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Sour Milk or Soda Biscuits
2 cups flour teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons fat teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder Follow directions for baking powder biscuits. 2 tablespoons fat 1 cup sugar 1 "egg 1 cup milk cup thick sour cream or sour milk enough to make a soft dough
A short-form entry that assumes the reader already knows the baking powder biscuit method from the preceding page. The essentials are two cups of flour, a little fat, both soda and baking powder, and sour milk or thick sour cream to bind.
- The hinge: soda plus acidThe soda is here to neutralise the acid in the sour milk or cream, and the baking powder supplies the rest of the lift. Mix and get the pans into the oven promptly, since the soda begins reacting the moment the liquid goes in.
- Quantities of soda and saltThe soda and salt are given without their fractions, so the amounts cannot be recovered from the page as printed. Comparable recipes for two cups of flour with sour milk commonly use about half a teaspoon of soda, with salt anywhere from half to a full teaspoon.
- Sour milk todayPeriod sour milk was raw milk naturally clabbered. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than souring cleanly. Use cultured buttermilk, or thin plain yogurt to pouring consistency; "thick sour cream" means full-fat cultured sour cream.
- FatTwo teaspoons of fat for two cups of flour is very lean by modern biscuit standards, which usually run to three or four tablespoons of butter, lard or shortening. Whatever fat you use should be cold and cut in until the pieces are pea-sized.
- OvenThe page specifies no oven at all, deferring to the baking powder biscuit directions on the preceding page. Modern practice for biscuits of this type is a hot oven, in the range of 425-475F, for roughly 10 to 12 minutes until the tops are well browned; a slack oven tends to dry them before they rise.
- "Soft dough"The dough should be wet enough to be slightly sticky and barely hold a shape. Knead only a few strokes, pat to about three-quarters of an inch, and cut straight down without twisting the cutter.
- YieldTwo cups of flour gives roughly a dozen two-inch biscuits. They are at their best within the hour and stale quickly.
Soda biscuits belong to the era when every household had milk that soured on its own and no one intended to waste it. Saleratus and sour milk were in general use by the 1840s, and commercial baking powders arrived from the late 1850s and 1860s; before then, soda worked against an acid already in the kitchen: sour milk, clabber, buttermilk from the churn, or molasses. This entry sits at the transition, using both leaveners at once, which is why it can be written as a two-line variation on the baking powder biscuit rather than a recipe in its own right. Books issued by insurance companies and utilities in the early twentieth century, of which this is one, favoured exactly this compressed style, assuming a cook who needed a reminder rather than a lesson.