Old-Style Southern Beaten Biscuit (1913)

From Dishes & Beverages of the Old South, 1913

The Story Behind This Recipe

A cook who explains herself

Most old recipes give orders. Martha McCulloch-Williams stops to tell you why. Partway through her beaten biscuit instructions, she explains that all that pounding exists to spread air through the dough. In the oven’s heat that air swells and lifts the biscuit. It is the kind of aside you would get from a seasoned cook standing at your elbow, and it turns a chore into something closer to a lesson.

The recipe comes from her book Dishes & Beverages of the Old South, published in New York in 1913 by McBride, Nast & Company. She headed it ‘Beaten Biscuit: (Old Style.)’, and that small parenthesis says a lot. By 1913 there was a newer way to make biscuits, and she wanted the older one on record. She knows exactly how the dough should feel when it is ready: firm, smooth and very elastic. She is frank about the oven, too. Too hot, and the biscuits scorch and blister. Too cool, and they come out hard and clammy. Her advice is to aim for what she calls the Irishman’s ‘middle exthrame.’

Cousin to hardtack

Forget the tall, fluffy biscuit on a modern breakfast plate. The beaten biscuit belongs to another branch of the family, one closer to hardtack. In New England a similar bread went by ‘sea biscuit,’ a staple aboard whaling ships, and Maryland is known for beaten biscuits too. The dish is most closely tied to the American South, where it goes back to the 19th century.

The classic dough was a short list: flour, salt, sugar, lard and cold water. McCulloch-Williams trims it further by leaving out the sugar. There is no baking powder either, though some modern cooks add it. Otherwise she follows the standard routine for the dish. The dough takes a hard beating, the rounds are cut smaller than an everyday biscuit, and each one is pricked before it goes into the oven.

A hundred strokes, and whose arms

Nobody agreed on how long the beating should last. Recipes called for anything from at least 15 minutes to 30 or even 45, and the tools ranged from a rolling pin to a hammer to the side of an axe. One cookbook demanded at least 200 blows and suggested putting boys to work on it. Next to that, McCulloch-Williams’s hundred strokes, with the dough folded over whenever it spreads thin, sound almost modest. The work also had a darker history. As Smithsonian Magazine has noted, this ‘prolonged and violent’ labor often fell to enslaved cooks. The sheer effort is a big reason the biscuit slowly fell out of favor, and it only became practical again once food processors arrived.

Inventors looked for a way to save the labor. On December 7, 1880, James Ignatius Lednum of Denton, Maryland, patented a ‘Kneading Machine,’ which the Denton Journal advertised as a faster way to make biscuits. It was a roller mounted on a hardwood or marble slab, and the cook fed the dough through as the roller turned. Machines like it came to be called biscuit brakes. Thirty-odd years later, McCulloch-Williams still assumes a cook with a floured block or marble slab and a strong arm. The payoff was a sturdy little biscuit that could keep for months in an airtight container. Split, buttered and filled with country ham, it became the ham biscuit, a traditional Southern party bite. It was sometimes known by a gentler name: Sunday biscuits.