Kitchen Histories: Biscuits You Can Beat With a Stick

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biscuits3Beaten Biscuits

Over on Etsy, I’ve got an article up about Beaten Biscuits, an old Southern recipe where you smack the heck out of biscuits dough with  a rolling pin.  It’s from one of America’s oldest cookbooks, The Virginia House Wife–read the Etsy article here.

The Virginia House Wife also contains the oldest known written recipe for gazpacho; I’ve made it, and you can read about it here.

The Virginia House Wife can be found on Google books here, or a hard copy can be purchased here.

5 thoughts on “Kitchen Histories: Biscuits You Can Beat With a Stick”

  1. You really do lack all common sense. A wire cooling rack just mm from a super hot blue gas flame is NOTHING like the mild heat you would get from a grid iron over glowing coals. Your biscuits were burned black and if you were Mrs. Randolph’s cook she would have had you beaten with your own pestle.

    Also Mrs. Randolph would have had access to much whiter flour than the whole wheat that you seem to have used. While maybe not as white as modern flours, the colonials made efforts to sift out bran and germ as best they could.

  3. Hi Jack! I’m experimenting and learning, while being honest about my methods–and my mistakes. Are you being playful or does my blog make you as mad as you seem?

    I sincerely appreciate your comments, corrections and input. I think it’s valuable for all my readers. But please don’t waste your time insulting me.

  4. Ok, thank you very much for this article. I recently purchase Ellen Emlen’s cookbook (published by the Historical Society of PA) and was puzzling over a recipe for these. I was imagining beating them with, like, a whisk all while thinking, “That really doesn’t make sense…” LOL. Thanks so much for this, it was super helpful.

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