Reading the Baking Soda/Baking Powder item (http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbakingsoda.html) made me think of a question. There are two types of flour; regular flour and “self-rising” flour. When baking with regular flour you have to add baking powder to make it rise. With self-rising flour you don’t. (Hence the name.)
Does this imply that the self-rising flour has baking powder in it? Or is there something else involved?
My board got hacked and all I got was this lousy sig file…
Self-rising flour does, indeed, have baking powder in it. It should have an ingredients list somewhere on it which should include baking soda and cream of tartar.
I strongly advise against using the stuff, though, because you can’t ever be exactly sure what the proportions are. Thus, if you want to control the rising of the things you bake, buy regular flower and baking powder, and add it yourself.
-astraeus
Bisquick being the prime example of a ‘self-rising’ flour. I always trust it to make tasteless biscuits. 
Hey DS, Bisquick is a bad example of self rising flour, as it isn’t. It’s a baking mix which also contains fat, Probably shortening, but since I don’t keep any in the house, I couldn’t tell you right off. It may also contain salt and maybe sugar, I guess, It’s for the just add water type of chef. Anyway as far as I’m concerned self rising flour is the worst invention since salted butter, or maybe until salted butter, which came first?
Jack Maxwell is correct. Bisquick is not self-rising flour. Bisquick is an instant biscuit mix that contains flour, baking powder, salt, and shortening. It can be used for many things, but IMHO they all taste nasty. It was introduced in 1931. It was one of the first packaged mixes for baked goods–the big innovation was figuring out how to keep the fat in the mix from getting rancid. From the Bisquick idea came the boxed cake and muffin mixes that are so common now.
Self-rising flour, by definition, contains flour and baking powder, although commercial brands could contain other ingredients. I would expect that self-rising flour was introduced somewhere in the late 1910s or early 1920s. This is an educated guess, but a guess nonetheless. Flour was sold out of barrels until 1905, when flour pre-packaged in smaller bags was introduced. I would think that self-rising flour would have come from a desire for flour millers to create a more expensive, branded, value-added product to extend their lines. This pre-supposes branded and packaged goods. As Astraeus points out, ingredients can vary widely, so a cook would have to depend one one identifiable brand in order to achieve satisfactory results.
Salted butter has pretty much always existed. Salt acts as a preservative in butter, so if butter was not going to be eaten right away, it was usually salted. Salted butter as a packaged and branded product did not become common until the 1890s. Paradoxically, it was the growing popularity of margarine that hastened the spread of branded butter. As branded products became more common, consumers began liking and expecting consistency in products. They also felt that a branded product was less likely to be adulterated. Therefore, the butter producers adopted standard packaging and branding as a way of maintaining their market share.
Or, to make a long story short, salted butter came before self-rising flour.