Home › Breads › Beaten Biscuit No. 2
Beaten Biscuit No. 2
1 qt. flour. 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. 1 level teaspoon salt. Lard size of goose egg.
Two-thirds cup of milk and water, half of each with one teaspoon of sugar dissolved in milk; have dough very stiff. Beat or roll until it blisters.
Beaten biscuit is a cracker-like bread leavened almost entirely by air pounded into the dough, which is why the ingredient list looks so lean. The beating is the recipe; everything else is incidental.
- The hinge: beat until it blistersThe dough must be worked until it turns satin-smooth and small blisters rise on the surface — traditionally 20 to 30 minutes of hard whacking with a mallet or rolling pin, folding the sheet over on itself each time. A stand mixer with a dough hook on medium for 10 to 15 minutes, or repeated passes through a pasta roller on its widest setting, gets you to the same place. Underbeaten dough bakes into a hard, dull lump rather than a flaky one.
- A quart of flourMeasured dry, roughly 4 cups, or about 1 lb. Use plain all-purpose or, closer to the original intent, a soft Southern flour.
- Lard the size of a goose eggA goose egg runs two to three times a hen's, so figure roughly 1/2 cup, about 3 to 4 oz. Leaf lard gives the flakiest result; shortening works, butter changes the flavor and browns faster.
- Very little liquid, deliberatelyTwo-thirds of a cup of milk and water for a pound of flour produces a dough far stiffer than any drop or rolled biscuit — it should look barely hydrated and crumbly at first and only come together under the beating. Add liquid a teaspoon at a time if it truly will not cohere, and no more.
- Why so little baking powderHalf a teaspoon in a pound of flour is a token amount. Mechanical aeration does the lifting, so resist the urge to increase it; extra chemical leavening puffs the biscuits and loses the dense, layered crumb that defines the style.
- Shaping and dockingRoll the beaten dough about 1/4 inch thick, cut with a small round cutter, and prick each biscuit twice through with a fork. The holes keep them from ballooning and are the visual signature of the type.
- OvenWilson gives none. A moderately hot oven, somewhere around 375 to 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, should bring them to pale gold and firm -- they should not brown deeply. They are done when a biscuit sounds hollow and snaps rather than bends.
- Yield and keepingPerhaps three dozen small biscuits. Being dry and hard they keep several days in a tin, and they were commonly eaten cool with ham as well as hot from the oven.
Beaten biscuit belongs to the Chesapeake and the upper South — Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas — where cooks made a hard, close-grained biscuit long before commercial baking powder, relying on air forced into the dough by half an hour with a mallet, an axe handle, or the flat of a hatchet against a stump or marble slab. By the late nineteenth century a hand-cranked "biscuit brake," a pair of iron rollers on a stand, had taken over some of the pounding in households that could afford one; before that the labor in such kitchens was often performed by enslaved and later by hired Black cooks, a fact the period cookbooks almost never mention. Mrs. Wilson, who wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and compiled this book around 1920, includes two versions at just the moment the dish was becoming a regional curiosity rather than a weekly chore — quick biscuits with a full charge of baking powder had made the beating optional, and the beaten biscuit survived mainly as an accompaniment to country ham and as a point of local pride.