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Whole Wheat or Health Biscuits
2 cups whole wheat flour 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 teaspoons shortening 1 cup milk 4 tablespoons cut raisins Mix well flour, salt and baking powder, or sift through coarse strainer; add shortening and rub in very lightly; add milk; mix to soft dough, add raisins. Drop with tablespoon quite far apart on greased baking tin. (Muffin tins may be used.) Bake in moderate oven about 25 minutes.
A plain drop biscuit from a baking-powder company pamphlet, sweetened only by the raisins. The dough is wetter than a rolled biscuit dough and should not be kneaded.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no number; "moderate oven" in period usage is usually taken as about 350-375F. The stated 25 minutes fits that range, and muffin tins may need the full time.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by modern standards, where 1 to 1.5 teaspoons per cup is typical. Pamphlet recipes had an obvious interest in generous quantities, and older powders were single-acting rather than double-acting. Three teaspoons will give good lift.
- ShorteningTwo teaspoons is unusually little fat. Lard or butter both work; anything more than a tablespoon changes the texture from bready to short.
- Whole wheat flourWhole wheat of this period was generally coarser and thirstier than most supermarket flour today. If the dough looks stiff rather than droppable, add milk a tablespoon at a time until it falls from the spoon.
- Cut raisinsMuch of the raisin supply of the period still had seeds and stems and was snipped with scissors or chopped. Modern seedless raisins can go in whole, though chopping still distributes them better through a small biscuit.
- SiftingWhole wheat bran will not pass a fine sifter. The instruction to use a coarse strainer, or simply whisk the dry ingredients, is the point — do not discard the bran left behind.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 biscuits dropped on a sheet, or a standard 12-cup muffin tin. Best eaten the day they are made; low-fat biscuits stale fast.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which printed collections of formulas built around its cream-of-tartar powder and distributed them cheaply or free. The "health biscuit" label reflects an early twentieth-century enthusiasm for whole grains, associated with reformers who argued that white flour had been stripped of what mattered — a view that ran alongside the era's interest in bran, roughage and digestibility. The recipe's structure is otherwise conventional: it is a standard drop biscuit with the white flour swapped out, the fat cut back to almost nothing, and raisins added for sweetness in place of sugar. Company pamphlets like this one circulated very widely in American kitchens, and their generous baking powder measurements were never entirely disinterested.