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Soda Biscuit
Put one quart of flour, before sifting, into sieve, with one teaspoon soda and two of cream tartar (or three of baking powder), one of salt, and one table-spoon white sugar; mix all thoroughly with the flour, run through sieve, rub in one level table-spoon of lard or butter (or half and half), wet with half pint sweet milk, roll on board about an inch thick, cut with biscuit cutter, and bake in a quick oven fifteen minutes. If you have not milk, use a little more butter, and wet with water. Handle as little and make as rapidly as possible.-M. Parloa.
A plain soda biscuit from the era before packaged baking powder was universal, which is why the recipe offers soda and cream of tartar first and baking powder as the alternative. Two things need translating: the volume measures and the very lean proportion of fat.
- A quart of flourMeasured before sifting, this is about 4 cups, or roughly 1 lb / 500 g of all-purpose flour. Sifting after the leavening is mixed in is the whole point here — it is how the soda and cream of tartar get distributed.
- Half pint sweet milkOne cup. "Sweet" simply means fresh, unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber used with soda alone.
- The dough will be stiffOne cup of liquid to four cups of flour is dry by modern standards. Expect to add another 2 to 4 tablespoons of milk to get a dough that just holds together.
- Quick ovenConventionally read as somewhere in the region of 400 to 450F; the original gives no temperature. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits inch-thick biscuits; the leavening is chemical and needs immediate heat to lift the dough before it sets.
- Only one tablespoon of fatThat is deliberate, not a typo. These are lean everyday biscuits, not the rich shortened kind — closer in texture to a bread roll than to a flaky buttermilk biscuit. If you want tenderness, 4 to 6 tablespoons of butter or lard rubbed in will not harm the chemistry.
- Soda and cream of tartarThe 1:2 ratio given is the classic homemade baking powder, and the substitution of three teaspoons of baking powder is a fair swap. Modern double-acting baking powder is more forgiving of delay; the tartar version starts working the moment it is wet.
- The hinge"Handle as little and make as rapidly as possible." Overworking develops gluten and the biscuits turn tough; with cream of tartar the gas also escapes before it reaches the oven. Mix, roll once, cut, bake.
- YieldA quart of flour makes a large batch; the count depends on the cutter size and how thick the rounds are left.
The attribution is to Maria Parloa, who ran a cooking school in Boston and whose books and lectures were widely reprinted in the 1870s and 80s — a reminder that The Dixie Cook Book, for all its regional title, borrowed freely from Northern domestic-science authorities. The recipe sits at a transitional moment in American baking: soda paired with cream of tartar was the standard way to raise a quick bread before commercial baking powders became cheap and reliable, and the parenthetical "or three of baking powder" shows the new product arriving as a convenience rather than a replacement. Sifting the leavening through with the flour, twice if the cook was careful, helped guard against the bitter yellow spots that undissolved soda leaves behind. Biscuits like these were breakfast bread in households without time to wait on yeast.