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Old-Fashioned Way

There has to be a maul, or Indian club over 2 feet long, and a stout table, for the beating. The biscuit will not be right unless you have the maul made of hard maple, square-shaped at the heavy end, but waving, so as to make uneven hollows in the dough and a hole in the handle for a string to hang it up by. 3 pounds of flour. 1 large teaspoonful of salt. 4 ounces of butter or lard. 3 cups of milk or water.

Have the milk tepid, mix the melted butter and salt with it, and wet up the flour-nearly all-into soft dough. Knead it to smoothness on the table, and then beat it out to a sheet with the maul, fold it over on itself and beat out again.

There is no established limit to the times the dough may be beaten out, but after a few times it begins to break instead of spread. This injures it, and an interval should be allowed for the dough to lose its toughness. The air in the hollows beaten into the dough makes it very light, and white and flaky Modern innovators on the preceding practice add a teaspoonful of soda sifted into the flour and mix up with buttermilk, beating besides in the regular manner.

There are few things more generally acceptable in some localities than beaten biscuit rolled out very thin and fried.

So that if baking powder were banished from the culinary world for the sins of its makers there would still be cakes and ale as of old. If we may believe the advertisements there is one brand of powder that is pure and honest, but is not that reducing our means of safety to a very slender plank? For if by any accident a little of some other powder should get mixed with that one there would be a terrible state of affairs!