Grandma’s Tea Biscuits

In Yukon Winter we are invited to eat with the main characters often and the food, while simple, is wonderful. Wes and his friends share recipes that have come down their family trees and here they are for you. Let us know if you try one.

Grandma’s Tea Biscuits

“Wow, my mother is a baker and never made anything so pretty,” said Jackson. He carried the bowls to the table.

“I financed my misspent youth in restaurants,” said Wes, “but this one’s totally home grown. It’s a recipe we like to call ‘Depression Tea Biscuits’, passed down from Aunt Isabelle’s grandmother. That woman was a force of nature.” – Yukon Winter, Chapter Twelve

 Ingredients

  • 2 cups sifted flour
  • 4 tablespoons lard
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • ¾ cup water (if too dry add up to 1 cup more)
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • Flour for kneading

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Be grateful that you have a thermostat and not a wood stove as Grandma had.
  2. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
  3. Cut in the lard coarsely (it should resemble the size of a small pea).
  4. Make a well in the center, turn water in all at once, stir lightly with a knife.
  5. Turn out on floured board, gather batter into a ball, kneed gently for 20 counts.
  6. Press dough down with the heel of your hand to about ½ an inch thick and cut with a cookie cutter or small can at one end.
  7. Place biscuits so they are touching one another on a cookie sheet. Bake in hot oven for 12 minutes or until brown
  8. Serve warm from the over with butter if you have it, just dip in soup or stew or use preserves. Yields 12

Notes:

  • When biscuits touch each other on the pan, they rise higher and evenly.
  • Don’t over kneed. Those peas of lard make the finished product so flaky.
  • If you don’t have a cookie cutter, form 12 small balls with your hands.
  • Dumplings for stew can be made from this dough by increasing water from ¾ cup to 1½ cups, to increase the moisture content so that dumplings drop from the end of an oiled spoon and form islands in your simmering stew.

Wes’s notes: Today we would use butter and the milk of your choice. My great-grandma lived in the wilderness. She would have had lard from the pig they’d killed that fall, and sometimes they would have milk from the old cow, but usually water was their choice. Sometimes she would fry this batter in her cast iron pan over a fire and it would make a very acceptable fry bread. The recipe is flexible, leaving room for what they had or didn’t have at the time, but I like to do it the way she did it. It connects me to her and my roots in surprising ways. When I was on the road, it gave me something of home.