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Baking Powder Biscuits
2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk or water 1 teaspoon salt Sift dry ingredients twice, cut in the butter with a knife. Stir in gradually the liquid; mix as soft as can be handled. Put the dough on a well-floured board, pat lightly to one inch thickness, cut with biscuit cutter, put on a buttered tin, and bake in a hot oven for 20 minutes. Put a little milk on top of each biscuit before baking to make them brown well.
A plain quick-bread formula of the kind that appeared in nearly every American cookbook after chemical leavening became cheap. It works as written, though the oven direction and the baking time need translating.
- "A hot oven"Read this as roughly 425-450F. Biscuits want fast, dry heat so the baking powder lifts them before the crust sets.
- Twenty minutes is too longAt 450F a one-inch biscuit is done in 12 to 15 minutes, when the tops are browned and the sides feel dry. Twenty minutes at that heat will dry them through; if you hold to the full time, drop the oven to 400F.
- Keep the butter coldThe instruction to cut it in with a knife assumes firm butter. Use it straight from the refrigerator and stop while there are still visible flakes; melted or softened butter gives a cakey crumb rather than layers.
- The fat is lean by modern standardsTwo tablespoons for two cups of flour is at the low end; many current recipes use considerably more, which is what produces the flaky, rich biscuit people now expect. As written you get a leaner, more scone-like result.
- Milk or waterThe choice is not incidental. Water gives a crisper, plainer biscuit; whole milk gives softer crumb and better browning. If you substitute buttermilk, expect less lift unless you add a little soda, since the recipe is built around baking powder alone.
- Sifting twiceSifting distributed the leavening evenly and broke up lumps in flour that had not been pre-sifted. Whisking the dry ingredients together thoroughly does the same job.
- "A buttered tin"A baking sheet. Modern nonstick or parchment needs no grease. Set the biscuits close together with sides nearly touching for softer edges and a higher rise.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve biscuits from a two-inch cutter. Press the cutter straight down without twisting, and pat the scraps together rather than rerolling.
Biscuits raised with baking powder rather than yeast, sour milk and soda, or hard hand-beating spread quickly through American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, once commercial baking powder was widely sold in tins; the appeal was bread on the table in half an hour with no waiting for a rise. A recipe this plain earns its place in a meatless cookbook because it is the workhorse of such a book: with no meat to anchor a meal, the burden shifts onto bread, eggs, cheese and pulses, and a cook needs something hot and starchy to serve alongside a vegetable stew or a cheese dish. Note also that the recipe offers water as an alternative to milk, an economy and a pantry convenience.