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Sour-Milk Biscuit
2 cups flour 3/4 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon lard Sour milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients; rub in the lard; stir in with a knife enough sour milk to make a very soft dough. Roll one half inch thick; cut in small rounds and bake in a quick oven about twenty minutes.
The ingredient list on this leaf is plainly incomplete — the loose-leaf format means lines have been dropped or shuffled, and the oat flour has ended up stranded at the bottom. Read it as a skeleton and fill in what a sour-milk biscuit of the period assumed.
- The missing leaveningA sour-milk biscuit works because acid in the milk reacts with baking soda; no soda is listed here, and without it the biscuits will be flat and taste sour. Standard practice of the era was about 1/2 teaspoon soda per cup of sour milk, sifted with the dry ingredients.
- The missing wheat flourOne cup of oat flour alone has no gluten to speak of and will not hold a rolled, cut biscuit. Period oat-flour biscuit recipes generally combine it with white flour, in varying proportions, so a wheat-flour line has probably been lost from this page.
- Sour milkThis means milk that has clabbered naturally: raw milk left to turn. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than souring cleanly, so cultured buttermilk is the practical modern substitute.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F, though period usage is imprecise. Biscuits want the heat high and fast so the soda gas expands before the crumb sets.
- Twenty minutes is longSmall half-inch rounds in a hot oven are generally done in 10-15 minutes. Twenty suggests either a cooler oven than the phrase implies or a thicker biscuit; watch for colour rather than the clock.
- LardOne tablespoon is a lean biscuit by modern standards. Leaf lard or shortening behaves the same way; butter will brown faster and add water to the dough.
- A very soft doughThe instruction is deliberate. Sour-milk doughs are handled as little as possible and rolled barely enough to cut — extra flour on the board is the usual cause of a tough biscuit.
- YieldDepending on how much wheat flour is assumed to be missing, a batch of this size cut in small rounds would give roughly eight to twelve biscuits.
Sour-milk biscuits belong to the era before every household had reliable refrigeration, when milk that had turned was a resource rather than a loss: the acid it developed was the working half of a chemical leavening system, paired with soda to give lift without yeast and without waiting. The oat flour here reflects a strand of early twentieth-century American cookery that pushed alternative grains -- oat, barley, rye, corn -- both for their supposed digestive virtues and, during the First World War years, as a way of stretching wheat.