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Milk Biscuits
Rub one pound each of salt and butter into four quarts of the best wheat flour until quite smooth, add one pinch of salt, and stir the mixture to a paste with milk. Divide the dough into small equal portions, shape them into balls, prick the tops with a fork, put them into buttered-pans, and stand in a warm place to rise for about an hour. When very light, place the biscuits in a moderate oven and bake. When crisp and cooked, take the biscuits out of the tins, and leave them until cold. If they are to be kept for any time, they should be put into biscuit-tins.
A short English-style biscuit dough from Oscar's enormous 1896 compendium, printed with at least one error that has to be dealt with before anything else.
- The pound of salt is a misprintThe pound of salt looks like a misprint -- "One pound each of salt and butter" into four quarts of flour is not a seasoning; it is roughly a quarter the weight of the flour. The later "one pinch of salt" suggests the salting is meant to happen there. Read the first pound as fat rather than salt.
- Four quarts of flourFlour was commonly measured by volume in bulk kitchens. Four quarts of sifted wheat flour is about 4 to 4 1/2 lb (roughly 16 cups) — a hotel-scale batch that will give you dozens of biscuits. Quarter it for a domestic oven.
- No leavening is givenThe dough is told to rise for an hour in a warm place, but nothing is listed to raise it. Either yeast has dropped out of the text, or the hour is simply a rest to relax the gluten. As written, the dough will not rise.
- Milk is unmeasured"Stir the mixture to a paste with milk" leaves the hydration to judgement. Add it slowly until the dough just comes together and is stiff rather than sticky; a wet dough will spread instead of holding its ball shape.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Small biscuits of this kind will take something like 15 to 20 minutes; the instruction is to bake until crisp, which means dry through, not merely coloured.
- These are biscuits in the English senseNot the soft American breakfast biscuit. The pricking with a fork, the crisping, and the storage tins all point to a hard, keeping biscuit closer to a cracker or a plain tea biscuit.
- Cooling and storageLeaving them until cold before tinning is not fussiness — trapped steam will soften a crisp biscuit overnight. Cool completely on a rack, then store airtight.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maitre d'hotel, the public face of the dining rooms — but the 1896 volume that carries his name runs to some nine hundred pages of recipes drawn from the hotel's kitchens and from the European culinary tradition its cooks had trained in. Pages like this one show the book's English inheritance plainly: a "milk biscuit" here is the hard, dry, tinned biscuit of British usage, in the tradition of the plain household and ship's biscuits that were baked to keep rather than to be eaten warm. Commercial biscuit tins were by the 1890s a familiar item in a well-stocked pantry, and the closing instruction to tin them assumes baked goods meant to be kept. The garbled ingredient line is a reminder that these big compilations were assembled at speed.