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Baking Powder Biscuit
One quart of flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a little salt sifted together; add a tablespoonful of butter and sufficient water to make soft dough. Roll out and cut in cakes an inch thick. Bake in a quick oven.
A plain, lean biscuit of the sort made daily for breakfast tables — closer to a soda scone than the rich buttermilk biscuit most cooks now expect. A few of the proportions need reading in period terms.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in this period: a quart is 4 cups, roughly a pound of all-purpose flour. A soft winter wheat flour gives a tenderer result than modern bread flour, though nothing in the recipe indicates which flour was intended.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. Biscuits want the high heat to set the crust while the baking powder is still working; at 375F they spread and dry out. Expect 10-12 minutes.
- The leavening is lightTwo teaspoons of baking powder to four cups of flour is roughly a third to a half of what a modern recipe calls for. The result here was meant to be a firm, close-grained biscuit rather than a tall fluffy one.
- A tablespoonful of butterThis is a very lean dough — modern biscuits typically use a quarter to half a cup of fat to two cups of flour. Rub the butter in until the flour looks sandy; there will not be enough to make visible flakes.
- Water, not milkThe recipe calls for water, which produces a crisper, plainer biscuit. Milk or buttermilk would enrich and brown it, but changes the character of what is written.
- Cut in cakes an inch thickRoll the dough to an inch and cut rounds; the thickness refers to the dough, not to the cutter. Press the cutter straight down without twisting or the edges seal and the biscuits rise crooked.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 biscuits from a two-inch cutter. They are best within an hour of baking — with this little fat they stale quickly.
Chemical leavening changed American bread-making faster than almost any other nineteenth-century kitchen innovation. Before commercial baking powder became widely available in the second half of the 1800s, quick biscuits relied on saleratus or soda paired with an acid such as sour milk, which required judgment to balance and could leave a soapy taste if misjudged. Pre-mixed baking powder removed the guesswork, and by the time this book appeared, "baking powder biscuit" was a fixed household formula, printed in general cookbooks with only small variations in fat and liquid. The extreme leanness here — one tablespoon of butter to a pound of flour — reflects that these were everyday bread, made to be eaten hot with butter at the table rather than to carry richness of their own.