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Buttermilk Biscuits
Sift into a quart of flour a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, adding a little salt; make a hollow in the center of the flour, pour in a pint of buttermilk and form into a dough, using care in rolling it out to make it as soft as possible, pressing perfectly flat with the hands to knead it. Let it lay for five or six minutes to allow the soda to dissolve and then knead it again. Cut into shape with a cutter and dock, baking on a greased baking-sheet in a moderate oven until done.
A lean soda biscuit with no fat in the dough at all — closer to a British soda scone than to the layered shortening biscuit most Americans expect. The measurements are by volume in the old style, and the oven instruction is the one thing worth ignoring.
- The quantitiesA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g; a pint of buttermilk is 2 cups. That is a very wet ratio for biscuits and will give a slack, sticky dough — expect to flour the board generously, or hold back a few tablespoons of the buttermilk.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only 'a moderate oven', which in period usage is usually reckoned somewhere around 350-375F. Soda biscuits generally do better hot and fast: modern practice is 425-450F for 10-12 minutes, which sets the crust before the dough slumps.
- No fat in the doughThere is no butter, lard or shortening here, so there are no flakes to build. The lift comes entirely from soda reacting with the acid in the buttermilk, and the texture will be soft and bready rather than layered.
- "Dock"To dock is to prick the tops with a fork or a docking roller so steam escapes and the biscuits rise evenly instead of doming or blistering.
- The resting and second kneadingThe five or six minutes lets the soda hydrate, but the second kneading should be brief — a few folds, no more. Soda begins working the moment it meets the buttermilk, and prolonged handling both toughens the crumb and spends the gas before it reaches the oven.
- ButtermilkCultured buttermilk from the carton is acidic enough to work with the soda and is the right substitute for the churn buttermilk Oscar knew. Do not use sweet milk; without acid the soda leaves a soapy taste and the biscuits will not rise.
- Salt"A little salt" is underspecified for 4 cups of flour. Use about 1½ teaspoons of fine salt, or the biscuits taste flat.
- YieldA batch this size gives a good many biscuits from a 2-inch cutter; the exact count depends on how thick the dough is rolled. Best within an hour of baking; fat-free soda biscuits stale quickly.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896, and it mixes hotel-scale French cookery with plain American baking of exactly this kind. Buttermilk biscuits belong to the second category: for most of the nineteenth century buttermilk was the tart liquid left after churning butter, a cheap byproduct that farm and hotel kitchens used up in quick breads because its acidity reacts with bicarbonate of soda to raise a dough in minutes rather than hours. Chemical leavening in American baking is generally traced to the spread of saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda in the 1840s and 1850s, which is what made a bread like this — no yeast, no waiting, no fat — practical for a kitchen that had to produce hot bread on demand at any hour. The commercially cultured buttermilk sold today is a later product, made by souring low-fat milk rather than by churning.