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Emergency or Drop Biscuits
Same as recipe for biscuits with the addition of more milk to make stiff batter. Drop by spoonfuls on greased pan and bake in hot oven.
A two-line variation that assumes you have the book's plain biscuit recipe in front of you. The whole trick is the wetter dough, which lets you skip rolling and cutting.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. Drop biscuits want the higher end so the outside sets before the soft batter slumps; 450F is a safe reading of the phrase in a baking-powder book of this period.
- How much more milkThe base biscuit dough is stiff enough to knead; here you want it just loose enough to fall from a spoon in a rough mound. In practice that is roughly a quarter more liquid, added a spoonful at a time. Too much and the biscuits spread flat.
- "Stiff batter"Period usage sits between dough and pourable batter: it should hold its shape on the spoon and need a push to release. Do not beat it smooth once the milk is in, or the gluten develops and the biscuits toughen.
- TimingNo time is given. Expect 12-15 minutes for spoonfuls the size of a golf ball, until the tops are set and lightly browned. They dry out quickly past that.
- Greased panA flat sheet, not a cake tin. Parchment does the job now and gives a cleaner bottom. Space the mounds about two inches apart; they will not spread much but they need air.
- Baking powderWith modern double-acting powder the batter tolerates a few minutes' delay, but getting it into the oven at once still gives the best lift.
- Yield and servingIf the base biscuit recipe uses about two cups of flour, it should drop into roughly a dozen. Best eaten within the hour, split hot with butter.
"Emergency" here most likely means unexpected company rather than disaster: the point of the drop biscuit is that it skips the floured board, the rolling pin and the cutter, which is most of the labor and all of the cleanup. The technique is about as old as chemical leavening in American kitchens, and it became more common after baking powder became a cheap pantry staple in the second half of the nineteenth century. Books issued by baking powder manufacturers leaned hard on recipes like this one, since a biscuit that goes from bowl to oven quickly is a strong argument for keeping a can of the product on the shelf. The habit of writing a variation as "same as above, with more milk" also suggests something about how these books were used: by a cook who had already made the plain version and needed only the difference spelled out.