Welcome to the Food, Glorious Food blog series. This new, limited series is a companion blog series to the Museum’s temporary exhibition of the same name, now on display in the Museum’s lobby and Burgoyne Room through autumn 2025.
Throughout the series, Curator Kathleen Powell and Public Programmer Abbey Stansfield (both the expert bakers here at the Museum), will be exploring Victorian-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.
Please enjoy the thrilling tale of the competitive development of baking powder with Part 2: Baking Powder Biscuits written and baked by Public Programmer Abbey Stansfield.
Bon Appetit!
Baking Powder Biscuits
Author: Strong’s Baking Powder
From: The Art of Cooking Made Easy
“One very important point is in having a hot oven, another is having flour sifted and roll dough as soft as you can handle. For each teacupful of flour take a teaspoonful of Strong’s Baking powder. Butter the size of a small hen’s egg is enough for a quart of flour. After rubbing butter, powder and salt into the amount of flour needed, put cold water or milk, stirring all the time till the right consistency is reached, then roll lightly and bake at once.“
St. Paul Street in the 1890s would have been a lively place to shop for both luxuries and everyday necessities. The 1889 Ontario Gazetteer boasts of St. Catharines as a City that is the County Seat for Lincoln, has good railway facilities, three daily newspapers, gas and electric lighting, a multitude of manufacturing companies that produce things from flour to furniture, a large library and an opera house. The city had continued to boom in the four decades between the publication of Every Lady’s Book in Niagara-On-The-Lake and the publication of The Art of Cooking Made Easy, the first recorded cookbook that was printed in St. Catharines.
Publishing and printing The Art of Cooking Made Easy in St. Catharines was completed by Joseph R. Seymour, proprietor of Seymour’s Central Drug Store. The cookbook proclaims Seymour’s as being the only authorized agent in St. Catharines for Strong’s Baking Powder. His drug store situated at 51 St. Paul Street specialized in providing luxury goods to local shoppers. His 1892 daily ads in the St. Catharines Standard invite shoppers to come in and “examine those elegant goods displayed in his window.” Among the advertised goods Seymour’s sold were cut glass perfumery and Turkish dyes.
Investigation into Strong’s Baking Powder yields very little in the way of information other than The Art of Cooking Made Easy itself. The biggest clue we have as to why a chemist would bother locally publishing and distributing a baking powder company’s cookbook comes from one of its opening pages. The company informs the reader that not all baking powders are pure, and not all produce the same results. The chemist/ pharmacist that chose to become the authorized dealers of Strong’s were lending the weight of their professional backgrounds behind the company’s claims of a pure and effective product.
The history of baking powder is surprisingly rife with corporate wars between dueling companies, adulteration of products, misinformation, government testing, and even criminal trials against baking powder companies. When sifting through the nineteenth century records relating to baking powder companies, it becomes clear that this product revolutionized the late-Victorian household globally and that before government restrictions were put into place, it was a race to the top.
Leavening agents prior to the advent of baking powder were limited to yeast (either from a brewer or a distiller) or a homemade variety that varied in strength. In an age where most labourers supplemented their daily diet with bread this important staple would have been made in high quantities in a household. An example is Catharine Parr Trail’s bread recipe calling for twenty pounds of flour (!). That’s a huge quantity of bread but necessary to supplement her family’s meals.
The late seventeen-hundreds saw the development of pearl ash (a refining of potash) used in household cooking as a leavening agent. While the potash produced today is different from the potash of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Canada has always been a major exporter of potash. Many Canadian homes would have used pearlash as a leavening agent as it was readily available. When reading through many old cookbooks from the beginning of the nineteenth century recipes, like pancakes, will call for the addition of pearlash to help them rise.
Pearlash, however, quickly gave way to baking powder at home. Early baking powders are not equivalent to the product we use today. Over the years the product has changed to include different compounds to create a better and more stable rise. As early as the 1860s Clayton and Swarts were acting as wholesale dealers of baking powder for St. Catharines grocers. This mid-century rendition of baking powder would have been made up of cream of tartar, baking soda and starch. This mixture was originally developed by the Hoagland brothers of New York who went on to open the Royal Baking Powder Company.
