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Bran Biscuits
1/2 cup bran 1 1/2 cups flour 5 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons sugar 1/2 cup water 2 tablespoons shortening Mix thoroughly bran, flour, baking powder, salt, sugar; add sufficient water to make soft dough; add melted shortening; roll out lightly to about 1/4 inch thick on floured board; cut with biscuit cutter. Bake in hot oven 12 to 15 minutes.
A plain hot-oven biscuit from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, written when leavening was weaker and biscuits were rolled far thinner than we roll them now. Two numbers need adjusting before this works in a modern kitchen.
- The leavening is the hingeFive teaspoons of baking powder to 1 1/2 cups of flour is roughly triple current practice, because Royal at this period was a single-acting cream-of-tartar powder that spent most of its gas in the bowl. With modern double-acting powder use about 2 teaspoons total and get the pan into the oven promptly.
- "Hot oven"Usually rendered today as somewhere around 400F to 450F. Twelve to fifteen minutes at that heat is plausible for a quarter-inch round; check at ten.
- Bran means miller's branUnprocessed wheat bran, the loose flaky kind sold in bulk or in health-food aisles, not a bran breakfast cereal and not oat bran. Cereal flakes are sweetened and pre-cooked and will not hydrate the same way.
- Water is approximateThe recipe lists 1/2 cup but then says "sufficient water," which is the honest instruction. Bran drinks liquid unevenly, so expect to add a tablespoon or two more; let the mixed dough stand five minutes before judging it.
- Melted shortening, added lastFat stirred in melted rather than cut in cold gives a short, sandy, cracker-like biscuit rather than a flaky one. That is the intended result here; do not substitute the rubbed-in method and expect the same thing.
- Thickness and yieldA quarter inch is thin by current habit and produces something closer to a hard biscuit or scone-cracker. Rolled at a half inch you will get fewer, taller, softer biscuits and should add two or three minutes.
- Salt and sugarA full teaspoon of salt with only 1 1/2 cups of flour reads high on the tongue today, particularly if you use salted butter as the shortening. Three-quarters of a teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning.
Booklets like this one existed to sell leavening: the brand name is written into the ingredient list, and the measurements are calibrated to a cream-of-tartar powder rather than to baking in general. The bran is a period marker of its own. In the early twentieth century, physicians and cereal manufacturers alike promoted wheat bran as "roughage," a corrective to the very white, very refined flour that industrial milling had just made cheap and universal, and household cookery answered with bran muffins, bran gems and bran biscuits in quantity. Wartime and postwar flour conservation campaigns gave the habit a second push, since stretching white flour with bran, cornmeal or oats was framed as patriotic as well as healthful. The result is a recipe that treats bran as a virtuous addition to an otherwise ordinary quick biscuit, rather than as a flavor anyone was chasing.