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Emergency Biscuits
2 cups flour 1/4 tablespoonful shortening 1 cup thick sour milk 1 teaspoonful salt teaspoonful soda Sift the flour, salt, and soda well together. Rub in the shortening with a spoon. Add the milk and stir lightly. The dough should be soft. Drop by spoonfuls into greased muffin-tins and bake in a hot oven about twenty minutes.
A plain drop biscuit leavened by the reaction of sour milk and soda. It comes together in under five minutes, which is the whole point of the name.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" of this period is usually taken as roughly 400-450F. Preheat fully before mixing, since the soda begins working the moment it meets the acid in the milk. Twenty minutes at that heat suits muffin-tin biscuits.
- The soda quantityThe amount of soda is given without a fraction. Many books of the period reckon about 1/2 teaspoon of soda to a cup of sour milk, which would suit this quantity; a full teaspoon risks a soapy, metallic taste.
- Thick sour milkThis is naturally clabbered raw milk, not spoiled pasteurised milk, which sours into something unpleasant rather than into clabber. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes.
- ShorteningHere this meant lard or a similar solid fat. Butter, rubbed in as the recipe directs, works and tastes better.
- Mixing"Stir lightly" is the hinge. Stop as soon as the flour is damp; the dough should look shaggy and slack. Beating it develops gluten and gives tough, close-grained biscuits.
- The muffin-tin trickDropping soft dough into greased cups avoids rolling and cutting altogether, and the tin walls force the biscuits upward instead of outward. A standard 12-cup tin will take the whole batch, filled about two-thirds.
- YieldTen to twelve biscuits, best eaten warm within an hour of baking; soda biscuits stiffen as they cool.
Emergency biscuits belong to the American quick-bread tradition that followed the wide availability of cheap baking soda in the mid-nineteenth century: before that, a bread you could put on the table twenty minutes after deciding to make it was far less common. Sour milk was not an ingredient one bought but one accumulated, since milk kept in a cellar or icebox clabbered on its own schedule, and cookbooks of this era offer many ways to spend it before it was wasted. That thrift is the organizing idea of a book of left-overs, where nothing sour, stale, or half-used was meant to leave the kitchen unaccounted for. The name signals its role in the household: the biscuit you made when guests arrived unannounced, or when the day's baking had been eaten faster than planned.