Virginia Cookery-book

Take two pints of flour, one table-spoonful of lard, and one teaspoonful of salt. Have ready a mug filled with equal parts of sweet milk and water, and add it gradually to the other ingredients, kneading all the while, and stopping as soon as the flour will hold together, for the dough should be very stiff. Beat thirty minutes with an axe, kept for the purpose ; or, if you use a kneading-trough, run the dough backward and forward through it, until rather soft and perfectly smooth. In the Virginia of the olden time no breakfast or teatable was thought to be properly furnished without a plate of these indispensable biscuits, which were wont to be " white as the driven snow " inside, and deemed both wholesome and palatable. Let one spend the night at some gentleman-farmer's home, and the first sound heard in the morning, after the crowing of the cock, was the heavy, regular fall of the cook's axe, as she beat and beat her biscuit - dough. Grown familiar, how appetizing the sound, as the gauge of good things to follow soon! Nowadays beaten biscuits are a rarity, found here and there, but soda and modem institutions have caused them to be sadly out of vogue. There are difficulties in the way. In the first place, there must be a biscuit-block, usuually the trunk of some solid oak or chestnut tree, felled and sawed off to a convenient height, when, of course, it must be planed smooth, and set up in some accessible place in or near the kitchen. Any ordinary table would would be knocked to pieces if used for this service. A machine may be obtained that answers the purpose admirably, but it is rare. We have only seen one specimen in use. Then an axe, with a short, stout handle, must hang ever ready to be applied to this use, and this alone is a condition hard to comply with in a Southern kitchen, where servants are careless, as a rule. Lastly, most servants object nowadays to the trouble of preparing this bread. But the house-keeper who has the energy to surmount these difficulties, and essays her skill in following the recipe here given, may be assured that she will be rewarded for her pains. Beatbn Biscuit, No. 2. One table-spoonful of butter and lard mixed, one eggy one quart of sifted flour, and one teaspoonful of salt. Make up with half a pint of milk, or, if milk is not to be had, plain water will answer ; beat well until the dough blisters and cracks; pull off a two-inch square of the dough ; roll it into a ball with the hand ; flatten, stick with a fork, and bake in a quick oven. Bachelor's Loaf. Three eggs, half a pint of milk, one quart of flour, two table-spoonfuls of butter, one teaspoonful of salt, three table-spoonfuls of yeast. Warm the milk and butter together; stir in the flour and salt, then the eggs, well beaten; beat the whole well, and stir in the yeast; set it to rise in the pan you mean to bake it in; butter the pan. Shbbwood Biscuit. For breakfast, make up at night a pint of flour with a table-spoonful of yeast, exactly as if for light bread ; in the morning work in a quart of flour, with a table-spoonful pf shortemng; half a pint of buttermilk in which a pinch of soda has been dissolved, or simply a cup of sweet milk instead, and a table-spoonful of butter and lard, mixed; work well for ten minutes; make into small biscuits with the hand, instead of cutting out. This recipe is among the very nicest, if the directions are strictly followed out. French Rolls.