Home › Bread, Etc. › Cream Biscuits
Cream Biscuits
2 cups flour 2 tablespoons butter 3/4 to 1 cup of milk 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt Mix the dry ingredients, and sift. Work in the butter, add the liquids gradually, mixing with a knife to a soft dough. Place on a floured board, shape with a biscuit cutter and bake in a buttered pan in a hot oven twelve or fifteen minutes.
A richer color is obtained by brushing the top of the biscuits lightly with milk before putting in the oven.
A plain baking-powder biscuit under a slightly misleading name. The proportions are close to modern practice; the oven and the handling are where the recipe assumes knowledge it does not spell out.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in a book of this period is usually read as somewhere in the region of 425-450F; set the oven high and have it fully preheated before the dough is mixed. Biscuits rely on a fast burst of steam and heat to rise; a cool oven gives flat, dry rounds. Twelve to fifteen minutes suits that range.
- No cream in cream biscuitsThere is no cream in the ingredient list; the name appears to have been applied loosely to a short, tender biscuit rather than to any particular ingredient. If you want to make them with cream, omit the butter and use about 1 1/4 cups heavy cream as the sole liquid, which is a related but different recipe.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is generous by modern standards, which run nearer 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup, though biscuit recipes often sit at the high end. Use it as written or cut it back slightly. Use a fresh tin; powder that has been open a long time loses much of its lift.
- Working in the butterUse cold butter and stop while pieces the size of peas remain. Those flakes are what separate the layers. Two tablespoons is on the lean side by current standards; four gives a noticeably more tender biscuit without changing the method.
- Mixing with a knifeThis is the hinge. The knife exists to keep warm hands and gluten development out of the dough. Add the milk at the lower end of the range first, cut it in until the dough just holds together, and add the rest only if dry flour remains in the bowl.
- Shaping and cuttingPat the dough out to about 3/4 inch rather than rolling it thin, and press the cutter straight down without twisting; a twisted edge seals and the biscuit rises lopsided. Re-rolled scraps will be tougher, so handle them lightly.
- Buttered panA greased sheet or shallow pan set the biscuits close together, nearly touching, so they support each other as they rise and stay soft at the sides. Spaced apart, they brown all round and rise less.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. They are best within an hour of baking and stale quickly, as all baking-powder breads do.
Biscuits like these were the natural filler on such a table: chemical leavening had made a bread possible in twenty minutes from a standing start, without yeast, without a sponge set the night before, and without a baker. Baking powder had been commercially available in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century, and was familiar enough by the time of this recipe that its four teaspoons are given without comment. The name "cream biscuit" was used loosely in this period for any short, tender biscuit of the richer sort, whether or not cream appeared in the list.