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Baking Powder Biscuit
To make a dozen large biscuits, use one quart of flour; two heaping teaspoons of baking powder; one teaspoon of salt; two even tablespoons of lard or butter; sweet milk to moisten. Place the salt in the flour, which should be measured before being sifted; stir well, add the baking powder, and sift again. Rub the lard into the flour, using the back of a spoon; and when thoroughly mixed, add enough milk to moisten. The dough should be so damp that it will not stick to the board. Mold the dough a moment, sprinkling the board with flour; and when it forms a smooth ball, roll it out an inch thick, cut it into cakes with a small round cutter, and place these in an ungreased tin. Bake thirty minutes in a moderately quick oven.
A plain American quick bread, written for a coal range and for baking powder that behaved differently from what is on the shelf now. Two things need adjusting: the bake time and the handling of the fat.
- Cut the baking time in halfThirty minutes will dry these out and brown them hard. Inch-thick biscuits need 12 to 15 minutes; pull them when the tops are golden and the sides look set rather than damp.
- "Moderately quick oven"Read this as somewhere around 400-425F. Biscuits want a hot oven so the leavening and steam lift them before the crust sets.
- A quart of flourFour cups, measured before sifting as the recipe specifies, which is roughly 1 lb (around 500 g). Flour measured before sifting packs more into the cup than flour measured after, so the order matters here.
- Baking powderTwo heaping teaspoons per quart of flour is light by current practice; most modern recipes use 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of flour. Period baking powders were often single-acting cream of tartar types, so mix and get the pan in the oven without delay.
- Sweet milk to moisten"Sweet" only means fresh rather than soured. Expect 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups; add it gradually, since flour absorbency varies and the dough should be soft but not tacky.
- Two even tablespoons of fatAbout 1 oz, which makes a lean, bready biscuit rather than a flaky one. Use cold lard or butter and rub it in quickly; warm fat blended smooth into the flour gives a tough crumb. A pastry blender or fingertips works better than the back of a spoon.
- Mold the dough a momentThat is the whole instruction on kneading, and it is right. A few folds to bring it together is enough; more develops gluten and the biscuits turn out close-grained.
- YieldA dozen large biscuits, as stated, cut an inch thick; the recipe specifies only a "small round cutter". Set them close together on the ungreased pan if you want soft sides, apart if you want crisp ones.
Baking powder biscuit is the plainest expression of a distinctly American habit: leavening bread chemically instead of waiting on yeast. Earlier nineteenth-century cooks got the same effect from saleratus or soda combined with sour milk or buttermilk, and commercial baking powders, which combine the alkali and its acid in one tin, gradually displaced that practice over the second half of the century. By the time the Butterick company, better known for its dress patterns, was issuing household books to the same audience that bought its magazines, a recipe like this one could assume a can of baking powder in every kitchen and needed only to specify how much. The instruction to measure flour before sifting, and to stir in the baking powder and sift the flour again, is a reminder that even distribution was the real technical problem: a badly mixed batch gave biscuits with bitter yellow streaks.