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Beaten Biscuits
1 quart pastry flour 1/2 cup butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup of water or milk Sift the flour and salt together, and work in the butter. Moisten with sufficient ice water to form a stiff dough. Place on a floured board, and beat with the rolling pin thirty minutes, taking care to fold the dough over every few seconds, or pass the dough through a beaten biscuit machine for twenty minutes, folding each time the dough is passed through. Roll to one-third inch in thickness, cut into little round cakes with biscuit-cutter, and prick with a fork. Place in pie tins or on baking sheets, and bake in a moderate oven twenty to thirty minutes. These biscuits are made successfully by hand by the cooks in the South but as a general rule the use of the beating machine is more satisfactory.
A beaten biscuit is not a soft Southern breakfast biscuit. There is no leavening at all: every bit of rise comes from air pounded into the dough and the steam it makes in the oven, which is why the beating is not optional and cannot be shortened.
- A quart of flourMeasured as sifted pastry flour, a quart is 4 cups, roughly 14 to 16 ounces depending on how lightly it is sifted; period books often simply equated a quart of flour with a pound. Pastry flour is soft and low in protein; all-purpose will work but gives a tougher, less crisp biscuit.
- The liquid is ambiguousThe ingredient list says 1/2 cup of water or milk, then the method says "sufficient ice water to form a stiff dough." Half a cup will not hydrate a pound of flour. Expect closer to 3/4 to 1 cup, added a little at a time; the dough should be stiff and dry, not tacky.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Beaten biscuits are baked pale, not browned, and finish hard and dry through to the centre rather than soft.
- What the beating doesThirty minutes with a rolling pin, folding constantly, develops gluten and laminates in thin sheets of air. The dough is ready when it is satin-smooth and blisters appear on the surface as you fold. Working under-beaten dough gives a solid, tooth-breaking cracker with no interior.
- The beaten biscuit machineThis is a biscuit brake, a marble or metal slab with a hand-cranked roller that the dough is passed through repeatedly. Modern cooks often substitute a stand mixer with a dough hook or a food processor; timings vary widely, from a couple of minutes in a processor to considerably longer in a mixer, and the motor should not be allowed to overheat.
- Prick all the way throughThe fork holes are structural, not decorative. They vent steam so the biscuit stays flat and dense instead of ballooning into a hollow shell.
- Yield and keepingSmall biscuits at one-third inch thick and roughly 1 1/2 inches across will run to five dozen or more from this quantity of dough. They keep well in a tin, which was the point; serve split, with butter, or alongside soup.
Beaten biscuits belong to the pre-baking-powder South, where a cook with flour, fat, salt and water and no chemical leavening got lift by main force: a half hour of pounding with a rolling pin, an axe handle or the flat of a hatchet against a stump or marble slab. The rhythmic thumping was a familiar early-morning sound in Southern kitchens, and the labour behind it was overwhelmingly that of enslaved and, later, poorly paid Black cooks, a fact the period cookbooks generally pass over as this one does. The "beaten biscuit machine" mentioned here is the biscuit brake, a hand-cranked roller mounted on a slab that came into use in the nineteenth century and spared the cook the pounding. The biscuit turns up in a meatless cookery book because it is thrifty, keeps well, and carries butter, cheese or preserves as well as it traditionally carried country ham.