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Southern Beaten Biscuit
Sift one pint of flour with one teaspoon salt. With the tips of fingers work in one-third cup of lard and moisten to a stiff dough with equal quantitise of milk and water mixed. Place on floured board and beat with rolling pin for at least one-half hour, folding the dough every few minutes. Roll to one-third inch in thickness, shape with a biscuit-cutter about two inches in diameter, prick with fork and place on buttered baking-sheet or inverted dripping-pan. Bake twenty minutes in hot oven. They should be light, of even grain, and should crack at the edges like crackers.
An unleavened biscuit that rises on nothing but the air and steam driven into it by half an hour of pounding. Everything depends on the beating.
- The hinge: beat until the dough blistersThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the only leavening is air worked into the dough and steam released in the oven. Beat with a rolling pin, mallet or the flat of a cleaver, folding every few minutes, until the dough is silky and small blisters appear on the surface; a snapping sound as it folds is the traditional sign. Thirty minutes is the honest minimum by hand.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, not weight: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 oz of all-purpose flour, and at the lighter end of that since the recipe sifts it. Southern cooks traditionally used a soft, low-protein flour for beaten biscuit; plain all-purpose is a workable substitute.
- Hot ovenRead "hot" as somewhere in the region of 400 to 425F. Twenty minutes should give the pale, dry, cracker-like biscuit the recipe describes; they are not meant to brown much, so keep to the lower end if they begin to colour.
- LardOne-third cup of lard is about 2 1/2 oz. Leaf lard or a good rendered lard gives the right short, dry crumb. Unsalted butter works but adds moisture and browning; vegetable shortening is the closest neutral substitute.
- Milk and water, and a stiff doughRoughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup total liquid, half milk and half water, added a little at a time. The dough should be noticeably stiffer than a rolled biscuit dough, almost like pasta dough; if it is soft enough to be pleasant to knead, it is too wet.
- Machine shortcutA food processor with the dough blade, run in bursts for 3 to 4 minutes, or a stand mixer with the dough hook for about 10, does the same work. A pasta roller, folding and passing the dough repeatedly, is closer to the original action.
- Docking mattersPricking with a fork all the way through is not decorative. It keeps the biscuits from puffing into hollow pockets and gives the flat, layered interior that splits cleanly.
- Yield and servingAbout 18 to 20 biscuits at 2 inches. They are served split, cold or barely warm, with country ham, and they keep for days in a tin -- one of the reasons the style survived.
Beaten biscuit belongs to the plantation and farmhouse South, chiefly of the nineteenth century, before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, and it is essentially a hard ship's biscuit or cracker refined into parlor food. The labor was immense and, in the antebellum period, was overwhelmingly done by enslaved cooks; the sound of the biscuit block being worked before dawn is a fixture of Southern memoirs, and the work was later mechanized by hand-cranked rollers sometimes called biscuit brakes. By the time it was being printed for a national audience, the dish was already regional nostalgia -- included as a representative Southern specialty rather than an everyday bread. Its persistence today is almost entirely as a vehicle for a sliver of salt-cured country ham.