Home › Frozen Desserts › Sour-Cream Biscuit
Sour-Cream Biscuit
1 cup sour cream 2 teaspoons baking soda 2½ cups sifted flour 1 teaspoon salt With a knife stir the cream into the sifted flour, enough to make a very soft dough. Roll thin; cut into rounds and bake in a hot oven.
A four-ingredient soda biscuit whose written method skips two of its own ingredients and whose leavening is heavy by modern standards. Both are easily handled.
- Sift the soda and salt with the flourThe instructions tell you only to stir cream into flour, but the soda and salt must be combined with the dry flour first or they will streak the dough. Sift all three together, then cut in the cream with a knife.
- The soda is highTwo teaspoons of soda to 2 1/2 cups of flour is roughly three to four times a common modern rate, and one cup of cultured sour cream is unlikely to carry enough acid to neutralize it. Expect a soapy, faintly metallic taste and some yellowing; 3/4 to 1 teaspoon is closer to what the acid in the cream can consume.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period a hot oven is generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Biscuits rolled thin should be done in about 8 to 12 minutes, when the tops are set and lightly colored.
- Sour cream then and nowThe sour cream meant here was most likely cream soured naturally rather than the thick stabilized cultured product sold today, and probably thinner and sharper. Commercial sour cream works; if the dough comes out too stiff, loosen it with a tablespoon or two of buttermilk to reach the "very soft" stage called for.
- Fat is already accounted forThere is no butter or shortening in the list because the butterfat in the cream is the shortening. Do not substitute yogurt or a low-fat sour cream without adding fat, or the biscuits bake up dry and tough.
- Roll thin, and handle littleStir only until the dough holds together, and press or roll to about 1/4 inch. Overworking a soda dough develops gluten and the soda gasses off before it reaches the oven.
- YieldAbout 15 to 18 rounds at 2 inches, or a dozen at 2 1/2 inches. Serve hot; soda biscuits stale within hours.
Sour-cream biscuits belong to the family of quick breads that spread through American kitchens after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that, a cook wanting bread in half an hour depended on pearlash or saleratus, and on some household acid to set it working: sour milk, buttermilk, molasses, or, on a farm with a crock of standing cream, soured cream. The recipe reads as a thrift recipe as much as anything, a use for cream that had turned before it could be churned.