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Twin Biscuits
1 cupful milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together, rub in Crisco with tips of fingers, then add milk. Pat and roll out dough, cut with cutter, brush with melted Crisco, place one on top of another, lay on Criscoed tin and bake in hot oven from ten to twelve minutes.
Sufficient for twelve biscuits.
A plain baking-powder biscuit dough, stacked in pairs so the halves pull apart at the table. The instructions are terse in the way of promotional cookbooks; a few things are worth pinning down.
- Hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. Biscuits want fast heat so the baking powder lifts before the crumb sets; at 350F they spread and dry out over the longer bake.
- Criscoed tinSimply a greased baking sheet. Any shortening, butter or a sheet of parchment does the same job.
- The fat is light by modern standardsTwo tablespoons of shortening to two cups of flour is a lean biscuit; four to six tablespoons gives a more tender result if you want one.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for two cups of flour sits at the lower end of the usual range; some modern recipes use half again as much. Use fresh powder, since anything opened more than a few months goes sluggish.
- Rubbing in with the fingertipsKeep the shortening cold and stop while it is still in pea-sized pieces. Overworking it into the flour is what produces a dense, cakey biscuit.
- Handling the doughAdd the milk all at once and mix only until it holds together. No thickness is given; since the rounds are stacked in pairs, roll them thinner than you would a single biscuit. Press the cutter straight down without twisting.
- The stackingBrush the melted shortening between the two rounds, not on the top surface only. The fat film is what keeps the halves from fusing, so they separate cleanly once baked.
- Yield"Sufficient for twelve biscuits" is ambiguous: it may mean twelve finished twins, needing twenty-four cut rounds, or twelve cut rounds making six twins. Expect fewer if you cut generously.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new material: a shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil rather than from lard or butter. Its recipes are deliberately ordinary, and this is a good example, since a baking-powder biscuit was among the most frequently made things in an American kitchen. The "twin" form, two rounds baked stacked so they split apart, gives a soft, steamy inner face rather than a crust on both sides. Chemically leavened biscuits like these became everyday food only after reliable commercial baking powder spread through the second half of the nineteenth century, which is why a book aimed at the housewife of 1913 could assume the technique needed no explanation.