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Sour Milk Biscuit
Into one quart of sifted flour rub a piece of butter as large as an egg and a teaspoon of salt; dissolve one teaspoon of soda, stir it into one pint of milk, and at once stir the milk into the flour mixture; knead quickly, roll about one-half-inch thick, cut into biscuits and bake at once in a quick oven. If you use sour cream instead of milk no butter will be needed.
A soda biscuit of the plainest kind, from the era when milk soured reliably on its own. Two things need translating: the acid the soda depends on, and the very wet dough the proportions give.
- Sour milk means buttermilkSour milk means genuinely acidic milk -- The soda has nothing to react with unless the milk is acidic. Pasteurized milk left on the counter spoils rather than souring cleanly, so use cultured buttermilk as the practical stand-in; failing that, a pint of milk with two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- A quart of flourSifted and lightly measured, that is 4 cups, on the order of a pound. Flour was measured by volume after sifting, which gives a lighter cup than scooping from the bag.
- Butter as large as an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Rub it in cold with the fingertips or a pastry blender until the flour looks like coarse meal.
- The liquid runs highA pint of buttermilk to a quart of flour gives a distinctly soft, sticky dough by current standards; many modern biscuit recipes use less liquid for the same weight of flour. Expect to flour the board generously, or hold back a few tablespoons of the milk until you see how the flour drinks it.
- Quick oven425 to 450F. Have it fully preheated before the milk goes into the flour.
- "At once" is the hingeSoda begins working the moment it meets the acid, and most of its lift is spent before the pan reaches the oven; it gives nothing like the second rise of modern double-acting baking powder. Mix, knead briefly, cut and bake without pause; dough left standing bakes flat.
- Knead quicklySix or eight folds is enough. Extended kneading develops gluten and turns these tough, which is why the original stresses speed rather than thoroughness.
- The sour cream variationSoured cream of the period was likely thinner than the thick cultured product sold now. If you use modern sour cream, thin it with milk to a pourable consistency before measuring the pint.
- Yield and baking timeAbout 16 to 18 biscuits cut at 2 inches, baked 10 to 14 minutes until well browned. They are at their best within the hour and stale quickly.
Soda biscuit belongs to the long American stretch between the hearth and commercial baking powder, when the cheapest leavening in the house was a spoonful of soda woken up by whatever was already sour in the dairy pail. Before refined bicarbonate was common, cooks used saleratus -- originally potassium bicarbonate, though the name came to be applied to the sodium product as well -- and mid-century recipe books often tell the cook to judge how much sourness the milk carried, since too little acid left an alkaline aftertaste. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared, packaged baking powder was widely sold, but sour-milk formulas survived in print because households with a cow still had sour milk to use up. The alternative given here, sour cream in place of milk and butter, shows the same thrift: the fat is already in the cream, so none needs adding.