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French Biscuits
Mrs. Lind.
Two cups of butter, two cups of sugar, one egg, (or the whites of two), half a cup of sour milk, half a teaspoon of soda, flour to roll; sprinkle with sugar.
A contributor's rolled sugar cookie, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what it should look like. The recipe gives no oven temperature, no thickness and no baking time, so the proportions are the only guide you get.
- Flour to rollThis is the whole recipe in three words. With two cups of butter and two of sugar you will need roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour to reach a dough stiff enough to roll without sticking. Add it gradually and stop as soon as the dough holds together; more flour than that gives a hard, dry biscuit.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic. Cultured buttermilk is the usual modern substitute, measure for measure. The half teaspoon of soda is there to work against that acid, so sweet milk is not a straight swap: with nothing to neutralise it, the soda can leave a faint soapy taste.
- Butter measured in cupsTwo cups is 1 lb, or four sticks. Nineteenth-century butter was usually salted; if you use unsalted, add about 3/4 teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- The eggOne whole egg or two whites, as the recipe says. The whites alone give a paler, crisper biscuit; the whole egg gives a slightly richer, more tender one. Either works.
- OvenNo oven temperature is given, as is usual in recipes of this kind. Bake at 350F. Rolled thin, about 1/8 to 1/4 inch, these take 8 to 12 minutes and are done when the edges just colour.
- Sugar on topSprinkle before baking, not after, so it sets into the surface. Coarse or granulated sugar, not powdered, which simply dissolves.
- Chill the doughWith this much butter the dough is slack at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes it manageable and keeps the cut shapes from spreading.
- YieldA large batch by modern standards: depending on how thin you roll them, anywhere from six dozen to well over ten dozen 2-inch biscuits. They keep well in a tin, which was rather the point.
In nineteenth-century American cookbooks "biscuit" covers a good deal of ground, and here it plainly means a rolled sweet biscuit rather than the soft baking-powder bread Americans now call by that name; what "French" is doing in the title is less clear. The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes signed by named contributors, sold to raise money for a charitable home, and its pages carry the ordinary domestic repertoire of the city's kitchens with each donor's name attached, as here with Mrs. Lind. The reliance on sour milk and soda rather than baking powder points to a household still working with the leavening it could make from what was at hand; commercial baking powders existed by then but sour milk cost nothing. The recipe's blithe "flour to roll" is characteristic of the genre, written cook to cook, on the assumption that anyone reading had made rolled cookies before and could feel when a dough was right.