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Emergency Biscuit
Use recipe for Baking Powder Biscuit I or II, with the addition of more milk, that mixture may be dropped from spoon without spreading. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan, one-half inch apart. Brush over with milk, and bake in hot oven eight minutes.
Fruit Rolls (Pin Wheel Biscuit) 2 cups flour 2/3 cup milk 5 teaspoons baking powder 1/3 cup stoned raisins 1/2 teaspoon salt (finely chopped) 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons citron 2 tablespoons butter (finely chopped) 1/3 teaspoon cinnamon Mix as Baking Powder Biscuit II. Roll to one-fourth inch thickness, brush over with melted butter, and sprinkle with fruit, sugar, and cinnamon. Roll like a jelly roll; cut off pieces three-fourths inch in thickness. Place on buttered tin, and bake in hot oven fifteen minutes. Currants may be used in place of raisins and citron.
Two recipes in one entry: a drop biscuit made by loosening the standard baking powder biscuit dough, and a rolled, filled pinwheel. Both depend on a base recipe printed elsewhere in the book.
- The base doughBaking Powder Biscuit II is printed elsewhere in the book; it is a plain flour, baking powder, salt, butter and milk dough. For the emergency version the recipe simply says to add more milk, until the mixture drops from a spoon in a soft mound rather than pouring off it.
- Half an inch apartBiscuits set this close tend to touch as they rise, which keeps the sides soft and pushes the lift upward. Space them further apart if you want crisp sides all round.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced tubs around the winter holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly; chop it fine, since large pieces scorch at the roll's cut edge.
- Stoned raisinsSimply pitted. Modern raisins are already seedless, so the instruction has no work left to do beyond the chopping the recipe calls for.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the high side by modern standards. Period powders were single-acting, and a somewhat smaller quantity of modern powder will usually do the work.
- Rolling the pinwheelsA quarter-inch sheet is thin, and it must be for the spiral to hold. Roll it snugly, chill the log ten minutes if the butter has softened, and cut with a sharp thin knife or a length of thread so the coils are not crushed flat.
- YieldTwo cups of flour makes about a dozen drop biscuits or ten to twelve pinwheels. Both are best within an hour of baking.
"Emergency" here means nothing more dramatic than unexpected company or a breakfast running late: by slackening the dough with extra milk, the cook skips rolling, cutting and the flouring of a board, and the biscuits are out of the oven in eight minutes. Drop biscuits under various names run all through nineteenth-century American cookery, and the Boston Cooking-School book is characteristic in treating them as a variation on a master recipe rather than a dish of their own, part of Fannie Farmer's larger project of teaching proportions that could be adapted rather than a stack of unrelated formulas. The pinwheel that follows shows the same economy working in the other direction, dressing the identical dough with butter, sugar, cinnamon and candied citron to make something closer to a pastry. Citron was bought as a candied block and chopped as needed, a general baking store rather than a seasonal one.