Utensils: 1 large tin bread pan. 1 wooden flour bowl. A wood burning stove with a red hot fire to make a 475 degree oven.

Step 1: Place a lump of lard the size of a walnut in a tin bread pan and place on back of stove to melt.

Step 2: With hands nicely washed, make a well in the wooden bowlful of soft wheat flour. Pour into the flour well about a cup of clabbered milk. Add the melted shortening leaving a small smidgen in the bread pan. Add a pinch of soda, depending on how sour the milk, but not more than a teaspoonful. Add enough baking powder from your fingers to equal 2 heaping teaspoons, and a dash of salt measured in your palm to equal a teaspoon.

Step 3: Mix with your fingers, picking up enough flour to make a soft dough. Rub your hands together to get off the accumulated dough, on your fingers. Knead enough flour into the dough from the sides to make it smooth and firm. Not too firm, just so it does not stick. Flour both hands. Pinch off enough dough to make a biscuit, nice and round, about the size of a walnut in its shell. Flatten in your palm. Dip it in the greased bread pan. Turn it over and place about 1/4 inch apart until all the dough is used. Place on the middle rack of the hot oven about 12-15 minutes, until the biscuits are done inside and a crisp brown outside.

Explanation:

Clabbered milk: This is natural milk direct from cow to crock, left to cool and the cream to rise on top. After a few hours the cream was removed by a cream skimmer and put in a manual churn for butter. The remaining milk was used for drinking or cooking. Sometimes, due to intense heat, the milk would sour in a short time. This was clabbered milk. The longer it was kept, the more it clabbered. My mother cooked this milk, then heated it and it separated into tiny whey particles. This was placed in a cheese cloth and hung up to drain. After draining, she mixed a small amount of cream and salt into it. This was creamed cottage cheese.