Did Someone Say Biscuits? ~ D.K. Deters

When I wrote The Texan’s Favor, one of the main characters, Kat, a farm girl with plenty of cooking experience, relied heavily on tried and true classic recipes.

Have you ever wondered what some of those old-time recipes taste like? Well, I decided to try one out. Full disclosure: I’m not a cook. I also used a conventional oven.

Recipe for baking biscuits (from the Tallahassee Museum, Tallahassee, Florida):

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup shortening (Shortening could be substituted with butter, lard, bacon grease, or chicken grease. The latter two will give the biscuits a different flavor.)

¾ cup milk

Preheat oven to 450F degrees.

Sift the flour in a medium bowl. Add sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut in shortening using a pastry blender (or pulling 2 table knives through the ingredients) until it looks like fine crumbs. Stir in milk until dough leaves the side of the bowl. Place on a floured surface. Knead 10 times. Roll or pat ¾ inch thick. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

In the 1800s, pioneers typically used a wood-burning stove on the farm and a small Dutch oven (a cast iron pot with a lid) on the trail.

Some cooks would gauge the stove’s temperature by placing a water kettle on the front burner. When the water boils, the stove is around 450F degrees.

Interestingly enough, the idiom “on the back burner” stems from placing a pan on the back burner of a stove where it’s not as hot.

       

LOL, as you can see, I used the pat method rather than a roller. These aren’t too pretty, but they were flaky, and the consistency was what I expected. 😊 My husband used them for sliders and thought they were good. So, there you have it.

On the trail, Kat would often make Soda Biscuits. I think of these as a no-frills biscuit. She’d cook the biscuits in a Dutch oven surrounded by hot coals.

Another method, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with, is to wrap a biscuit around a large stick and hold it over the campfire.

Have you ever tried an old-time recipe? How did it turn out?