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Sour Milk Biscuits
(Kate B. Vaughn) 2 cupfuls flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful baking soda 1 cupful sour milk Sift flour and salt into basin, rub Crisco lightly into them. Stir soda into milk until it effervesces and then add to flour. Turn out on floured baking board, knead lightly until smooth, roll out quarter of an inch thick, cut with biscuit cutter, place on greased tin and bake twelve to fifteen minutes in hot oven.
Sufficient to make twelve biscuits.
A plain soda biscuit from the era when a bowl of milk left on the shelf was an ingredient rather than a loss. The proportions work, but two things in the original need translating: the oven and the milk.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. At that heat twelve to fifteen minutes is right for a quarter-inch biscuit; lower and the soda spends itself before the crumb sets.
- Sour milkThe original means raw milk that has clabbered naturally and turned acidic. Pasteurized milk left out spoils rather than sours, so use cultured buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup.
- The sodaA teaspoon and a half to one cup of milk is generous by current practice; a scant teaspoon per cup of buttermilk is the usual ratio now. Too much leaves a soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste and a yellowish crumb.
- Work quicklyOnce the soda meets the acid the leavening begins immediately and does not wait for you. Mix, knead briefly, cut and get the tray into a preheated oven without pause.
- Crisco then and nowThe Crisco of this book was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; the current product has been reformulated. Modern shortening, or lard, works here: rub it in until the flour looks like coarse meal and stop.
- ThicknessA quarter inch gives a thin, crisp biscuit closer to a scone than to the tall split biscuit most people expect. Roll to half or three-quarters of an inch for a higher rise, and add a minute or two.
- YieldTwelve biscuits, as the recipe states; the cutter size is not given. Press the scraps together gently rather than rerolling hard, or the second batch will be tough.
This recipe comes from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbooks, part of a campaign to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911 as a substitute for both butter and lard. The strategy was to take dishes every cook already knew and simply substitute the new product, and sour milk biscuits were an ideal target. Quick breads leavened with soda and sour milk had been standard American household baking since saleratus became cheap in the mid-nineteenth century, and before refrigeration a household often had milk on the turn to use up. This recipe carries a contributor name, Kate B. Vaughn, a cooking teacher and newspaper food writer of the period, lending domestic authority to what was in substance advertising.