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Hot Marmalade Biscuits
2 cups flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 1/4 tablespoons baking powder 2 tablespoons shortening 2/3 to 1 cup milk 1/2 glass orange marmalade 1 tablespoon butter Mix as for biscuits, except marmalade and the batter. Roll lightly on floured board, cut into rounds with small biscuit cutter, dough 1/4 inch thick. Make a depression in half of the rounds and fill with little of the marmalade. Moisten dough around edges, cover with rest of the plain rounds of dough. Brush the tops with the melted butter, bake in hot oven 15 minutes. Serve hot without butter.
A filled biscuit rather than a split one: two thin rounds sealed around a spoonful of marmalade. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the seal.
- Seal the edges properlyMoisten the rim of the filled round with water or milk and press the top round down firmly all the way around, ideally with fingertips rather than a fork. Marmalade thins as it heats and any gap will let it run out and scorch on the sheet.
- Half a glass of marmaladeA 'glass' in recipes of this period usually means a tumbler of roughly half a pint, so half a glass is probably somewhere near 1/2 cup, though the measure was never standardised. Use no more than a scant teaspoon per biscuit; overfilling is the usual cause of blowouts.
- Hot oven425 to 450F. At 15 minutes the biscuits should be well risen and browned at the edges; check at 12 if your rounds are on the small side.
- ShorteningTwo tablespoons to two cups of flour is a lean biscuit by modern standards, which suits a filled round because it holds its shape. Cold butter cut in works as well as vegetable shortening and gives better flavour.
- Milk quantityThe range from 2/3 to 1 cup is deliberate; flours vary in absorption. Add the smaller amount first and bring in the rest only until the dough just holds together, since a wet dough is difficult to seal.
- Roll thinA quarter inch is thinner than an ordinary biscuit for good reason: two layers plus filling make the finished depth. Rolling thicker gives a doughy centre around the marmalade.
- YieldWith a two-inch cutter this dough makes roughly a dozen filled biscuits. They are meant to be eaten straight from the oven, as the instruction to serve them hot without butter suggests.
Baking powder biscuits were a common quick bread of the American breakfast table, and their appeal is that they need no yeast, no proving and no forethought. Sealing a sweet filling between two rounds of biscuit dough appears elsewhere in cookbooks of the period, with jam, mincemeat or chopped dates used in the same construction. Orange marmalade carried a faint air of the English breakfast, and the measurement 'by the glass' probably reflects the tumbler in which preserves were sold and stored.