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Baking Powder Biscuit II
2 cups bread flour 5 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk ½ teaspoon salt Mix and bake as Baking Powder Biscuit I.
A leaner variant of Farmer's basic biscuit, with half the fat of the first version — the dough is drier and wants a light hand more than the richer one does.
- The missing methodBaking Powder Biscuit I directs you to sift the dry ingredients, work in the butter with the fingertips or a knife, add milk gradually to a soft dough, turn onto a floured board, roll or pat about half an inch thick, cut, and bake. Handle the dough as little as possible; a biscuit made from over-worked dough is tough regardless of how good the proportions are.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; her "hot oven" for biscuit is conventionally read as about 450F. Bake around 12 minutes, until the tops are browned and the sides feel dry.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is more than modern practice, which generally runs 3 to 4 teaspoons for that much flour. Turn-of-the-century powders varied in strength and lost potency in the tin; with a fresh can of double-acting powder, 4 teaspoons should give ample lift.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half is assertive but not wrong for a biscuit with only 2 tablespoons of fat — the salt is doing some of the work the butter would otherwise do. Reduce to a teaspoon if you are using salted butter.
- Bread flourThe recipe calls for bread flour. With today's bread flour expect a chewier biscuit, and hold back a tablespoon or two of the milk if the dough seems wet.
- MilkWhole milk, cold. If the dough will not come together in a shaggy mass, add milk a teaspoon at a time rather than dumping more in — the flour absorbency has changed more than the recipe has.
- YieldAbout a dozen biscuits cut with a two-inch cutter, or nine cut square with a knife, which wastes no dough and needs no re-rolling.
Chemically leavened biscuits belong to a specific moment in American baking: baking powder became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the 1896 first edition of Fannie Farmer's book it had largely displaced the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method in many kitchens. Farmer numbers her variants -- Biscuit I, Biscuit II -- with the second referring back to the first for method. This is the plainer, more economical of the two.