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Spoon-Biscuit
One quart sour milk or buttermilk, one tea-spoon soda, a little salt, two table-spoons melted lard, and flour enough for a stiff batter; drop in a hot gem-pan and bake in a quick oven. -Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A drop biscuit in all but name, leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour milk. The batter should be stiff enough to hold its shape on a spoon but too soft to knead.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F in modern terms, though the conversion is approximate; such terms were judged by the cook, not a thermometer. These need high heat so the soda's lift sets before the crumb dries out.
- Gem-panA cast-iron gem pan is essentially a heavy muffin tin with rounded or oval cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; heat it in the oven and grease it well before the batter goes in, as the original assumes a preheated pan.
- Sour milkNineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, which is not the same as modern pasteurised milk gone off — that simply spoils. Use cultured buttermilk, which the recipe already offers as the alternative.
- Soda quantityOne teaspoon of soda to a quart of buttermilk is on the light side by modern proportions; a quart of buttermilk will take about 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons before you taste it. If your buttermilk is mild, err toward the larger amount.
- LardTwo tablespoons melted lard can be replaced measure for measure with melted butter, shortening or a neutral oil. Lard gives a tender crumb.
- Flour enoughThe recipe names no quantity. For a quart of buttermilk expect a great deal of flour, somewhere in the region of 6 to 8 cups of all-purpose, and go by feel rather than the number. Stop when the batter mounds on the spoon and drops off reluctantly; overshooting gives a dry, bready biscuit.
- Work fastSoda and acid begin reacting the moment they meet. Mix only until the flour disappears and get the pan into the oven immediately.
- Yield and timeA quart of liquid makes a large batch — two dozen biscuits or more, depending on the size of the cups. Bake 12-15 minutes, until browned and firm at the centre.
Spoon-biscuit belongs to the family of quick breads that soda made possible in American kitchens, in a transition generally traced to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, though saleratus was already in kitchen use before then and the shift was gradual. Before that, a cook wanting a fast bread had to rely on eggs, beaten batter, or a saved yeast sponge; soda plus the acid already present in sour milk or buttermilk did the same work in minutes. The dairy economy behind it matters too: a household churning its own butter had buttermilk to use up daily, and recipes like this one were how it got used. The Dixie Cook Book credits contributors by name — Mrs. A. B. Morey's version is one of dozens of soda-and-sour-milk breads readers would have recognised as a variation on their own.