The Royal Baking Powder company would grow to be one of the largest players in the baking powder world and was available internationally. Their domination of the market led to the development, by a competitor, of an alum based recipe for baking powder in the 1880s. The results of this new mixture provided a better and more reliable rise. Questions were being raised by authorities and the public as to the effects of the various substances being used as rising agents in baking powders. Imperial Baking Powder, which was the choice of many St. Catharines households, ran ads claiming their product was, “Purest. Strongest. Best. Contains no Alum, Ammonia, Lime, Phosephates, or any Injurant.”
With the range of products available and all claiming to be the purest and best on the market it became more and more important for specialists to weigh in. Chemists began running tests and one study from New Jersey was published in multiple periodicals of the 1890s to provide the public some scientific guidance. In Canada, chief government labatory analyst, A. McGill, published an annual report on the effectiveness and composition of baking powders sold on the Canadian market.
When considering the information that would have been required but was unavailable to the average consumer to decide as to which would be the most effective baking powder, it makes sense that Seymour’s would be the local authorized dealer of a baking powder company. Strong’s chose pharmacies as local distributers as a means of pseudo vetting their product with being backed by trusted local men of science.
Whether Strong’s was a superior product is unclear as the company does not appear to have been able to survive in the over saturated market. The legacy of their cookbook does survive and included hundreds of recipes and instructions for residents. Many of the recipes don’t contain baking powder, implying that the cookbook was more likely a marketing tool to get the Strong name into local households.
In the same vein as having local pharmacies connect themselves with Strong, many of the recipes attribute the names of local women who submitted them for the cookbook. This addition gives the home cook of the 1890s some reassurance that the recipes have been vetted by households like theirs. The recipes included in The Art of Cooking Made Easy include non-culinary related sections like recipes to treat poisonings and how to create dyes for your home.
While providing ample instruction on creating dye of a red hue out of madder, the instructions of the recipe we are focussing on today leaves much to be desired for a modern reader. It was particularly challenging deciphering instructions like “butter the size of a small hen’s egg.” Most 1890s readers would know that reference.
The recipe book is similar to our modern lifestyle blogs. The baking powder biscuit recipe seems more like a jumbled conversation than a recipe, and the reader has to navigate through the text to understand the instruction.
The Recipe
Luckily, we’ve done that for you, so here is an updated and tested version of Strong’s Baking Powder Biscuits for those bakers looking to give it a try.
Baking Powder Biscuits
Ingredients-
- 2 Cups of All Purpose Flour
- 1 Tablespoon of Baking Powder
- 1 Teaspoon of Salt
- 6 Tablespoons of cold Butter
- 3/4 Cup of Milk
Method-
1 – “One very important point is in having a hot oven.”
Equating historic stove to modern oven temperatures can be tricky. The best result for biscuits is to cook at a high heat of 425 °F. While the oven is preheating line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2 – “For each teacupful of flour take a teaspoonful of Strong’s Baking power.”
Sift flour, baking powder, and salt into a mixing bowl.
3 – “[adding the butter] Butter the size of a small hen’s egg is enough for a quart of flour. After rubbing butter, powder and salt into the amount of flour needed…”
Grate very cold butter into the mixing bowl with the flour, salt and baking powder. When all the butter has been grated use a spoon to mix in the butter, so it is coated in the flour mixture.
4 – “After rubbing butter, powder and salt into the amount of flour needed put cold water or milk, stirring all the time till the right consistency is reached.”
Add the milk (milk will give richer biscuits than water) and use a spoon to mix it in. When the dough comes together into a ball and becomes hard to stir, turn it out onto a floured surface and use your hands to bring it together into a ball.
5 – “…then roll lightly.”
Roll the dough out with a rolling pin until the dough is an inch thick and then use a circular cutter to cut out the biscuits. Place the biscuits onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, half an inch apart.
6 – “…bake at once.”
Cook the biscuits in the oven at 425°F for 12 minutes.
Allow to cool on the tray and then enjoy!
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