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Soda Beaten Biscuit
1 quart flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco ⅕ teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful baking soda
This is an ingredient list rather than a full method, and it is missing the one thing beaten biscuits cannot be made without: the liquid. Read it as a proportion table for a cook who already knew the technique.
- The missing liquidBeaten biscuit dough is bound with a small quantity of cold milk or water, quite enough to make a soft dough. Contemporary beaten-biscuit recipes of this proportion use roughly two-thirds to one cup of liquid per quart of flour. The original gives no figure, so treat any number as a reconstruction rather than the book's instruction.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in 1913. A quart of sifted soft wheat flour weighs about 16 oz, so figure four cups, or a little more if you scoop rather than spoon.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and more waxy than the current reformulated product; any solid vegetable shortening or lard behaves the same way here. Three tablespoons to a quart of flour is a very lean dough by biscuit standards, which is the point.
- The soda without acidHalf a teaspoon of baking soda with no buttermilk, cream of tartar or sour milk in the list has almost nothing to react with. In beaten biscuits soda is there mainly to tenderize; leavening comes from steam and from air worked into the dough, not from chemistry.
- The beating is the recipeThe dough is turned out and struck with a rolling pin, mallet or the flat of an axe for 20 to 30 minutes, folding it over on itself repeatedly, until it blisters and snaps back. Home cooks now run it through a stand mixer with a dough hook or fold and roll it in a pasta machine for 10 to 15 minutes to the same effect. Underworked dough gives a hard, dead biscuit rather than a flaky one.
- Shaping and dockingRoll to about a third of an inch, cut small rounds, and prick each one through twice with a fork. The docking is not decorative — it keeps the biscuit from puffing into a hollow shell.
- OvenThe original gives no oven instruction at all. Bake until firm and barely coloured, 20 to 30 minutes; they should stay pale, not brown like a soda biscuit.
- YieldPerhaps three dozen small biscuits from a quart of flour, depending on the size of the cutter. They are meant to be split and eaten with country ham, and they keep for days in a tin.
Beaten biscuits belong to the American upper South -- Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee -- where soft winter wheat and a supply of household labour made a bread possible that depends entirely on physical work. With no yeast and very little chemical rise, the dough is developed by prolonged pounding, which builds gluten and traps the air that makes the biscuit flaky and crisp rather than fluffy. Purpose-built beaten biscuit brakes -- a hinged roller on a stand -- were sold through the late nineteenth century, an admission of how long the beating took. Their appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) is characteristic of the book, which was published by Procter & Gamble to demonstrate that its new hydrogenated shortening could stand in for lard in every regional dish an American cook might already know. Including a Southern hot bread, with Crisco substituted for the lard the recipe would have called for a generation earlier, was the whole argument in miniature.