Soda Biscuit
1 qt. flour. 1 teaspoon soda. 1 teaspoon salt. 3 level teaspoons baking powder. 1 kitchen spoon crisco. 1 cup sour milk.
Sift soda, salt and flour, mix in lightly the crisco. Make into soft dough with milk. Knead smooth, roll out, cut and bake quickly. Leave piece of dough size of biscuit, put into one cup sour milk, let stand until next time, and use in making up the dough. This makes lovely light biscuits.
— Miss Fort'S Beaten Biscuit
1 1/2 lb. flour. 5 ozs. lard. 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. 2 teaspoons sugar (dissolve the sugar in water.) 1 cup water.
Blend with flour, lard and salt. Mix into a stiff dough with water in which sugar has been dissolved. Work well. Beat or roll until dough blisters. Bake in moderate oven until light brown.
Two biscuits on one page: a quick sour-milk soda biscuit with a perpetual milk starter, and a Southern beaten biscuit leavened by nothing but trapped air. They are made entirely differently, so read them as separate recipes.
- A quart of flourFlour was routinely measured by volume in this period: 1 quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of soft winter wheat flour. Southern biscuit flour was and is lower in protein than modern all-purpose; a cup of all-purpose with 2 tablespoons swapped for cornstarch approximates it.
- "1 kitchen spoon crisco"Genuinely imprecise. A kitchen or serving spoon of the era held something between 1 and 2 tablespoons of solid fat, and nothing in the recipe pins it down. Two tablespoons of shortening per pound of flour gives a lean, soft biscuit, which is what this is.
- Sour milkAt the time this meant unpasteurized milk left to clabber on its own. Pasteurized milk tends to spoil rather than sour cleanly. Use cultured buttermilk, which is what the acid is there for: it reacts with the soda and tenderizes the crumb.
- The milk starterReserving a biscuit-sized lump of dough in a cup of sour milk "until next time" is a perpetual leaven, the same principle as a sourdough chef. Held at room temperature in milk it is unpredictable at best; keep it in the refrigerator, refresh it every few days, and discard it if it smells cheesy, sharp or off rather than pleasantly tangy.
- Soda and baking powder bothThe soda reacts with the sour milk's acid, giving gas of its own, and the baking powder adds further lift. If you substitute sweet milk, drop the soda, or the biscuits may taste soapy and brown too fast.
- "Bake quickly"A quick oven, in modern terms somewhere around 425 to 450F for 10 to 12 minutes. Biscuits need heat fast enough to set the crust before the gas escapes. A quart of flour makes roughly 18 to 20 two-inch biscuits.
- Beaten biscuit: the beating is the leaveningThere is no soda, no powder and no yeast in Miss Fort's recipe. Air is forced into a very stiff dough by beating it with a mallet or rolling pin, folding, and beating again -- old instructions differ widely on how long, but half an hour is commonly cited -- until the surface blisters, as the recipe says. A stand mixer with a dough hook or repeated passes through a pasta roller does the same work.
- Beaten biscuit proportions and baking1 1/2 lb flour is about 5 1/2 cups; 5 oz lard is a scant 3/4 cup. Cut them small, dock each one through with a fork so they do not dome, and bake in a moderate oven, 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes. They should be pale gold, dry, hard-crusted and layered inside, closer to a cracker than to a soft biscuit.
Crisco, on the market since 1911, was being pushed hard as a modern replacement for lard in these years, and both fats appear side by side, which is exactly what happens on this page. The beaten biscuit is older still and firmly Southern: before chemical leaveners were cheap and reliable, cooks in Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky beat stiff flour-and-lard dough on a stump or a marble slab, and by the late nineteenth century on a hand-cranked biscuit brake, to work air into it mechanically. The result keeps for days and was standard with country ham. Contributed recipes credited to a named woman, as here to Miss Fort, were common in cookbooks of the period and point to a compiled or community cookbook, the recipes usually coming from readers or friends of the compilers.