Home › Cereals, Batters and Doughs › Baking Powder Biscuits
Baking Powder Biscuits
2 cups flour. teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons fat About cup milk Mix and sift dry ingredients. Rub in fat with tips of fingers, or chop in with a knife. Add milk gradually to make a soft dough. Use a knife in mixing. Toss on a well-floured board. Pat and roll out to 1 inch thickness. Cut with biscuit cutter dipped in flour. Place close together on an oiled pan and bake in a hot oven 450° F. 10 to 15 minutes. For emergency biscuit increase milk to 1 cup and drop by spoonfuls on greased tin or in greased muffin pans and bake.
A plain baking-powder biscuit of the type standard in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward. The method is sound; a few of the quantities need reading against the usual proportions of the period.
- ProportionsThe flour quantity has dropped out of the text, as has the fraction before "cup milk." Four teaspoons of baking powder points to 2 cups of flour at the period's usual rate of 2 teaspoons per cup, with 2 tablespoons fat; since the drop version says to increase the milk to a full cup, the rolled version presumably took something under that, around 3/4 cup.
- The fat"Fat" here is unspecified and would most often have meant lard or a vegetable shortening, though butter and drippings were also used. Butter works but brings water and salt with it; reduce the added salt slightly if you use it.
- Oven450F is correct and worth respecting. Biscuits rely on a fast blast of heat to set the crust while the baking powder is still working; a cooler oven gives pale, squat results.
- Thickness and timingRolled a full inch thick, as directed, these need the long end of the range, 15 minutes. Rolled thinner, check at 10.
- Handle it as little as possibleThe instruction to mix with a knife and merely toss and pat is the hinge of the recipe. Kneading develops gluten and turns a tender biscuit tough; work the dough only until it holds together.
- Placed close togetherSetting the rounds so they touch is deliberate. They support one another as they rise and stay soft at the sides; spaced apart, they brown all over and rise less.
- YieldNeither the flour quantity nor the cutter size survives in the text, so the yield can only be guessed at; expect somewhere around a dozen from 2 cups of flour, fewer at the full inch thickness. They are at their best within an hour of baking.
The chemically leavened biscuit is one of the few genuinely American breads, made possible when commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century and freed the household from waiting on yeast or relying on sour milk and saleratus. By the time books like this one were compiled, the formula had settled into a fixed ratio taught in cooking schools and printed on baking powder tins alike: two teaspoons of powder and a spoonful or two of fat to each cup of flour, moistened to a soft dough. The "emergency biscuit" at the end, wetter and dropped rather than rolled, is the same batter loosened so it can be got into the oven in the time it takes to heat one, and it turns up under that name or as "drop biscuit" in dozens of contemporary collections.