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Tea Biscuits
2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 1 egg 2 tablespoons shortening 1/3 cup water Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar; add well beaten egg and melted shortening to water and add to dry ingredients to make soft dough. Roll out on floured board to about 1/2 inch thick; cut with biscuit cutter. Bake in moderate oven about 25 minutes.
A plain egg-enriched baking powder biscuit from a brand cookbook, written for cooks who already knew what a biscuit dough should feel like. Two things need translating: the oven and the liquid.
- The hinge: work the dough as little as possibleStir only until the flour is damp, then pat or roll once and cut. Rerolled scraps and extra kneading develop gluten and give tough, tight biscuits rather than flaky ones.
- "Moderate oven"In this period that means 350-375F. Modern biscuit practice runs much hotter, 425-450F for 12-15 minutes, so that the leavening lifts fast and the crust sets before the inside dries. At 350F for 25 minutes expect a paler, drier, more scone-like result, which is what the book intended.
- Royal Baking PowderIn the era of this book Royal was a cream-of-tartar (tartrate) powder, largely single-acting: it began releasing gas the moment it met liquid. Get the pans into the oven promptly. Any modern double-acting powder works at the same measure, 3 teaspoons to 2 cups flour.
- ShorteningVegetable shortening, lard or butter all work. Note that this recipe melts the fat and adds it with the liquid rather than cutting it in cold, which gives a fine, close, tender crumb instead of flaky layers. That is deliberate, not an error.
- The liquid is scantOne egg plus 1/3 cup water is a dry mix by current flour standards, and flours vary in how much water they take up. Add water a spoonful at a time until the dough is soft and just holds together, as the text asks.
- Thickness and cutHalf an inch is on the thin side and yields a flatter biscuit. Press the cutter straight down without twisting; twisting seals the edge and stops the biscuit rising evenly.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. Best within an hour of baking; they stale quickly, being made with water rather than milk.
The New Royal Cook Book was advertising: the Royal Baking Powder Company gave these booklets away free, and the recipes in them are written around the brand. Royal's product was based on cream of tartar rather than the cheaper alum-and-phosphate formulas of its competitors, and the company spent decades in a public and often bitter campaign insisting that alum powders were unwholesome, a fight waged in newspapers, state legislatures and free cookbooks alike. "Tea biscuit" here means a small plain quick bread for the tea table rather than the sweet British tea biscuit, which is a cookie; the enriching egg and the single tablespoon of sugar mark it as a step above an everyday supper biscuit, the sort of thing turned out in twenty minutes for unexpected afternoon company.