Cotton and Corn is a four-part series built from Louise Glanton’s 1930 Baltimore Sun feature on Alabama menus.
If smothered chicken depended on the yard, beaten biscuits depended on the arm. The older recipe used no leavening at all. A cook folded and pounded the dough with a mallet or the flat of an axe for half an hour or longer, until it blistered and snapped. That labor fell on lower-caste cooks, and the biscuit’s prestige rested on hours someone else spent. Louise Glanton’s version gives the game away. She slips in baking powder and sugar, a hedge for households that could no longer count on a cook’s endless time. By 1930, many lower-caste women had left Southern kitchens for northern cities, Baltimore among them, where Maryland beaten biscuits already claimed their own regional pride. The same dough tied the two places together through the women who moved between them. Alex D. Ketchum’s study of feminist restaurants and cafés shows that every menu price contains a decision about whose labor counts. The beaten biscuit priced that labor at nothing. (Ketchum, Ingredients for Revolution).
Question: Which dishes on your table still depend on time nobody pays for?
[Side Bar]
Louise Glanton’s beaten biscuit keeps the blistered texture of the Upper South classic but adds baking powder and sugar to shorten the work. Compare it with Maryland recipes her Baltimore readers knew, and notice whose arm each version assumes.
Beaten Biscuit Recipe
Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup cold milk
4 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons sugar
Directions
Sift together flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Chop butter into flour. Add milk gradually to flour, mixing into a very stiff dough. Beat until dough is pliable, smooth and blistered. Roll one-fourth inch thick, cut into shape, prick with small fork and bake slowly with a decreasing rather than an increasing heat. In baking, arrange biscuits so they will not touch. Such biscuits should be only slightly browned.