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Old-Fashioned "Beaten Biscuit"
Sift 1 quart flour into bowl, add 1/2 teaspoon salt, then cut in 3/4 cup very cold lard. Wet with ice water enough to make very stiff dough. Lay on floured board, and give the dough 100 strokes with a rolling pin. Fold over again each time the dough beats thin, dredge with flour if it sticks. Roll 1/2 inch thick, cut out with small round cutter, prick lightly all over top with fork, bake in slow moderate oven to a delicate brown tint. An oven about 350 degrees is about right, since a cold oven will make the biscuit hard, and a hot one will scorch and blister the biscuit.
Beaten biscuits are a mechanical problem more than a baking one: there is no leavening at all, so every bit of lift comes from steam trapped in dough that has been beaten until it blisters. The recipe gives a usable oven temperature, which is unusual for its date, but a few of its measures need translating.
- The hinge: beat until the dough changesStop counting strokes and watch the dough. It is ready when it is satiny, blisters when folded, and snaps back cleanly — a smooth cut face with tiny air holes. One hundred strokes is at the low end of the range found in period recipes; many call for several hundred, and under-beaten dough bakes into a hard, dense puck.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, that is 4 cups, roughly 500 g of soft or all-purpose flour. Southern cooks used soft winter wheat; a low-protein flour such as White Lily gives the characteristic short, crisp crumb, while bread flour will fight the beating.
- LardThree-quarters cup is about 150 g. Leaf lard is closest to what was meant. Cold, firm shortening works; butter does not, since its water content and low melting point defeat the long room-temperature beating.
- Ice water, and not much of it"Very stiff" is the operative phrase — expect somewhere near 3/4 to 1 cup, added a spoonful at a time. The dough should look too dry to come together at first; beating brings it into one mass. A soft dough will never blister.
- Machine substituteA food processor run for two to three minutes, or a stand mixer with a dough hook for eight to ten, does what the rolling pin did. Both are reasonable stand-ins for a biscuit brake, the geared roller Southern kitchens used once hand-beating fell out of favor.
- Oven and timeThe 350°F given is stated in the recipe and worth respecting. Expect roughly 20 to 30 minutes; they should be pale gold and sound hollow, and they never rise much.
- DockingPricking with a fork is not decoration. It vents steam so the biscuit splits evenly at the equator rather than bursting; the recipe asks only for a light pricking of the top.
- YieldSeveral dozen, depending on the size of the "small round cutter" used. They are best warm, and stale quickly — traditionally they were split and eaten with country ham.