Home › Frozen Desserts › Tea Biscuit
Tea Biscuit
2 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tabicspoon lard 2 teaspoons baking powder Milk or water to make soft dough Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl; rub in the lard with the tips of the fingers; add milk to make a dough just stiff enough to roll out. Roll one half inch thick; cut with a round cutter and bake in greased tins.
A plain baking-powder biscuit of the sort that stood in for bread at supper. The written-out amounts cover only the leavening, salt and fat, so the flour has to be judged from the baking powder.
- Flour is not statedThe list of ingredients begins mid-stream and no flour quantity survives. Period proportions for baking powder ran from roughly one to two teaspoons per cup of flour, so the two teaspoons here could suit anything from one to two cups; the half teaspoon of salt and single tablespoon of lard give no firmer answer. Any flour figure is inference, not the original measure.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature or time. Biscuits of this kind are usually baked hot by modern practice, around 450F for 10 to 12 minutes; a cooler oven tends to dry them before the baking powder can lift them.
- LardA single tablespoon of fat makes a lean biscuit by modern taste whatever the flour quantity was. Leaf lard or a good rendered lard gives the tenderest result; shortening can be swapped by volume, butter less exactly, as it carries water as well as fat.
- Rub in with the fingertipsThe instruction is deliberate. Fingertips are cooler than palms, and the fat should stay in distinct flakes the size of coarse crumbs rather than melting into the flour.
- Soft dough"Just stiff enough to roll out" means a wet dough by modern habit. A dry dough gives a hard biscuit; work the mass as little as possible and flour the board rather than the dough.
- Greased tinsA flat baking sheet, greased or lined. Biscuits set close together rise higher and stay softer at the sides; set apart they crisp all round.
- YieldIf the missing flour was about two cups, a two-inch cutter gives roughly a dozen biscuits; a smaller quantity of flour proportionately fewer. They are at their best soon after baking.
Tea biscuit in American usage means a quick bread raised with baking powder, not the sweet English biscuit served with tea, and the name records the meal it belonged to: the light evening tea that followed a midday dinner. A formula this basic is the reference version, the thing a cook checks proportions against rather than a dish she needs taught. The reliance on chemical leavening and a single tablespoon of lard marks it as a weekday recipe from the era when packaged baking powder had made yeast bread optional for the supper table.