Biscuits are more easily made than raised bread and so are used largely in its place while in camp. The proportions of flour and baking-powder are the same as for flapjacks. To 4 cups of flour mix 2 teaspoonfuls of Royal baking-powder and 1 level teaspoonful of salt; add shortening about the size of an egg, either lard or drippings. Divide the shortening into small bits and, using the tips of your fingers, rub it well into the dry flour just prepared; then gradually stir in cold water to make a soft dough, barely stiff enough to be rolled out ¾ inch thick on bread-board, clean flat stone, or large, smooth piece of flattened bark. Whichever is used must be well floured, as must also the rolling-pin and biscuit cutter. A clean glass bottle or smooth round stick may be used as rolling-pin, and the cutter can be a baking-powder can, or the biscuits may be cut square, or 4 inches long and 2 inches wide with a knife. The dough may also be shaped into a loaf ¾ inch thick and baked in a pan by planting the pan in a bed of hot coals, covering it with another pan or some substitute, and placing a deep layer of hot coals all over the cover. The biscuits should bake in about fifteen minutes. For a hurry meal each camper can take a strip of dough, wind it spirally around a peeled thick stick, which has first been heated, and cook her own spiral biscuit by holding it over the fire and constantly turning the stick. Biscuits, in common with everything cooked over a hot wood-fire, need constant watching that they may not burn. Test them with a clean splinter of wood; thrust it into the biscuit and if no dough clings to the wood the biscuits are done.
Johnny-Cake
Served hot, split open and buttered, these Kentucky johnny-cakes with a cup of good coffee make a fine, hearty breakfast, very satisfying and good.
Allow ½ cup of corn-meal for each person, and to every 4 cups of meal add 1 teaspoonful of salt, mix well; then pour water, which is boiling hard, gradually into the meal, stirring constantly to avoid having any lumps. When the consistency is like soft mush, have ready a frying-pan almost full of hot drippings or lard, dip your hands into cold water to enable you to handle the hot dough, and, taking up enough corn-meal dough to make a large-sized biscuit, pat it in your hands into a ¾-inch-thick cake and gently drop it into the hot fat; immediately make another cake, drop it into the fat, and continue until the frying-pan is full. As soon as one johnny-cake browns on the lower side turn it over, remove each cake from the fat as soon as done, and serve as they cook.
Corn-meal must be thoroughly scalded with boiling water when making any kind of corn bread in order to have the bread soft and not dry and "chaffy."
For baked corn bread add 2 full teaspoons of baking-powder and stir in 2 eggs, after 4 cups of meal and 1 teaspoonful of salt have been thoroughly scalded and allowed to cool a little. Pour this corn-meal dough into a pan which has been generously greased, and bake.
Corn-meal needs a hot oven and takes longer to bake than wheat-flour biscuits.
Corn-Meal Mush
Corn-meal mush does not absolutely require fresh cream or milk when served. It is good eaten with butter and very nourishing. Many like it with maple-syrup or common molasses.
Time is required to make well-cooked mush; at least one hour will be necessary. To 2 quarts of boiling, bubbling water add 1 teaspoonful of salt, and very slowly, little by little, add 2 cups of corn-meal, stirring constantly and not allowing the water to cease boiling. Do not stop stirring until the mush has cooked about ten minutes. It may then be placed higher up from the fire, where it will not scorch, and boiling water added from time to time as needed to keep the mush of right consistency. The cold mush may be made into a tempting dish, if sliced ½-inch thick and fried brown in pork fat. Many cold cooked cereals can be treated in the same way; sprinkled with flour these will brown better.