Home › Quick Doughs › Quick Doughs (Drop Biscuits or Emergency)
Quick Doughs (Drop Biscuits or Emergency)
1/2 t. salt. 2/3 C. (?) milk. Drop Biscuits or Emergency Biscuits. 2 C. flour t. salt 3 t. baking powder 2 T. shortening C. (?) milk 1. Mix the same as baking powder biscuits. 2. Add milk enough to make a stiff drop batter and drop by tablespoonfuls one inch apart, on a well greased baking sheet. 3. Bake twelve to fifteen minutes in hot oven.
Egg Tea Rolls. 2 C. flour t. sait 3 T. fat 1 egg 4 t. baking powder 1. Mix dry ingredients and sift three times. 2. Cut in shortening with two knives. 3. Add beaten egg to one-half the milk and add gradually to the dry ingredients. ness. 4. Add enough more milk to make a soft dough. 5. Turn onto a floured board. Roll lightly to 1/2 inch thick- 6. Cut into oblong pieces and with a floured knife crease through the center of each piece lengthwise. 7. Brush the top of each roll with the white of egg and sprinkle with granulated sugar. 8. Place on greased baking sheet and bake in hot oven twelve to fifteen minutes.
Cinnamon Rolls. 2 C. flour 2 T. fat 4 t. baking powder 3 C. (?) milk t. salt + C. sugar t. cinnamon 1. Mix as for baking powder biscuit. 2. Roll ¼ inch thick, brush with melted butter and spread with sugar and cinnamon. 3. Roll like jelly roll and cut into pieces 1 inch thick. 4. Stand pieces on end on a well greased tin and bake in hot oven fifteen minutes.
Note. One-half cup finely chopped fruit (raisins, currants or citron) may be spread over the dough before it is rolled up. Cheese Biscuit. 2 C. flour 3 T. butter 4 t. baking powder C. (?) milk t. salt grated cheese 1. Mix like baking powder biscuits. 2. Roll one-fourth inch thick. 3. Spread one-half of the dough with grated cheese, sprinkle with salt and pepper and fold the other half of the dough over the cheese. 4. Roll lightly with the rolling pin to make the two layers stick together, then cut with small biscuit cutter and bake on floured pan twelve to fifteen minutes in hot oven. 5. Serve hot with salads.
Four variations on a single baking-powder dough, written for a classroom where the basic method had already been taught. The proportions are standard for the type, which helps, because several of the fractions have not survived in this copy.
- Missing fractionsThe salt, sugar and cinnamon quantities and most of the milk measures have lost their fractions. For a two-cup flour dough of this kind the conventional figures are 1/2 teaspoon salt and about 3/4 cup milk; the cinnamon roll filling would be roughly 1/4 cup sugar with 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Treat these as reconstructions, not as the book's text.
- "Hot oven"In manuals of this period usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Quick breads want the high heat to set the crust before the baking powder is spent; a slack oven gives pale, spreading biscuits.
- AbbreviationsC. is cup, T. is tablespoon, t. is teaspoon. The distinction between T. and t. is the whole recipe in the case of the leavening, so read carefully: 3 to 4 teaspoons baking powder to 2 cups flour is correct and not a misprint.
- "Mix the same as baking powder biscuits"Sift the dry ingredients, cut in the fat until it is the size of coarse crumbs, then add liquid all at once and stir only until the flour is damp. Overworking is the failure mode for every dough on this page.
- Drop batter consistencyThe emergency biscuit takes more milk than a rolled biscuit, enough that the dough falls heavily from the spoon but does not pour. It is the same formula loosened so no board or cutter is needed.
- Egg tea rollsNo milk quantity is given at all in this copy. Beat the egg, make it up with milk to about 3/4 cup total, and add in two stages as directed, holding back the last of the liquid until you see how the flour takes it.
- Shortening"fat" or "shortening" here would most likely have been lard or a vegetable shortening, though butter and drippings were also used. Butter works in all four and is better in the cinnamon and cheese versions, though it browns faster.
- CheeseNo amount is specified. A cup of firmly grated sharp cheddar over half of a two-cup dough is a sensible reading. Roll the folded layers only lightly, or the cheese pushes out at the edges and welds the biscuits to the sheet.
- YieldEach two-cup formula gives roughly a dozen biscuits or rolls, or about ten cinnamon rolls cut an inch thick. They are at their best within an hour of baking.
Manuals like this one were written for school cookery courses in the early twentieth century, where the teaching method was to establish one master formula and then run variations on it. Baking powder biscuits were the master formula for quick doughs; drop biscuits, tea rolls, cinnamon rolls and cheese biscuits all follow from it with a change of fat, liquid or filling, which is why three of the four recipes simply say "mix as for baking powder biscuit" rather than repeating the steps. The alternate name "emergency biscuits" reflects their standing as the fastest bread in the repertoire, needing no yeast, no rising time and no rolling out; chemical leavening had by then made an unexpected supper guest a manageable problem. The terse ingredient columns and numbered steps are the house style of the domestic science movement, which aimed to put cookery on the same footing as a laboratory exercise.