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Biscuit (Dissolve one rounded)
Dissolve one rounded table-spoon of butter in a pint of hot milk; when lukewarm stir in one quart of flour, add one beaten egg, a little salt, and a tea-cup of yeast; work into dough until smooth.
If winter, set in a warm place; if summer, in a cool one to rise. In rise.
In the morning work softly and roll out one-half inch and cut into biscuit and set to rise for thirty minutes, when they will be ready to bake. These are delicious.
An overnight yeast-raised biscuit, closer to a soft dinner roll than to the baking-powder biscuit the word now suggests. The recipe assumes a cook who keeps her own liquid yeast and knows her own oven, so both need translating.
- The teacup of yeastThis means homemade liquid yeast or barm, a thin ferment of potato, hops or flour water, not anything sold today. A teacup in cookbooks of this period is usually reckoned somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup of active liquid; one packet of active dry yeast (2 1/4 tsp) proofed in a little of the warm milk stands in for it, though the dough will likely rise faster than the original expected.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups, a quart of flour about 4 cups or a pound. The dough should be soft and slightly tacky, not stiff, so hold back a little flour until you see how it comes together.
- Temperature of the milk"When lukewarm" is the hinge. Milk hot enough to melt butter will kill yeast outright; wait until it is no warmer than blood heat, around 100F, before the flour and yeast go in.
- The overnight riseThe winter/summer instruction is about controlling a slow ferment in a house without thermostats. With modern yeast, a cool spot or the refrigerator overnight gives the same long, flavourful rise; a warm kitchen will overproof the dough by morning.
- "Work softly"Handle the risen dough gently, deflating it as little as possible. Roll to the specified half inch, cut with a 2-inch cutter, and give the cut biscuits the full thirty minutes to puff before baking.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 400F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are evenly browned and the bottoms sound hollow.
- YieldAbout two dozen 2-inch biscuits. Best eaten the day they are baked; the enriched dough stales quickly.
Through most of the nineteenth century "biscuit" in an American cookbook could mean either a quick bread or, as here, a small yeast-raised roll set overnight and baked for breakfast, the chemically leavened version only pushing the older kind aside as reliable baking powder became cheap and universal. The overnight schedule is often said to have been a matter of supply rather than taste: where households had no access to packaged yeast, a jar of liquid yeast or barm was kept going from batch to batch, and it worked slowly enough that dough had to be mixed the night before to be on the table at breakfast, though compressed and dry yeast cakes were commercially available in America from the later nineteenth century, overlapping the period described. The Dixie Cook-Book, generally credited to Estelle Woods Wilcox and drawing heavily on her earlier Buckeye Cookery, was assembled for exactly this kind of kitchen, where the yeast pot and the baking of breakfast breads structured the day's work.