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Cheese Biscuits
6 T grated cheese 2/3 C milk 2 t Royal baking powder 12 t salt Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; add cheese, mix in lightly; add milk slowly, just enough to hold dough together. Roll out on fioured board about 1/2 inch thick; cut with biscuit cutter. Bake in hot oven 12 to 15 minutes.
Royal Baking Powder Recipe. 2 good sized potatoes 3 C flour 3 t baking powder 12 t salt
A plain baking-powder biscuit enriched with grated cheese, from the era when Royal Baking Powder's promotional recipes circulated through church cookbooks. The proportions given are workable, but one key quantity is absent.
- The flour is missingNo flour quantity is stated for the cheese biscuits themselves; the ingredient list has been truncated. With 2/3 cup milk and 2 teaspoons baking powder, somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 cups of flour will give a workable dough -- add the milk slowly as directed and stop when it coheres, since cheese contributes its own moisture. Note that the recipe lists no fat at all.
- Salt"12 t salt" is a lost fraction. Read it as 1/2 teaspoon, which is right for roughly 2 cups of flour.
- Hot ovenFor biscuits of this period a "hot oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Twelve to fifteen minutes at that heat is consistent with the instruction.
- The cheeseSix tablespoons is about 1 1/2 ounces grated, a modest amount. Use a dry, sharp cheese — aged cheddar or a hard grating cheese. A moist young cheddar will slacken the dough and demand less milk.
- HandlingMix the cheese in lightly before the milk so it stays in distinct flecks rather than smearing into the flour. Add the milk in stages and stop as soon as the dough coheres; overworked biscuit dough turns tough and cheese makes it more prone to it.
- Thickness and yieldHalf an inch is on the thin side of how biscuits are usually cut now, giving a somewhat crisper result. Yield depends on the missing flour quantity, but expect roughly a dozen from a 2-inch cutter.
- Baking powderThe brand name is incidental. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same quantity; if yours is more than six months open, test a spoonful in hot water before trusting it.
Church and charity cookbooks of the early twentieth century were quietly full of manufacturers' recipes, and Royal Baking Powder was among the most aggressive at placing them. The company distributed free booklets and newspaper columns of recipes that named the product by brand in the ingredient list, and contributors copied them into local collections verbatim — which is why "Royal Baking Powder Recipe" appears here as a credit line rather than an instruction. The context was a real commercial fight: baking powders of the day were sold on competing chemistries, and Royal, built on cream of tartar, spent decades campaigning against cheaper alum-based rivals. Cheese biscuits themselves belong to the wider family of quick breads that made baking powder a household staple, producing bread-like results in twenty minutes without the wait a yeast dough demands.