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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.