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Hard Tea Biscuit
Two pounds of flour, one-fourth pound butter, one salt-spoon salt, three gills milk; cut up the butter and rub it in the flour, add the salt and milk, knead dough for half an hour, cut cakes about as large as a small tea-cup, and half an inch thick, prick with a fork, and bake in a moderate oven until they are a delicate brown. -Mrs.
Denmead, Columbus,
A stiff, low-hydration dough of the beaten-biscuit family, worked long enough to develop gluten rather than leavened. Nothing here rises, so the kneading is the recipe.
- The half hour of kneading is the pointWith no baking powder, soda or yeast, whatever lift there is comes from steam trapped in a well-developed dough. Cut the work short and you are likely to get flat, tough discs. A stand mixer with the dough hook on low for 15-20 minutes is a reasonable modern substitute for the long hand-working, though note that this recipe specifies kneading rather than the beating with a mallet or rolling pin used for beaten biscuits proper.
- Gills and salt-spoonsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups of milk. A salt-spoon is about 1/4 teaspoon — noticeably less salt than a modern baker would use in 2 lb of flour.
- Weights in modern termsTwo pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups; a quarter pound of butter is one standard 4 oz stick. Weigh the flour if you can, since scooped cups run heavy and this dough is already very dry.
- Hydration1 1/2 cups of milk to 2 lb of flour gives a very stiff dough, which is what is wanted for hard biscuit. If it will not come together at all, add milk a tablespoon at a time and no more; a soft dough will not crisp.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is usually read as somewhere around 350F. The biscuits should dry out as much as bake, so allow perhaps 20-30 minutes for the size given, turning the sheet once. "A delicate brown" means pale gold, not deep colour.
- Docking with the forkPricking through the dough is structural, not decorative: it lets steam escape in controlled places so the biscuits stay flat and even rather than puffing into hollow shells.
- Size and yieldA small tea-cup of the period is about 2 1/2 inches across. Cut at that size and half an inch thick, this quantity makes roughly two to three dozen.
- KeepingHard biscuits are meant to be dry, and they keep for weeks in a tin. Cool them completely before storing or trapped steam will soften the crust.
Hard biscuit of this kind is often associated with the Southern beaten-biscuit tradition, in which a very stiff flour-and-fat dough was beaten or kneaded at length to make it rise without chemical leavening — a technique generally traced to English ship's biscuit and household hard bread, and kept alive in the American South well after baking powder became common elsewhere; whether this particular recipe belongs to that lineage is not clear from the page itself. Biscuits of the type were tea-table food: crisp, barely salted, keeping well in a tin, and served with butter, preserves or cheese rather than eaten hot from the pan. The half hour of labour is a reminder that the recipe assumed a cook with time.