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Baking Powder Biscuit
2 pounds or quarts of flour. 4 ounces of melted lard or butter. 4 teaspoonfuls of powder. 1 teaspoonfuls of salt. 1 1/2 pints of tepid water or milk. Mix the powder in the flour dry. Place the melted lard in a hollow in the middle, the salt and water or milk with that, and stir around, drawing the flour in gradually so as to make a smooth, soft d ugh Turn out on the floured table. Press the dough out flat with the hands fold it over again and ag in and press out till it is compact, even, and smooth. Let stand 5 minutes. Roll out and cut into biscuits. Bake immediately.
Of all the atrocious frauds in the way of bread perhaps the worst is the baking-powder biscuit of unskillful cooks, sometimes found in boarding houses and low-priced restaurants. The compulsory spoiling of biscuit through excessive economy of ingredients may be pardonable in the cooks, but the atrocity of spoiling them with too much richness and wrong way of working, never. Such biscuit are yellow, dirty on the bottom, greasy to the touch; they have rough sides, no edges, for they rise tall and narrowing towards the top; they are wrinkled and freckled and ugly; they will not part into white and eatable flakes or slices, but tumble in brittle crumbs from the fingers, and eat like smoked sawdust. Strange, that the same materials should make things so different as these and good biscuit.
Biscuit dough should be made up soft. The shortening should be melted and added to the fluid milk-warm, to insure thorough incorporation. The private house way of kneading the dough up into dumpling shape, perpetually breaking the layers and making the parted edges take up too much flour, is the wrong way that ruins biscuit. The right way is given in the receipt.
A bakeshop-scale formula written for someone making biscuits by the pan, not the plate. The technique — melted fat, soft dough, folding rather than kneading — is the point, and it produces a flakier, more layered biscuit than the usual cut-in method.
- Scale it downTwo pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups and yields several dozen 2-inch biscuits. Quartering the recipe gives 8 oz flour (about 1 3/4 cups), 1 oz fat (2 tablespoons), 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt and 3/4 cup liquid.
- "2 pounds or quarts"The author is treating a pound of flour as roughly equal to a quart by volume, a standard bakeshop shorthand of the period. Weigh it if you can: 2 lb is about 900 g.
- Liquid and fat1 1/2 pints is 3 cups; 4 ounces of lard or butter is 1/2 cup. That is a lean dough by modern standards, which is deliberate — the whole closing paragraph is an argument against over-enriched biscuits.
- Baking powder is lightFour teaspoons to 7 cups of flour is well under half the modern proportion of roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup. Period bulk powders varied in strength and this is a commercial formula; expect a denser, more bread-like biscuit unless you increase it. The salt is low too — a scant teaspoon for 2 lb of flour tastes flat to most palates now.
- Melted fat, warm liquidThis is the hinge. The fat must be melted and the milk or water tepid so the two combine instead of the fat seizing into lumps. Cold liquid here gives you neither the cut-in flakiness of a modern biscuit nor the smooth dough this method depends on.
- Fold, do not kneadPress flat with the hands, fold, press again — this is lamination, and it is what makes the biscuits part into slices. Rounding the dough up like a dumpling, as the author complains, tears the layers and drives in extra flour at every crease.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Biscuits of this kind want a hot oven, around 450F, for 10 to 14 minutes. "Bake immediately" is meant literally: the powder begins working as soon as the liquid goes in.
- CuttingPress the cutter straight down and lift straight up. Twisting seals the cut edge and the biscuit rises crooked.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the hotel, restaurant and boarding-house trade in Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s, and his books read like a working chef correcting his staff, which is exactly what the second half of this entry is. Baking powder biscuits rested on a convenience that was by then some decades old: commercial chemical leavening had gradually and only partly displaced the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method, and a reliable canned powder meant hot bread could be produced to order at any hour without a sponge or a yeast starter. That is plausibly part of why the biscuit became the signature bread of cheap American eating houses, and why Whitehead is so exercised about it being, in his judgment, almost always ruined. His diagnosis is technical rather than moral: too much shortening, dough worked into a ball instead of folded flat, and fat added cold so it never dispersed. The insistence on melted fat and warm liquid sets this recipe apart from the cut-in cold-butter method that dominates American biscuit-making today.