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Baking Powder Biscuit
1 cup flour. 2 level teaspoons baking powder. 1 tablespoon fat. 1 teaspoon salt.
Sift dry materials together. Mix fat into flour with fork or knife. Make into soft dough with sweet milk. Use hand to mould in shape; cut with biscuit cutter or knife and bake in quick oven.
A single-cup recipe scaled for a small household, written with the assumption that the cook already knows what biscuit dough should feel like. A few of its terms need translating.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F; biscuits want the high end, since a hot oven sets the crust and drives the steam that lifts them. Small biscuits take about 10-12 minutes.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that a period kitchen would also have on hand. Whole milk is closest to what was meant.
- The saltOne teaspoon to a single cup of flour is very salty by current taste, and may be a compositor's error for a half or quarter teaspoon. Judge for yourself before committing the batch.
- FatThe recipe says only "fat"; lard or a solid vegetable shortening is the likely intent, and butter works and tastes better. Keep it cold and cut it in only until the pieces are pea-sized, not blended smooth.
- How much milkNone is specified. About 1/3 cup brings a cup of flour to a soft, slightly sticky dough; add it in stages, since flour absorbency varies.
- Moulding by hand"Use hand to mould in shape" most likely means patting out rather than kneading. Work the dough as little as possible, and cut straight down without twisting the cutter, or the edges seal and the rise suffers.
- YieldSix small biscuits, or four generous ones. The recipe multiplies cleanly if you want a full pan.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers in the years around the First World War, when domestic-science teaching and government food-conservation campaigns had pushed cookbooks toward short, measured, level-teaspoon instructions of exactly this kind. Chemically leavened biscuits themselves belong to the nineteenth century: commercial baking powders, combining an acid salt with bicarbonate of soda, became widely available in American kitchens from the 1860s onward and increasingly displaced the older practice of soda plus sour milk, which required the cook to judge the sourness. The result was a quick bread that could be mixed and on the table in under half an hour.