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English Tea Biscuits
4 cups flour. 4 level teaspoons baking powder. 1 teaspoon salt. 2 tablespoons butter or crisco. 1 cup mashed potatoes. 1 cup milk. Boil and mash potatoes, having them free from lumps. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder, add potatoes and rub in crisco or butter. Mix to a light dough with egg and milk; roll out a little thinner than ordinary biscuits and bake in hot oven. Serve hot. Use potatoes while warm.
A potato scone-biscuit, quick to mix and best eaten within the hour. The list and the method disagree on one point, so read both before you start.
- The missing eggThe method says "mix to a light dough with egg and milk" but no egg appears in the ingredient list. One egg, beaten into the cup of milk, suits this quantity of flour; omitting it gives a plainer, slightly drier biscuit that still works.
- Warm potatoes are the hingeThe last line is the important one. Cold mashed potato works into flour lumpily and can go gluey; warm potato disperses more smoothly and keeps the crumb light. Mash and rub in while still warm, and let the mixture cool only enough that the milk and egg are not scrambled.
- A hot oven"Hot oven" in recipes of this kind is usually read as roughly 425-450F. Bake on the upper-middle rack for 12-15 minutes, until well risen and browned at the edges.
- CriscoCrisco was a relatively new and heavily promoted product in this period, and the recipe offers it as an alternative to butter. Butter gives more flavour; any solid shortening behaves the same way mechanically. Two tablespoons to four cups of flour is a very lean fat ratio, which is why the potato matters.
- How much potatoA cup of mashed potato is roughly 8 oz, from about 10 oz of raw peeled potato — one large russet or two medium. Mash plain, with no butter, milk or seasoning beyond the salt already in the recipe.
- Rolling thickness"A little thinner than ordinary biscuits" suggests something around 1/2 inch, against the thicker roll usual for plain biscuits. If cutting rounds, press the cutter straight down without twisting so the edges rise cleanly.
- YieldAbout 20 to 24 biscuits at 2 inches. Like all quick biscuits they are best hot; split and toast any left the next day.
Potato in the biscuit dough is a thrift and a texture trick at once — the starch holds water, so the bread stays moist longer and stretches the flour, which mattered a great deal in an era when readers were still working through the habits of wartime flour conservation. The name "English tea biscuit" points at the British teatime scone rather than at anything specifically English about the method; American cookbooks of the period seem to have used "tea biscuit" loosely for any small, quick, slightly rich bread meant to be served hot at an afternoon or supper table, in contrast to the plainer breakfast biscuit. Potato scones and potato farls have a long documented life in Scotland and Ireland, and the resemblance here is close enough that the borrowing is generally assumed, though Wilson gives no source.