Emergency Biscuits

[rushthatspeaks]

As one does, I occasionally read old cookbooks with horrifically sexist yet somehow entertainingly bland vignettes of early twentieth-century life in them. My favorite of these is called A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband With Bettina's Best Recipes, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles Le Cron (1917). Bettina is a Home Economics Mary Sue, or possibly Mary Poppins without the sarcasm, Practically Perfect In Every Way. She is forever explaining things to her friends in a sweetly condescending fashion, has never burned toast in her life, and will only let her husband mix the salad dressing if she first provides him with a multi-step instruction manual-- after which she tells him how proud she is of him for making dinner. And yet she's a progressive, in her way; one of the chapters is about her providing a several-course luncheon for prominent suffragettes from out of town. It's an interesting mixture of unintentionally hilarious, dull, and historically revelatory.

Most of the food would not work for a modern palate. Bettina puts pimento in everything, makes white sauce as a default to go over all foods, and considers something 'deviled' if it has a quarter-teaspoon of paprika and 'curried' if it has a quarter-teaspoon of curry powder (I mean a quarter-teaspoon for, say, an entire leg of lamb). The only herb she has heard of is mint, which she incessantly soaks in vinegar before using it, for reasons unknown to me. She uses one square of baking chocolate per chocolate cake, and makes peanut butter sandwiches by mixing the peanut butter with mayonnaise.

But I decided I would pay more attention to the recipes after I noticed during a recent reread that the chocolate meringue pie I have been making for the last several Thanksgivings, which I got from another source and which has been greatly acclaimed, which is that magical combination of easy and delicious that means you can toss it off while also worrying about the turkey-- is Bettina's. Huh. Not what I expected.

Further poking around came up with a few things that looked usable, and tonight for dinner I wanted a starch, and I didn't want bagels because we use them for lunch sandwiches, and the oatmeal bread Ruth likes wouldn't have gone with the asparagus, and I haven't made any bread lately and we haven't any rice or potatoes and I didn't want to go out to buy anything and we had a limited amount of time before Sassafrass rehearsal--

Bettina's Emergency Biscuit

(as it appears in the book; this recipe is meant for the days you've had to go out and do something that prevents you from making bread, biscuits that need to rise, or cake, or in other words for modernity)

2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons fat (butter, lard, drippings, whatever you have)
7/8 cup milk

Mix the dry ingredients and cut in the fat. Add the milk, mixing with a knife. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan, placing one inch apart. Bake twelve minutes in a hot oven.

I halved it, because there are two of us, and that made exactly the right amount. I used butter, all-purpose flour, and whole milk, and preheated the oven to 350 F. Threw the dry ingredients into a bowl, didn't even really bother mixing them, softened the butter a very little bit in the microwave (I keep my butter in the fridge so you might not need to do this), smashed it into the dry ingredients with a butter knife and cut the knife through the mixture a few times until I felt like I couldn't see any huge chunks of butter. I didn't bother measuring the milk-- just poured it in a little at a time, kept stirring with the butter knife thoroughly between trickles, and stopped when the mixture came together in a ball with no flour left at the bowl bottom. Dropped rounds of it onto a greased cookie sheet without really shaping them and put them in the oven. After six minutes I took them out, rotated them 180 degrees, and turned the oven up to 400 F; they were done at twelve minutes on the dot.

Total expenditure of my time: three minutes of mixing, a little futzing with the oven.

Total expenditure of my brain: zero thought required except when halving measurements.

Results: in contention for the best biscuits I've had, certainly better than any I've bought from a store and right up there among the ones from restaurants. They're crusty on the outside, but not hard to bite through, and inside they're ridiculously fluffy, flavorful, and savory. Make sure the balls of dough are at least the size of golf balls, as the one biscuit I made smaller than that was a little dry; also I could tell from the flavor and texture that they would go tough in the refrigerator and dry out on the counter, so only make as much as you need. Would go beautifully with butter and jam, especially when hot, but would also dip well into gravies or sauces, and I was perfectly content to eat them with nothing at all.

