Buttermilk
Sift flour with soda and salt, then rub in Crisco thoroughly with finger tips, and mix to stiff dough with buttermilk. Beat with rolling-pin or hammer until dough blisters. Roll out one-third inch in thickness, cut with round cutter, and lay on Criscoed tins. Bake in moderate oven from thirty to forty minutes.
Sufficient for forty biscuits.
This is a beaten biscuit — a hard, cracker-like Southern biscuit leavened by air pounded into the dough rather than by much soda. The page as printed gives the method but no quantities, so treat it as a technique note attached to a standard formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text lists no amounts for flour, soda, salt, Crisco or buttermilk. A conventional beaten-biscuit proportion for forty small biscuits is roughly 4 cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt, a scant 1/2 teaspoon soda, 1/2 cup fat and about 1 cup buttermilk, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- The hinge: beat it long enoughThe blistering is the whole point. Fold the dough over on itself and strike it with a rolling pin or the flat of a mallet for 20 to 30 minutes, until the surface shows small blisters and the cut edge looks satiny. Under-beaten dough bakes into a dense, chalky puck rather than a flaky, layered cracker.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. At that sort of heat the long thirty to forty minutes suits this style — the biscuits are meant to dry through and crisp, not to rise and brown quickly like a baking-powder biscuit.
- Crisco and "Criscoed tins"Crisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Modern all-vegetable shortening works directly; lard or butter would have been the usual fat in earlier versions of this biscuit. "Criscoed tins" simply means tins greased with Crisco.
- Soda with buttermilkThe soda is there mainly to neutralize the acid in the buttermilk rather than to inflate the dough, though the reaction does give off some gas. Keep it scant — excess soda leaves a soapy taste and a yellow crumb.
- Rolling and dockingOne-third inch is thicker than it sounds for this dough; the biscuits barely expand. Prick each round twice with a fork before baking so it stays flat instead of puffing into a hollow shell.
- Yield and servingThe recipe says forty biscuits, which implies small rounds, but with no quantities printed the size cannot be worked out from the text. Beaten biscuits keep well in a tin and are traditionally eaten with country ham or butter.
Beaten biscuits belong to the Chesapeake and the upper South, where cooks worked hard wheat dough by hand — on a stump, a marble slab, or later a hand-cranked "biscuit brake" — to force air into a dough carrying almost no chemical leavening. They are usually traced to households that had labor to spare, and their decline followed the spread of reliable baking powder, which made a tender biscuit in ten minutes rather than an hour. Their appearance in The Story of Crisco (published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce hydrogenated shortening to American cooks) is characteristic of that book's strategy: take a dish every reader already knew, restate it with Crisco in place of lard or butter, and let familiarity do the selling. The instruction to grease the tins with the product as well as to shorten the dough with it is part of the same pitch.