Ingredients:

• 2 cups sifted flour
  
• 2 teasp Royal® baking powder
  
• 1/2 teasp salt
  
• 4 tablesp shortening
  
• 3/4 cup milk
  

Instructions:

• Sift together dry ingredients.
  
• Add shortening: mix in thoroughly with fork.
  
• Add liquid to make a soft dough
  
• Turn out on floured board and toss lightly until outside looks smooth.
  
• Roll out 1/2 inch thick. Cut into biscuits.
  
• Bake in hot oven at 475° F about 12 minutes.
  
• Makes 14 two inch biscuits.
  

Notes:

• This was among my mom's hand written recipies.
  
• Those were more simple times--she could buy flour. She couldn't buy self-rising flour, or pre-sifted flour, and any of the other variations you might find in your local store. Just use plain (NON-self-rising) white flour.
  
• Wanna skip the 'sift' step? Do NOT. Because if you take a measuring cup and scoop out two cups you will have about a HUGE BUNCH too much flour. Here is how to do it the way my mother did it: Put a measuring cup in the bottom of a big bowl. Sift the flour into that cup until the cup is full and some flour piles up in a little dome above the cup's rim. With a knife cut off/level off the top--do NOT press down any of that over the rim. Then, pour that one measured/sifted cup into the mixing bowl. Repeat. Then return all the sifted flour in the bottom of the bowl which held the measuring cup back to the bag. See, sifted flour has lots of air in between the grains. If you use an accurate kitchen scale to weigh a level cup of sifted and just scooped out of the bag flour you will see what I'm talking about.
  
• "Shortening" is defined as "A fat, such as butter or lard, used to make cake or pastry light or flaky." But, I guess the shortening my mom used most often was Crisco® and all vegetable product.
• "Cut into biscuits" means use a round biscuit cutter (or glass of appropriate size) to cut round biscuits. (Little Johnny came home from school and daddy said "Son, what did you learn in school today?" And Little Johnny had learnd the formula to calculate the area of a circle as Area = Pi(r²) and Little Johnny simply said "Pi r square". To which old daddy said "That is the dumbest thing I ever heard. Everyone knows pie and biscuits are round, cornbread are square.")