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Emergency Biscuit
Use the recipe for baking-powder biscuit, using more liquid to make the dough soft enough to drop from the spoon. The amount of the liquid in this recipe, in most cases, will be just half the amount of flour (two cups of flour to one cup liquid). Drop the biscuit on to a well-greased pan, or bake in greased muffin-tins, in a hot oven (450°-460° F.).
A drop biscuit, written as a variation on the book's baking-powder biscuit rather than as a standalone formula. The only real change is hydration: wetter dough, no rolling, no cutter.
- The base recipe it assumesThe book's own baking-powder biscuit is not reproduced here, so the exact proportions of powder, salt and fat are not on the page. What this variation changes is the liquid, which goes up to a full cup per two cups of flour so the dough will fall from a spoon.
- The hingeMix only until the flour disappears and stop. Drop batter is easy to overwork because it looks like it wants stirring; gluten development is what turns these tough and slick rather than craggy and tender.
- Oven450-460F is stated outright, and is right for biscuit. Preheat fully; the burst of steam in the first few minutes is what lifts them.
- Baking powder strengthEarly-20th-century recipes often assumed weaker or single-acting powder. With modern double-acting powder, 3 to 3 1/2 teaspoons per 2 cups flour is ample, and less metallic on the tongue.
- FatThe original almost certainly used lard or butter, though this page does not say. Either works; keep it cold and rub it into the flour so it stays in flecks.
- Pan choiceNo time is given, so watch them. Dropped on a sheet they spread and bake quickly; in greased muffin tins they climb instead of spread and take a little longer, giving a softer, more roll-like biscuit.
- YieldTwo cups of flour gives roughly 10 to 12 drop biscuits. Serve hot; they are not a keeping bread.
The name is literal: this is what you made when unexpected company arrived or the bread had run out, and it survives on the fact that a drop biscuit skips the flour board, the rolling pin and the cutter entirely. Chemical leavening made that possible. Baking powder became widely available in American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time Butterick published its household volumes the quick-bread chapter was a standard feature of general cookbooks. Note that this entry is written as a proportion rather than a list of ingredients, directing the cook back to the base biscuit and giving the ratio of one part liquid to two parts flour.