Fruit Biscuit
Roll Baking Powder Biscuit mixture to one fourth inch; brush with melted butter; sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar and chopped raisins and citron.
Roll like a jelly roll; cut in one half inch pieces; place on buttered tin; brush with melted butter; sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake in hot oven. 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt
A yeast-free cinnamon roll built on a standard baking powder biscuit dough. The printed ingredient line is only a fragment of that base recipe, so the main work is reconstructing it.
- The ingredient list is incompleteOnly flour and salt are given because the book assumes you will turn back to its Baking Powder Biscuit entry. A standard biscuit of this era with 2 cups flour and 1 teaspoon salt also takes about 4 teaspoons baking powder, 2 to 4 tablespoons of butter or lard, and roughly 3/4 cup milk. Use whatever biscuit formula you trust.
- Hot ovenConventionally read as about 425 to 450F. The recipe gives no time; at that heat rolls of this size should be done in roughly 12 to 15 minutes, and since the brown sugar on top can scorch it is worth checking early.
- CitronCandied peel of the citron fruit (Citrus medica); a candied citron melon was also sold under the same name in America. It is now mostly stocked around Christmas. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly; chop it small so the spiral still rolls tightly.
- Half-inch slicesCut them with a sharp thin blade or a length of thread drawn under the log, which avoids squashing the spiral. Lay them cut side up, not on edge, and leave a little space so the edges crisp.
- Handle the dough cold and fastBaking powder dough has no rising time to recover from overworking. Roll it once to a quarter inch, fill, roll up and cut; a second rerolling gives tough, dense biscuits.
- Buttered tinA shallow sheet pan or a jelly roll pan. The brown sugar and butter run out and burn onto bare metal, so line with parchment if you would rather not scrub.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 rolls from 2 cups of flour. Best within a few hours of baking, since biscuit dough stales faster than yeast dough.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; like many maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it carried a full general household repertoire alongside the recipes that sold cocoa. This particular entry shows the chemical-leavening habit at its most confident: what is essentially a cinnamon roll, a form that elsewhere depends on yeast and a couple of hours of rising, is made instead from biscuit dough that goes from bowl to oven in minutes. Commercial baking powders were available from the middle of the nineteenth century and in wide household use by its later decades, and by 1907 American cooks were applying them freely to breads a yeast sponge would once have raised, particularly for breakfast breads that had to appear the same morning they were mixed. Citron and raisins in the filling suggest a slightly dressed-up version rather than an ordinary weekday pan of biscuits.