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Standard Baking Powder Biscuit
4 cups flour. 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 level teaspoon salt 1 or 2 tablespoons butter or lard About 2 cups of milk or water, more or less, enough to mix a very soft dough Sift flour, salt and baking powder together thoroughly. Rub in shortening with fingers, flexible knife, known as spatula, or rounding edge of a large spoon. With a little practice the spatula or spoon can be made to do better work than the fingers. Add milk or water, as cold as possible, mixing to a very soft dough. Mix with a spoon or flexible knife, in preference to using the warm hand. Turn dough on a well floured board, and roll out lightly till half an inch thick. Cut into biscuits and lay in baking pan, not too closely. Bake in hot oven from 12 to 15 minutes.
A plain baking powder biscuit from a leaflet published to sell Calumet baking powder. The ingredient list as printed omits the flour, so read it against the ratios below before you start.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity is given in the text as printed. With 4 teaspoons of baking powder and about 2 cups of liquid, 4 cups of flour is the likeliest intended amount. Treat it as a reconstruction rather than the original figure.
- Baking powderCalumet was a double-acting phosphate-alum powder, close in strength to modern double-acting baking powder, so 4 teaspoons to 4 cups of flour works as written. Current practice runs a little leaner, around 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup, if you find the aftertaste assertive.
- Hot oven425 to 450F. Biscuits want the high heat so the steam lifts them before the crumb sets; a moderate oven gives pale, squat results even with the same timing.
- The hinge: keep everything cold and handle it littleThe insistence on ice-cold liquid, a spatula instead of fingers, and "in preference to using the warm hand" is about keeping the dough and its fat cold. Mix only until the dough holds together, and roll once, lightly.
- A very soft doughThe dough should be wetter and stickier than a modern pie dough, just short of unrollable. Flour the board generously and work quickly rather than adding more flour to the dough itself.
- ShorteningOne or two tablespoons for four cups of flour is a lean biscuit by current standards, closer to a soda bread. For a flakier, richer biscuit, use 1/2 to 3/4 cup of cold butter or lard.
- Spacing and yield"Not too closely" gives crisp sides; set the rounds an inch apart. The batch is a large one, and the quantities halve cleanly.
Reliable Recipes belongs to a genre that dominated American home baking in the first decades of the twentieth century: the free cookbook issued by a baking powder company. Calumet, founded in Chicago in the 1880s, competed hard against Royal and Rumford, and the leaflets did double duty as instruction and advertisement, with the brand name typically written into the ingredient list. The chemically leavened biscuit itself was a nineteenth-century American development, moving from saleratus and sour milk, through cream of tartar and soda, to the ready-mixed powders that made a hot bread possible in fifteen minutes without yeast or a sponge set the night before. The fussiness here about cold liquid and about using a spatula rather than the hand is genuine period technique, and much of it can still be recognized in modern biscuit instructions.