It's nice to remember that baking does not have to be Hard Work.

... and okay, props to Bettina. I must try her actual baking-powder biscuits that she considers correct for the days when one has time, as I will be very impressed if they are better.

Comments

[zeborah]

This is the second time today I've seen a recipe for scones describing "drop by spoonfuls" - my mother's recipe makes for a dough that you practically roll out and then cut, so I'll have to try this variation.

My favourite scone accompaniment is jam and whipped cream. I don't get to have it very often (I live by myself, so I'd either be wasting or eating way too much cream) but when I do (eg at a church spread or other occasion) I go nomnomnom.

[hunningham]

Old cookbooks are fun. I've got an old wartime cookery book somewhere which has ingredients such one-quarter of a dried egg, and recipes for things like parsnip pudding.

[starlady]

I'm still trying to imagine what actual flavor that "chocolate cake" had. More like chocolate-colored cake, at that ratio!

[shippen_stand]

I made these last night. Thanks for sharing.

I have an Amy Vanderbilt cookbook that is awesome, and funny for things like 'this recipe is good for cook's day off'.

[msilverstar]

I'm going to try those biscuits, thanks! I am now curious about the pie, do you have a recipe posted for that?

[selidor]

It says something about my headspace at the moment that I got to your results section before realising these were kin-to-scones biscuits. Texture-wise, they sound like excellent scones. Will try.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

This is interesting to me, as my first associations with the word scone have a much heavier texture, and also contain eggs. These resemble the biscuits I used to get in biscuits-n'-gravy, what I've heard called baking-powder biscuits, except that the true baking-powder biscuit has a required rise time and is much harder to get right because its failure mode involves collapsing into something that could stop a bullet. I think the failure mode of these would be cardboard, and the failure mode of the scones I've had has been sand, which is a little different.

These are awesome, whatever they are, and I hope you like them.

[selidor]

Yes, this is why I use 'kin-to-' as the overloading on 'scone' varies between cultures. Scones are definitely egg-free: eg. Edmonds. I agree the failure mode is cardboard. I highly recommend dried dates for the sweet version.

I shall be cooking this weekend!

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

Those are scones! One has them for tea, usually eaten with cream and jam. You can add cheese, herbs, black pepper and/or paprika, for savoury ones, and dried or candied fruit and a bit of sugar for the sweet ones. Once baked, they freeze well. For extra-light scones, you can substitute sour milk, buttermilk or plain yoghurt diluted to the thickness of whole milk for the milk. To get them a consistent size you can just pat the dough out to your preferred thickness and use a cookie cutter. They are indeed incredibly easy to make.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. What I know as scones have a much higher fat-to-flour ratio, contain eggs, and are baked in a large flat round from which one cuts pie-wedge shapes. They're heavier than these, although if made well still fluffy, and are difficult enough that they're a special-occasion thing. Coffeeshops sell terrible ones, bakeries sell mediocre ones, and occasionally at somebody's house you get a brilliant one.

Whereas these, my first impulse was '... maybe I should make cream gravy', as they would so obviously make ridiculous biscuits-n'-gravy.

Good to hear they freeze well, and that they take additions nicely too. Thanks!

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

You can also substitute oats (I use Quaker Oats) for half of the flour, and get high-fibre scones. There is no end to the variation possible.

[sovay]

Results: in contention for the best biscuits I've had, certainly better than any I've bought from a store and right up there among the ones from restaurants.

Fantastic. The biscuits I know how to make off the top of my head are for strawberry shortcake and therefore sweet. I'll give these a try.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

These sound like scones to me. Mmmm.

Eggs?

Nine

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, eggs and sugar-- this (http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/flaky-currant-scones) is the sort of thing I think of as a scone recipe.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

madamebuttery (of blessed memory) made legendary scones. No eggs. Just flour, butter, salt, sugar, milk, and currants.

Nine

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

makes peanut butter sandwiches by mixing the peanut butter with mayonnaise.

