Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Biscuits (C flour level t baking powder)
Biscuits (C flour level t baking powder)
1½ C flour 3 level t baking powder 12 t salt Makes ten. 1 t sugar 1½ T shortening ½ Milk Julia Price.
A telegraphic church-supper recipe: the abbreviations are compressed almost to the point of code, and at least two of them are typesetting casualties. Everything here is standard baking-powder biscuit practice, so the gaps can be read with reasonable confidence.
- "12 t salt" is a misprintTwelve teaspoons of salt in a cup and a half of flour is inedible and nothing close to it appears in any comparable recipe. The intended figure is almost certainly ½ teaspoon, the fraction bar having dropped out in setting.
- "½ Milk" means ½ cupThe unit is missing. For 1½ cups of flour with 1½ tablespoons of fat, roughly ½ cup of milk gives a soft, just-cohesive dough. Hold back a spoonful and add it only if the flour stays dry.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon, and the distinction between the two t's is carried entirely by capitalisation — a convention worth double-checking in any book of this vintage.
- No oven temperature is givenBaking-powder biscuits want a hot oven, 450°F, for 10 to 12 minutes. The steam has to hit before the crumb sets, which is what produces the lift; a moderate oven gives pale, squat biscuits.
- ShorteningHere this means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Cold butter works and tastes better, but it carries water, so the dough will be slightly slacker.
- Baking powder proportionThree level teaspoons to 1½ cups of flour is roughly double the modern rule of thumb of about one teaspoon per cup. Older recipes commonly called for more leavening; with current tinned powder, 1½ to 2 teaspoons is enough, and the full three may leave a metallic edge.
- HandlingCut the fat in until it is the size of peas, add the milk all at once, and stop mixing the moment the dough holds together. Kneading past a dozen quick folds develops gluten and makes the biscuits tough.
- YieldTen, as stated, from a dough patted about ¾ inch thick and cut with a small 2-inch cutter. Press the cutter straight down without twisting.
Community cookbooks like this one were compiled by church women as fundraising projects, printed cheaply, and likely set from handwritten slips submitted by contributors — which is exactly how a salt measurement loses its fraction and a milk measurement loses its unit. The recipes were written for people who already knew how to make biscuits; the card existed to record one woman's proportions, not to teach the method, which is why no oven temperature, mixing instruction or baking time appears. Chemically leavened biscuits of this kind became the American everyday bread after commercial baking powder spread through the second half of the nineteenth century, overlapping for decades with the older saleratus-and-sour-milk approach and putting hot bread on the table in under half an hour. Julia Price's name at the foot may be doing real work: in a book of this sort the attribution is often read as a kind of endorsement, a signal of whose biscuits were worth copying.