Home › Breakfast And Tea Cakes › High Biscuit
High Biscuit
On baking days, reserve one small loaf and mix a rounded tablespoon butter, a level table-spoon sugar and one egg into it by pulling it to pieces with the hands; knead into a loaf, let it rise, then, by rolling between the hands, make into balls the size of a small hen's egg, place in rows in very well greased dripping -pan; when half full raise the end that is empty almost perpendicular, and shake gently until the balls slide compactly together, then add more, and continue doing SO until the pan is full; rub over the top with melted butter, let rise until very light, and bake. - Mildred.
This is a bakers' shortcut: a portion of the day's plain bread dough is enriched after the fact with butter, sugar and egg, then shaped into pan rolls. The original assumes you already have dough on the bench and a hot oven going, so both quantity and temperature are left unsaid.
- The hinge: work the fat in completely, then let it rise againTearing the dough apart with the hands and pinching in the butter and egg is not decoration: fat and egg coat the gluten and slacken an already-risen dough, and an under-mixed batch is likely to bake patchy. Expect several minutes of tearing and re-kneading, and note that the recipe calls for a full rise after this stage, before shaping.
- "One small loaf"Read this as perhaps a pound of risen bread dough, which at the stated size (a small hen's egg) gives roughly a dozen balls. Any plain white bread dough works; if yours is already sweetened or enriched, reduce the added sugar.
- Dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan, not a casserole dish. A quarter-sheet pan or a 9x13 baking pan gives the same effect: sides close enough that the balls support each other as they rise.
- The tilting trickRaising the empty end of the pan and shaking is a way of packing the balls tight without handling and deflating them. Modern equivalent: set the rolls just touching, and accept that they will knit together as they proof.
- BakeNo temperature is given because the oven was whatever the day's bread demanded. For enriched pan rolls of this size, 375-400F for 18 to 25 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the centre roll reads about 190F.
- "Let rise until very light"The final proof matters more than the clock — the dough is heavier than the plain loaf it came from and will take longer. The rolls should look visibly puffed and hold a slow-filling dent when pressed.
- The butter washBrushing melted butter before the final rise keeps the tops soft and prevents a skin forming while proofing. A second brush straight from the oven is worth doing.
"High biscuit" in nineteenth-century American usage is generally taken to mean a raised biscuit he sosoda and baking-powder biscuits that were displacing them — and this is the thrifty version of the type, built from bread dough already at hand rather than mixed from scratch. The Dixie Cook Book, like its northern sibling Buckeye Cookery, was assembled from contributed receipts, which is why the page is signed simply "Mildred"; such attributions are often read as a way of vouching for a recipe by naming the housewife who had actually made it work, though the compilers' intent is not documented. The method itself reflects a kitchen where baking was a weekly event and dough was a resource to be divided: one batch became loaves, a portion became rolls for tea, and nothing was mixed twice if it could be mixed once.