rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2012-03-28 10:36 pm
rushthatspeaks) wrote2012-03-28 10:36 pm
Entry tags:
Emergency Biscuits
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--
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.
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.
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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.
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I have an Amy Vanderbilt cookbook that is awesome, and funny for things like 'this recipe is good for cook's day off'.
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These are awesome, whatever they are, and I hope you like them.
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I shall be cooking this weekend!
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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!
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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.
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Eggs?
Nine
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Nine
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*horror*
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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.
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(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.)
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For the rest of it [the lamb 'curry'? herbs?] ...I am goggling.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.