The biscuit is the bread of life. If the South had a regional bread, it would definitely be the biscuit. Well, maybe that or cornbread. There are probably two camps—the cornbread camp and the biscuit camp. I’m definitely on the side of the biscuit. Among my earliest memories are waking up to the rhythm of a fork striking the side of the Pyrex mixing bowl as my mama stirred them up each morning. That was actually my alarm clock. I can still hear that in my sleep. My mama’s recipe involved shortening, self-rising flour, and milk. In fact, I can almost remember the measurements but I’m not sure enough to put them in writing and lead anyone astray with my faulty memory. What I wouldn’t give for one more morning with my mom and her biscuits.
It’s true that music conjures up memories. You can hear a song and immediately return to a particular place or feeling in your mind. The same can be said for food. It is simply not possible to think of biscuits without also seeing the plate of biscuits on the table along with the jar of homemade grape or apple jelly. Every morning before school I had three biscuits. Exactly three biscuits. No more and no less. That was to hold me through the lunch that I wouldn’t eat that almost always consisted of spongy yellow cornbread and whatever else Mrs. Quinby had on her mind. My fourth grade teacher, Miss Lewis, was concerned that I didn’t eat enough, but was quickly assured that I ate plenty of biscuits.
Mama was raised during the Depression, so she believed in stretching everything. She used shortening instead of butter, but always whole milk. She didn’t own a biscuit cutter, preferring the open end of a short drinking glass. Until I was much older, I didn’t know biscuits could be round. Hers always had a quarter moon looking edge on one side where she made the most of the dough before rerolling it. If biscuits were left over, they usually reappeared at supper that night, buttered and toasted in the oven. An after-school snack could consist of a cold biscuit with butter and a bit of sugar.
In the winter, we usually found a source for sorghum syrup, so the biscuits were dressed up with that instead of jelly for a while. My widowed grandmother stayed with us occasionally and I was pretty impressed with her artful dragging of a biscuit through a thick pool of sorghum syrup without ripping the biscuit apart. She must have had a lot of practice. And when you couple a sorghum biscuit with fried country ham, that is truly a meal to worship, which is usually what happened on Christmas morning. After Santa stopped by and we had gone through it all, Mama would disappear into the kitchen and soon you would hear the clanking of fork against Pyrex. No pancakes for us. They were reserved for rainy Sunday evening meals, never for breakfast—and certainly not for such a holiday as Christmas.
Just about the only time breakfast didn’t include biscuits was when we were leaving early for a vacation trip. Then, she would heat the store-bought cinnamon rolls with raisins and the thick icing that would flake off. It was only acceptable because it meant we’d soon be on the road to the beach. Anything would have tasted good at that point.
As I grew older and more cosmopolitan, my taste evolved to Pop Tarts or Frankenberry in the morning. It was what my friends ate. The same friends who also had Charles Chips delivered in the cannister to their front door and who drank Coke instead of milk at meals. So for a few years, I did with fewer biscuits and didn’t miss them much at all.
Then I found myself with my own kitchen and family and I wanted them to appreciate the biscuit art. So, although my mom’s recipe is the sentimental favorite, I settled on one that uses White Lilly flour and real butter. I worked to perfect the recipe and just when I thought it was as good as it gets, my kids would visit my mom and be wowed by her selection of frozen Pillsbury biscuits. By that point, she had left the shortening concoction behind and was enjoying the store-bought equivalent. She went through a short phase of using the “whomp” biscuits—those where you peel the wrapper and then use a spoon or countertop edge to spring the biscuits open before baking. But nothing quite compares to Pillsbury. Actually I think nothing quite compares to anything cooked in a grandmother’s kitchen, so I gave up on the competition and vowed not to get my feelings hurt. I was just so incredibly thankful for the grandmother I was able to share my children with.
If you ask them right now, they’d probably agree that having breakfast with Mimi is a favorite memory. For them, it might be the image of buttered toast coming out of the toaster oven, coupled with the jar of homemade grape or apple jelly on the table, but the memory is just as sweet as my recollection of the plate of biscuits on the little pine table in the kitchen. And the Pyrex bowl was robin’s egg blue.
