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Drop Biscuits
1¾ cups bread flour Cornstarch 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons Mazola 1 cup milk 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Sift together the dry ingredients, stir in the Mazola and milk. Drop the mixture by small tablespoonfuls two inches apart on an oiled biscuit pan and bake in a quick oven, 375 to 400 degrees F. about twenty minutes.
A brand-promotion recipe from a corn products company, which explains the ingredient list: every branded item in it is corn. The wording runs the ingredients together, so read them carefully before you start.
- Decoding the ingredient listThe line reads as one block but is four separate items: 1¾ cups bread flour, ¼ cup cornstarch, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt. Argo and Kingsford's are both cornstarch brands, and the ¼ cup at the end belongs to that word.
- MazolaA refined corn oil, sold from the 1910s onward and still available. Any neutral vegetable oil works in the same quantity.
- Liquid fat, not cut inThis is the hinge. There is no butter or lard to rub into the flour, so the biscuits get their lift from baking powder alone and their tenderness from the cornstarch, which dilutes the gluten. Stir only until the dough comes together — an oil dough toughens quickly with overmixing and will not recover.
- Bread flour plus cornstarchCutting a strong flour with cornstarch approximates a softer flour, though how widespread that practice was in period kitchens is not something this page establishes. Modern all-purpose flour is closer to the target already, but keep the cornstarch: it is doing real work on the crumb.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to under two cups of flour is high by current standards; powders of the period were generally weaker than modern ones. Modern double-acting powder at this rate can leave a soapy or metallic aftertaste; three teaspoons is ample.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives its own numbers, 375–400°F, which is a fair reading of a "quick oven." Twenty minutes at 400°F will overshoot for tablespoon-sized drops; start checking at twelve, and pull them when the tops are set and lightly coloured.
- The pan"Oiled biscuit pan" means a flat baking sheet, lightly oiled. Parchment does the job with less browning on the base.
- YieldDepending on how large the spoonfuls are, small tablespoonfuls of this dough could give anywhere from twelve to two dozen biscuits.
Books of this kind were published by refiners and millers to demonstrate their own products, and the fingerprints are all over the page: Mazola corn oil, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, all trade names of the Corn Products Refining Company, which consolidated much of the American corn-milling industry in the early twentieth century. The domestic argument being made here is that a bottled vegetable oil could replace the butter or lard a cook would ordinarily cut into biscuit dough — a claim that needed demonstrating, since rubbing solid fat into flour was the whole received technique of biscuit-making. Dropping the dough rather than rolling and cutting it sidesteps the problem neatly, since a wetter, oil-slack dough will not roll well anyway. The cornstarch serves double duty: it softens the crumb and it sells another product in the same catalogue.