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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!
Beaten biscuits are a mechanical bread: no yeast, no chemical leavening in the original version, only air pounded into a stiff dough. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: beat until the dough blistersThe dough should be beaten, folded and beaten again -- commonly said to take something like half an hour by hand -- until it turns satiny and small blisters appear on the surface. The text's warning is the important one: once the sheet starts tearing rather than spreading, stop and let it rest before continuing, or the gluten will be shredded and the biscuits heavy.
- No maul requiredA heavy rolling pin on a sturdy table does the same work, and a food processor with the metal blade does it in two or three minutes: run the dough until it is smooth and satiny and slaps cleanly around the bowl. Old biscuit brakes -- geared rollers on a stand -- were the commercial version of the same idea.
- Quantities3 pounds of flour is about 11 cups; use plain all-purpose or a soft Southern flour, not bread flour. 4 ounces of butter or lard is one stick, and 3 cups of milk gives a dough far stiffer than a modern drop biscuit. Hold back some liquid as instructed -- the dough should be firm enough to resist the pin.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 350F for 25-30 minutes, until pale straw rather than brown. Beaten biscuits are meant to be dry, hard-crusted and ivory-coloured, not golden.
- Docking is not optionalCut rounds about 2 inches across and pierce each one through to the pan with a fork twice. Undocked biscuits balloon and hollow out, since the trapped air is doing all the lifting.
- The soda variantThe teaspoonful of soda with buttermilk is a hedge, not a shortcut -- it still wants the full beating. Use it only with genuine cultured buttermilk; sweet milk plus soda will leave a soapy taste with nothing to neutralise it.
- Yield and keepingFive dozen or more small biscuits, depending on how thick they are cut. They keep for days in a tin and were expected to -- they are eaten split, with ham or butter, and are closer to a cracker than to a raised roll.
- The fried versionRolled very thin and fried, the same dough gives a blistered flatbread. Shallow fat at around 360F, a minute or so a side; any hotter and the thin sheets scorch before the interior dries.
Beaten biscuits belong to the American Upper South -- Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee -- where soft winter wheat and abundant kitchen labour made them practical. Before reliable chemical leavening they were the way to get a light bread without waiting on yeast, and the labour involved was considerable: several hundred strokes with a mallet is the figure often quoted, though this recipe itself says there is no established limit. The mechanical biscuit brake, which came into use in the later 1800s, largely replaced the maul in serious kitchens. The aggrieved digression at the end of this entry about baking powder is characteristic of the 1890s and 1900s, when alum-based and phosphate-based powders were competing hard, adulteration scandals were routine, and pure-food agitation was building toward federal regulation -- the author is making the point that the old hand method needed no one's guarantee of purity.