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Tea Biscuits
Mrs. Norcross.
One cup of hot water, two of milk, three tablespoons of yeast; mix thoroughly; after it is risen, take twothirds of a cup of butter and a little sugar and mould it; then let it rise, and mould it into small cakes. TO MAKE STALE BREAD OR CAKE FRESH.
Mrs. M. G. Adams.
Plunge the loaf one instant in cold water; lay it upon a tin in the oven ten or fifteen minutes. Cake and rolls may be thus made almost as nice as if just baked, but must be eaten immediately.
A sketch rather than a formula: the flour is not mentioned at all, which was normal in a subscription cookbook where every contributor assumed you would add flour until the dough felt right. Read it as a lightly enriched sweet yeast dough.
- The missing ingredientNo flour quantity is given. With three cups of liquid, a soft moulded dough will take roughly 7 to 9 cups of all-purpose flour, added in stages until the mass pulls away from the bowl and is tacky but not sticky. Judge by feel, not by the number.
- Three tablespoons of yeastThis means a liquid yeast: a homemade potato or hop yeast kept in a jar, or yeast bought from a brewer. It is not interchangeable with the modern packet; roughly two teaspoons of instant dry yeast should do the work of it here.
- Hot water and milkOne cup of hot water combined with two of cold milk would bring the liquid to roughly blood heat. Whatever the intent, the mixture should be no warmer than lukewarm, about 110F, before the yeast goes in.
- "Mould"In this period mould means to knead. The butter and sugar are worked into the risen sponge by hand at the second stage, which is why the dough is soft and slow to come together.
- Butter and sugarTwo-thirds of a cup of butter is about 150 g, best softened rather than melted. 'A little sugar' suggests a modest amount, perhaps 2 to 4 tablespoons.
- Rises and shapingExpect the first rise to take 1 to 1.5 hours, a second rise after the butter is worked in, and a final proof of 30 to 45 minutes once the small cakes are shaped and panned. The enriched dough moves more slowly than the plain sponge did.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Small enriched rolls of this kind want a fairly quick oven, 400 to 425F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow.
- YieldThree cups of liquid is a large batch by modern standards, giving roughly two to three dozen small biscuits. Halving it is sensible for one household.
- On the stale-bread hintThe second paragraph is a household tip, not a second recipe. It works because the water re-wets the crust and the oven heat drives moisture back through the crumb, reversing starch retrogradation for an hour or so; 350F for the ten to fifteen minutes stated is about right, and the warning to eat it immediately is the whole point.
Nineteenth-century "tea biscuits" were often not the chemically raised biscuits of the American South but small yeast-raised rolls served at the evening tea table, closer to a plain sweet bun, though both kinds existed in the period. Recipes like this one turn up under a contributor's name because charitable cookbooks were commonly compiled from the receipt books of local women and sold to raise money, which is also why the instructions assume so much. The vagueness about yeast is a marker of date, since bakers then kept a live liquid yeast at home or bought it from a brewer, and compressed cake yeast is generally said to have become widely available in American kitchens in the last quarter of the century. The stale-bread revival trick that follows was a common household practice in the era before sliced, wrapped bread, when a loaf was expected to last several days.