I grew up in Maryland and had never heard of this.
I looked it up on Google. It seems this is one way that biscuits were leavened before the invention of baking powder:
You learn something new every day…
They still make them this way, albeit it with a handle of an axe, and you can order them online.
You’re correct - while most pizzas here are dreadful, they still don’t deviate from the basic premise of ‘dough with tomato & cheese & stuff’.
Skimmed milk, while fully available, certainly isn’t common (although I was brought up on it, and since rebelled 
). And I’ve never seen or heard anyone specifically request it in a cafe. So it was probably simply that you were the first person to request it from that barista.
Cool!
But those of us who make biscuits at home don’t do it that way. We use baking powder for leavening.
Nah, most commercially-produced ones are machine-beaten these days. I find them kind of bland, not bad with some salty country ham though.
Speaking of baking powder, when several of the UK posters described dumplings it sounded like they were made with flour and fat, but no leavening. Many common US traditional dumpling recipes (e.g., chicken and dumplings) use something akin to drop biscuit dough, which are put on top of the simmering stew and essentially steamed until they are done inside. This give the dumplings more of a bready than a noodly texture.
And before anyone asks, drop biscuit are made with essentially the same ingredients as other US biscuits, but the dough is a bit wetter and is just dropped from a spoon onto the baking sheet.
Yeah, the dumplings I make for chicken and dumplings contain no fat, but do contain baking powder. They don’t contain milk either, but that’s because I keep kosher- a traditional recipe probably would. They don’t really stay on top of the stew, though- they sink down in it and are cooked there.
Yes.
If you are talking about the UK I disagree. A lolly just means a lollipop. The generic name for what you call candy is* sweets* . Thus you get sweet shops that sell all types of sugar confectionery (and chocolate) and even sweet jars were you will see them displayed in the shop.
Sorry, I should’ve said I just meant Australia. “Sweets” down under is more likely to be a reference to dessert.
Both kinds exist - ‘floaters’ and ‘sinkers’ - depending on whether or not they are leavened. The leavened kind are by far the most common though and are probably what almost everybody thinks they’d be getting if they ask for dumplings.
Sounds a bit like drop (or girdle)scones.
See post No. 68.
While there is a good proportion of Americans who despise skim milk (these are the types that also avoid 1 and 2 percent milk and stick to whole milk), I would guess that probably 80 to 90 percent of the people I interact with personally exclusively use skim milk (hmm … I wonder about the provenance of “skimmed milk” in the United States) if they drink any milk at all.
In my experience, dressing is not cooked inside the turkey, but rather in a pan. The drippings from the turkey are used to give it flavor. I consider stuffing to be a separate entity- much wetter and fluffier. This sort of thing varies a lot within the US, even within specific regions. At least, different parts of the south do things differently.
acsenray, look at the 2004 US sales figures for milk: link (PDF). Skim represents less than 15% of all milk sold.
I don’t think that this contradicts anything I said in my post.
I guess I was hung up on the 80-90% thing. The skim users I know all use soy now.