How Southern Biscuits Went From Beaten to Baking Powder

Southern biscuits took their soft, tall shape in the 19th century, when chemical leaveners replaced muscle. Before pearlash, soda and baking powder, the Southern biscuit was a hard, small, pale thing made by beating dough for the better part of an hour, and that work often fell to enslaved cooks. The fluffy biscuit most people mean now is a product of chemistry and of low-protein Southern flour.

The beaten biscuit and the work behind it

Flour, salt, lard and cold water went into the dough, with sugar in some recipes. Then came the beating. The dough was struck with a mallet, an axe or a rolling pin, or slapped against a hard surface, folded and struck again until it blistered and went silky. The air trapped that way did the job that yeast and baking powder do now.

Accounts disagree on how long it took. Aimee Levitt, writing in The Takeout, gives "anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes" and spent about an hour on her own, with a rolling pin. The cookbook author Bill Neal suggested "300 strokes, 500 for company." The result was a small, dense biscuit, a classic with Kentucky or Virginia ham.

Levitt states that before the Civil War beaten biscuits were common "because there were enslaved people to do the beating." King Arthur Baking's history of American biscuits says that in the Southern colonies the task "typically fell to enslaved women." Neal called the biscuits "symbols of the Old South," when "time and labor weren't luxuries, but a way of life." The biscuit on a planter's table was, in practice, labor taken from someone else.

Beaten biscuits are tied to Kentucky and Virginia cooking. John Egerton wrote that biscuit brakes could still be found in antique stores "in the stretch between Kentucky and northern Alabama," as Levitt quotes him.

A machine, and a businesswoman

By the later 19th century some households owned a biscuit brake, a hand-cranked roller that The Takeout says Evelyn L. Edwards invented in 1877. Pass the dough through, fold it, pass it through again. It replaced the arm of the cook with a handle, though not the cook.

The beaten biscuit also became a living for Black women who sold it. The Southern Foodways Alliance tells the story of Annie Fisher of Columbia, Missouri, who ran a mail-order business shipping beaten biscuits to both coasts during the Jim Crow years. A prominent surgeon called her the most efficient cateress in town, newspapers ran headlines about a "road to fortune paved with beaten biscuits," and she rented more than a dozen houses at a time. She appears as well in Clement Richardson's National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race.

Pearlash: the first shortcut

Pearlash, a refined potash whose active ingredient is potassium carbonate, reacts with an acid such as sour milk to give off carbon dioxide. Professional European bakers were using it by the mid-1600s.

Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, printed in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796, is the first known cookbook written by an American, and it was the first American cookbook to call for pearlash. Simmons signed herself only "An American Orphan." Her book contains no biscuit recipe, which is worth saying plainly, since the pearlash story is often told as if it did. The book's importance is that it introduced pearlash as a chemical leavener to American kitchens, and it has been credited with a revolution in cake making.

Pearlash had a drawback. It tasted bitter and soapy if the cook got the amounts wrong, and it was hard to buy, store and measure the same way twice. Cooks spent decades fiddling with soda, cream of tartar and other acids before anything dependable reached the shelf.

Baking powder reaches the pantry

An English grocer, George Borwick, began selling baking powder in 1842, and a chemist, Alfred Bird, made a yeast-free version in 1843 for his wife, who could not eat yeast or eggs. Both were single-acting powders that fizzed the moment they got wet.

In the United States the key figure was Eben Norton Horsford, a Harvard professor. He took out a patent in 1856 on a phosphate-based acid, co-founded the Rumford Chemical Works in 1859, and in the 1860s developed the first double-acting powder, which releases some gas when mixed and more in the oven. In 1866 Joseph and Cornelius Hoagland came up with a cream of tartar powder, and in 1868 they incorporated as the Royal Baking Powder Company.

A cook could now mix flour, fat and buttermilk in a minute, with no beating. In 1875 Alexander P. Ashbourne patented a biscuit cutter with a hinged board, a sign that biscuit making had become ordinary kitchen business.

Why Southern biscuits are so soft

Flour matters as much as leavening. King Arthur Baking's history says Northern flour came from hard winter wheat, with more protein, which tends to make biscuits tough, while Southern flour came from "low-protein soft wheat," poor for bread and ideal for biscuits. That difference helped make biscuits the Southern bread and loaf bread the Northern one.

Put soft flour and a chemical leavener together and you get the tall, soft biscuit now baked in Southern kitchens, a different thing from the beaten biscuit that came before it.

The cathead and the other biscuit

A cathead biscuit is named for its size, about that of a cat's head. King Arthur Baking says such biscuits are named for their size, "as big as a cat's head."

For where the biscuit goes next, see the story of biscuits and gravy, the history of grits and the history of Southern fried chicken. The wider theme sits under Origin Stories and Cultural Identity.

The word itself causes confusion across the Atlantic. In Britain a biscuit is a crisp baked cookie or cracker. King Arthur Baking traces the word to the Latin "biscotus," twice-baked, and says hardtack, made of flour, water and salt, reached the Royal Navy in 1588. The beaten biscuit and the soft biscuit are different breads that share the name.

Questions people ask

Why are Southern biscuits so soft?

Southern biscuits are soft because they are made with low-protein soft wheat flour and raised with chemical leaveners such as baking powder or soda. King Arthur Baking's history calls Southern flour "low-protein soft wheat," ideal for biscuits, where Northern hard winter wheat tends to make them tough.

What are beaten biscuits?

Beaten biscuits are a Southern bread associated with Kentucky and Virginia. Cooks beat a stiff dough with a rolling pin, mallet or ax handle for 30 to 90 minutes, according to Aimee Levitt in The Takeout, which got the biscuit to rise before baking powder and soda became standard. The result was small and dense.

Did enslaved cooks make beaten biscuits?

Yes. King Arthur Baking says the beating "typically fell to enslaved women" in the Southern colonies, and Aimee Levitt writes that beaten biscuits were common before the Civil War because enslaved people did the beating. After emancipation, Black cooks such as Annie Fisher of Columbia, Missouri, built businesses selling them.

When was baking powder invented?

Commercial baking powder dates to the 1840s in England, when George Borwick sold it in 1842 and Alfred Bird made his version in 1843. In the United States, Eben Horsford of Rumford Chemical Works patented a phosphate acid in 1856, and the Hoaglands founded Royal Baking Powder in 1868.

Filed under Origin Stories, Cultural Identity