Biscuit Cutters

Biscuits that were no longer hard, like sea biscuits or beaten biscuits, appeared with the early nineteenth-century use of homemade potash, pearl ashes, and subsequent commercial baking sodas and powders. It was customary from the 1840s or so to the mid-twentieth century for farm housewives and family cooks to make fresh biscuits for at least one meal a day. An inverted tumbler twisted against the dough can cut a biscuit, but it pinches the edge and keeps the biscuit from rising fully. A sharp-edged cutter did not have to be twisted. Until the 1870s, biscuit cutters were either pieced tin or carved wood circles, with or without a handle, similar to cookie cutters.