Beaten Biscuit
White or brown flour, but be sure it is sweet and unadulterated; to each quart of flour use one teacupful of sweet cream, and one teaspoonful of table salt. When well mixed, beat on good slab (marble preferred), until the dough "blisters" all over. It is important to rub the dough thoroughly with dry flour each time that you fold it over for a fresh bout of beating. When you do not have cream use sweet milk and you then add a teaspoonful of butter to each quart of flour. It will be observed that the chief element is the beating, and there is an art in administering this properly. Some cooks have a deftness and skill that enables them quickly to produce the blistery appearance of the dough, which indicates that lightness has been attained, and to such the task is very easy; while others hang over it much longer. But don't let them give it up until the proper condition is reached. When she has blistered the dough roll it out until it is about a quarter of an inch in thickness. Cut it with a cutter a trifle larger than a silver dollar. When cut, the biscuit are carefully pricked with a fork and baked in a moderate oven until a golden brown. They are nice hot for breakfast and cold for luncheon.
A beaten biscuit is a stiff, unleavened cracker-biscuit raised only by the air and gluten structure driven into it by physical pounding. Everything here depends on the beating.
- The beating is the leaveningThere is no soda, no baking powder and no yeast. Folding and striking the dough develops gluten and traps air in fine layers; when the blistered surface appears, the dough has taken up as much air as it will hold. Expect 20 to 30 minutes of steady work with a mallet, the flat of a heavy rolling pin or the side of an axe handle, folding after every dozen strokes. A food processor with the metal blade, run 2 to 3 minutes until the dough is smooth and satiny, does the same job.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of flour is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb. A teacupful in books of this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so roughly 4 cups flour to 1/2-3/4 cup cream plus 1 tsp salt. That is a very dry dough by modern bread standards — correct for this style, but add cold water a tablespoon at a time if it will not come together at all.
- Sweet cream, sweet milk"Sweet" here means fresh rather than soured or cultured, not sugared. Use heavy cream, or whole milk with 1 tsp butter worked in as the recipe directs. The fat keeps the finished biscuit short rather than tough.
- Flour choiceSouthern beaten biscuit were generally made with soft Southern winter wheat flour. All-purpose works; bread flour makes them harder than intended. "Brown flour" here most likely means whole wheat, which will give a coarser, less blistery dough.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. Bake 20 to 30 minutes, until pale golden and dry through — these are meant to be crisp and dense, not soft, so the interior should not stay doughy.
- Size and dockingA silver dollar is about 1 1/2 inches across, so cut a trifle larger than that. Pricking with a fork is not decorative: it lets steam escape so the biscuit stays flat and even instead of puffing into a hollow shell.
- YieldSeveral dozen small biscuit from a quart of flour, depending on the cutter. They keep for several days in a tin, and the recipe itself offers them hot for breakfast and cold for luncheon.
Beaten biscuit belong to the Upper South — Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee — and predate reliable chemical leaveners, which is why the recipe leans entirely on mechanical work. In wealthier households the pounding was done on a marble slab or, from the later nineteenth century, in a hand-cranked "biscuit brake," a pair of geared rollers bolted to a bench. The offhand shift to "when she has blistered the dough" in this text may be telling: cookbooks of this period are often said to have been written for a mistress directing kitchen labor she did not perform herself, and it is reasonable to infer, though the text names no one, that the half-hour of hammering was someone else's arm. As baking powder became cheap and universal, the beaten biscuit receded to a holiday and country-ham accompaniment, which is roughly where it survives today.