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Dessert

Beaten Biscuit

A simple biscuit made with flour, cold lard, salt, and water, kneaded until blistered and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Beaten Biscuit

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, cold lard, and salt.

  2. Add cold water gradually to form a stiff dough.

  3. Knead the dough well and beat it until it blisters.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut the dough into round biscuits.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the biscuits together.
Cold lard
Adds fat that keeps the biscuits tender and flaky rather than tough.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour so the dough can be kneaded into a stiff, workable mass.

The step that matters

Knead and beat the dough until it blisters. Repeated kneading and beating develops gluten in the stiff dough, giving the biscuits their characteristic dense, blistered texture. Too little working leaves the crumb weak and the surface smooth.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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