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Galley Biscuits
I TEASPOON FAT WATER Mix flour and salt, work in fat with your fingers, and add only enough water to make a very thick dough which you will proceed to work as much as possible. Beat and hammer it with a heavy stick, rolling pin, or anything else at hand, until it is thin. You can beat it on deck if your deck is as it should be, or in the woods you may beat it on a log. Then fold it as many times as you can so it is in 4 or 8 layers, and beat again. Repeat until dough becomes elastic, and the last time it is beaten out have it 1/2 inch thick. Cut with baking powder tin or cover, and bake in double skillet or Dutch oven.
Galley Biscuits bake quickly, are good cold, and keep nearly a week. They are the old "sailors' biscuits" or "Maryland biscuits," of early coasting vessels.
A beaten biscuit: no leavening at all, the rise coming entirely from steam trapped in the layers you hammer into the dough. The technique matters far more than the measurements.
- The hinge is the beatingThe dough must be beaten, folded, and beaten again until it turns smooth and elastic and blisters slightly — usually 20 to 30 minutes by hand. Stop early and you get hard pucks rather than flaky layers.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives no quantities beyond a teaspoon (of salt) and unmeasured fat and water. Published beaten-biscuit recipes generally run in the region of 4 cups flour to a teaspoon of salt with a spoonful or two of lard or shortening, the liquid added a little at a time; the recipe's own guide is simply 'only enough water', and the dough should be markedly stiffer than a rolled biscuit dough.
- A modern shortcutA food processor with the metal blade, run in long bursts for several minutes, develops the gluten the same way a rolling pin and a log do. So does a pasta machine used to fold and sheet the dough repeatedly.
- "Baking powder tin or cover"A cylindrical tin used as a cutter — a 1 1/2 to 2 inch round cutter or a small glass does the same job.
- Docking the topsThe recipe does not mention it, but beaten biscuits are traditionally pricked with a fork before baking so steam escapes evenly and the biscuit splits cleanly rather than bursting.
- Double skillet or Dutch ovenA covered Dutch oven over coals, with coals banked on the lid, gives roughly the enclosed radiant heat of an oven. The recipe sets no temperature; a hot oven, in the region of 425F, for something under twenty minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent, taking them out pale rather than browned.
- "Bake quickly" and "keep nearly a week"With no leavening and very little fat, these are closer to hardtack than to a breakfast biscuit. They dry rather than stale, which is why they travelled; store them in a tin, not a bag.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, so the yield depends entirely on how much flour is used; cut at about two inches from a batch built on roughly four cups of flour, expect a couple of dozen or more small biscuits.
Beaten biscuits belong to the era before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, when a cook produced lift by physically working air and gluten into a stiff flour-and-water paste. In the Chesapeake they became a regional signature — "Maryland biscuits" — and some households owned a purpose-built biscuit brake, a hand-cranked roller mounted on a stump or table to spare the arms. Aboard coasting vessels the same dough answered a different need: it kept for days in a damp galley and required nothing that could spoil. The book's placement of it among the plainest camp breads is apt, since the recipe assumes only flour, salt, a little fat, water, and something heavy to hit it with.