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Don't Cook That

Soda Biscuits (No. 65)

Three drachms of muriatic acid in the dough, from a book that quotes Liebig on how impure muriatic acid is.

From
The Bread and Biscuit Baker's and Sugar-Boiler's Assistant
Published
1890
Yikes Scale
Call poison control

Exactly as printed, 1890

Take 8 lbs. of flour, rub in 2 lbs. of good butter. Make a bay, add about 1 quart of water, take in your flour and butter and well shake up, and note the more your mixture is shaken up and worked the better biscuits you will have. Also note in shaking up these biscuits, when they are mixed let your two thumbs meet, giving the mixture a shake up in the air till you have all the dry flour worked in and the mixture is nice and moist.

Bake in a smart oven on wires. 65. Soda Biscuits. 14 lbs. of flour, 1 lb. of butter, oz. of carbonate of soda, 3 drachms of muriatic acid, 2 quarts of water. Mix as the last, adding the acid mixed with half-a-pint of the water after the dough is shaken up, then finish with the machine.

CRACKERS, PICNICS, BISCUITS.


The Bread and Biscuit Baker's and Sugar-Boiler's Assistant, 1890. Public domain; transcription unaltered.

So what happens if I make it?

Muriatic acid is hydrochloric acid, and the technical grade sold then and now carries iron, arsenic and other heavy-metal impurities. It is a masonry and pool chemical.

The book knows. Its own appendix quotes Liebig to that effect, and the recipe is printed anyway, because the acid-and-soda reaction raises a biscuit cheaply and the trade needed cheap.

Notes from the 21st century

  • Four recipes on these pages use it. Soda Biscuits, Pic-Nics, Common Pic-Nics and Luncheon Biscuits all specify drachms or ounces of muriatic acid.
  • Pearlash is the other leavening. Refined potassium carbonate, which the book's own opening line criticises for its disagreeable alkaline flavour.
  • “Volatile salts” is baker's ammonia. Ammonium carbonate, still used industrially for thin dry biscuits where the ammonia bakes off completely.

Also in this book

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