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Tea Biscuits
Mix in the following proportions the desired quantity: Rub six ounces of lard and a similar quantity of butter into five and a half pounds of flour; make a bay, and mix in two pounds of sifted sugar, and mix into a dough with one pint of milk and a half pint of water; mix in with the sugar a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, and, with the water, a teaspoonful of hydrochloric acid. Allow the dough to become quite stiff, and break well with the biscuit-break; roll out thin, and cut into pieces with a round or oval cutter. Cover over, and leave in a warm place to rise; when it becomes puffy, place on buttered baking-sheets in a quick oven for twenty minutes.
This is a bakery-scale formula that leavens with bicarbonate of soda plus a measured dose of hydrochloric acid, a practice that has no place in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the terms and why the recipe cannot be followed.
- The hydrochloric acidHydrochloric acid is the same substance sold as muriatic acid for masonry and pool work; nothing on a hardware or hardware-grade label is food-grade, and even dilute solutions cause chemical burns to skin, eyes and airway. The recipe specifies neither concentration nor purity, so a "teaspoonful" could be anything from a mild dilution to a corrosive strong acid. Use a current biscuit recipe leavened with baking powder or with cream of tartar.
- Why it was there at allThe acid was doing the job that cream of tartar, alum or monocalcium phosphate does in baking powder: reacting with the soda to release carbon dioxide. The chemistry is sound; the reagent is not one you should have in a kitchen, and any excess left unneutralised ends up in the biscuit.
- ScaleFive and a half pounds of flour with two pounds of sugar is a bakery-scale batch rather than a household one. The recipe gives no yield; it opens by presenting itself as proportions to be mixed in "the desired quantity," i.e. a formula meant to be scaled up or down.
- "Make a bay"Bakers' term for pushing the rubbed flour into a ring and working the liquids in the well at the centre, drawing flour in from the sides. It is the same gesture as making a well for pasta dough.
- The biscuit-breakA bench-mounted roller device used to fold and compress stiff biscuit dough repeatedly, blending and developing it into a uniform sheet. Hand work with a heavy pin would have been the nearest domestic equivalent.
- "A quick oven"Period glosses for a quick oven run roughly 400 to 450F, though usage varied from book to book. Recorded here only as a gloss on the original wording, not as a working instruction for this formula.
- "Leave in a warm place to rise"Misleading language carried over from yeast baking. There is no yeast here; the puffiness comes from gas already released by the acid and soda, so any resting period simply lets the reaction proceed before the dough reaches the oven.
Chemical leavening arrived in commercial baking well before a single reliable powder settled the question, and through much of the nineteenth century bakers combined an alkali with whatever acid was to hand: sour milk, cream of tartar, tartaric acid, and alum. Formulas of this kind circulated in printers' and confectioners' handbooks and were copied from book to book, which may be how this one reached Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection, though the route cannot be established; the sheer scale of the batch marks it as a working bakeshop recipe rather than something written for a home cook. "Tea biscuit" here means the sweet English sense, a hard sugared biscuit for the tea table, not the American soft quick bread. Once packaged double-acting baking powder became cheap and universal in the early twentieth century, acid-and-soda formulas like this one became far less common in print.