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Butter Biscuits
Mix up half a pound of butter with two pounds of sifted flour, adding a teaspoonful of salt; moisten to a stiff dough with half a pint of milk and mix it well. Remove the dough from the pan and put it on a floured paste-board and knead thoroughly; roll it into a large thick sheet and beat hard on both sides with a rolling-pin or break it. Then cut it out into small, round, thick cakes with a tin cutter, beat each cake on both sides, place them in buttered pans and bake to a light brown in a slow oven.
This is a beaten biscuit — an unleavened cracker-like biscuit that rises only on the air the beating drives into it. The dough is deliberately stiffer and drier than anything a modern cook would call biscuit dough.
- The beating is the whole recipeThere is no baking powder, soda or yeast here, so the only leavening is mechanical. The recipe gives no time; traditional accounts of beaten biscuit call for anything from twenty minutes to half an hour of hard, rhythmic pounding, folding the sheet over on itself between rounds, until it blisters and turns satiny. Under-beaten dough will be dense and dull rather than crisp.
- Weights into cupsTwo pounds of sifted flour is roughly 7 to 8 cups; half a pound of butter is two sticks; half a pint of milk is one cup. This is a large batch — halve or quarter it for a first attempt.
- That liquid is very shortOne cup of milk to two pounds of flour gives a dough barely damp enough to hold together, which is authentic but unforgiving. Add the milk gradually and expect to need a little more to bring it into a mass; the target is stiff enough to resist the rolling pin, not crumbly.
- "Slow oven"Read this as roughly 300-325F. The recipe asks for a light brown only, so expect a long, pale bake -- on the order of half an hour -- with the aim of drying the cakes through rather than colouring them deeply.
- Cut thick, then dockRoll the sheet about a third of an inch thick and cut rounds of 1½ to 2 inches. Prick each one twice through with a fork before baking, or the trapped steam blows the middle into a hollow dome.
- A stand mixer or pasta roller worksThe historic labour-saver was a hand-cranked biscuit brake, two rollers the dough passed through repeatedly. A pasta machine on its widest setting does the same job, as does a dough hook run long on low, though neither gives quite the blistered texture of pounding.
- Yield and servingThe full quantity makes a large batch, several dozen small biscuits. They are meant to be split and eaten with country ham, butter or preserves, and being dry and cracker-like they keep well in a tin.
Beaten biscuits belong to the Chesapeake and the upper South, where they were a fixture of Maryland and Virginia households through the nineteenth century. They predate reliable chemical leavening: with no soda or baking powder, the cook raised the dough by beating air into it, traditionally with a mallet, an axe head or a flat iron on a stump or marble slab, for half an hour at a stretch — labour often done by servants or enslaved cooks, a fact the printed recipes rarely mention. The patented "biscuit brake," a set of geared rollers, took over much of the work later in the century. The result is closer to a hard cracker than to a fluffy Southern buttermilk biscuit, and it was prized for exactly that: it travelled well and made the classic vehicle for a slice of salt-cured ham.