*horror*

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

That is a BRILLIANT use of that Agatha icon.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It is heartfelt and sincere!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I agree ENTIRELY.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

MInt with vinegar- that sounds like it might be one of those "if you don't have canned peaches, you can substitute fresh" things to me- mint sauce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_sauce) is basically mint and vinegar.

[chomiji]

Hmmm, I wonder if dropping little spoonfuls of that dough across the top of a hot pot of stew and returning it to the oven would make a good potpie/dumplings sort of thing.

Even regular rolled-and-cut hot biscuits are fairly quick, but yeah, if I'm feeling tired at the end of the day, my brain doesn't want to go there.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I would like to report that,routinely making both, Joy of Cooking has recipes for drop-dumplings atop stew and quick baking powder biscuits which are almost identical to both each other and the Bettina recipe. Both have the same ingredient list (a little more butter, a little less milk), and if you are really lazy like me, you didn't roll out the biscuits to begin with: you grabbed a handful of dough, rolled it between your floured hands, and plopped it onto the baking sheet as-is. Or ontop the bubbling chicken-and-barley, as the case may be.

(I put the lid on stove-top stews, so that the dumplings remain soft and spongy on top, but if I wanted a biscuity texture on top, I could easily finish the stew in the oven without a lid and get that result.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The Joy of Cooking ones have quite a bit more butter -- IIRC I use three cups of flour and eight tablespoons of butter, which IIRCagain is 1.5 times the recipe. Also a much hotter oven. I've never thought of baking-powder biscuits as at all tricky.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Bettina's dumpling recipe is actually literally 'do Emergency Biscuit batter and poach it in stew or gravy', so I bet this makes great dumplings.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

The biscuit recipe I've adapted from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook is basically this recipe, and I do exactly the same thing to make dumplings. It is great. A glass-lidded soup pot is handy here, so you can let the dumplings steam nicely while you keep an eye on their puffiness.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

Biscuits ftw! I shall have to try that recipe some time.

For the rest of it [the lamb 'curry'? herbs?] ...I am goggling.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this - it looks similar to a recipe I used to have and lost. That one came from Martha Stewart iirc - perhaps another case of Bettina's recipes filtering through modern magazines?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't surprise me at all. These things do travel.

[enleve.livejournal.com]

When I made things from old recipes with my grandmother, we always increased the amount of spices, usually by adding about 3 times as much as was called for in the recipe. She explained that spices used to have a stronger taste. It wasn't a case of her own sense of taste fading. She was able to taste subtleties that I missed, and I have a very sensitive sense of smell and taste.

So yes, our culture has gotten more used to eating spicy food, but also the spices themselves have changed over time. Something to keep in mind when looking at old recipes.

[rosefox]

Make sure the balls of dough are at least the size of golf balls

Oops, mine are twice that size (what I think of as biscuit size--big enough to make strawberry shortcake with--so four biscuits from a half-recipe). No wonder they took about twice as long to bake!

I used GF flour + 3/4 tsp xanthan gum per cup of flour, and vegan faux-butter. Baked at 350F for 20 minutes, until they just started to brown, and they came out pretty well.

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

Here via link from your recent post about Bettina's pie. Mayonnaise with peanut butter? Did people seriously eat this or were the mesdames Weaver and Le Cron trolling their contemporaries?

Those biscuits sound very scone like to me, if they had sugar and some kind of fruit added. Also, for reference, there are a zillion scone recipes of varying fussiness, egginess, and density, linked from this page (http://web.mit.edu/rjbarbal/Tea/) (ctrl-F for "scone"). I went through a phase in Japan where I worked my way through Richard's entire catalog of scone recipes. I can't now remember which ones turned out like hockey pucks, and which ones turned into sand, and which ones actually worked. I wish I'd kept notes.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow, you've also read Bettina! Fantastic!

It really is entry to Another World.

Have you ever felt moved to decorate the table for Washington's birthday, with a little construction-paper axe? And I always marveled that Thrifty Bettina looked for-- and found!-- fresh cherries at that time of year.