Ellis - Biscuits: A Savor the South Cookbook

For fifteen years, it was my job to travel around the country and teach people to make biscuits. Armed with my rolling pin and mixing bowls, I had the pleasure of talking to people about their sacred relationship with biscuits. I learned that deep in the soul of a biscuit, theres more than flour, fat, and milk. A hot biscuit embodies a memory of place and family.

In my life, that memory takes me back to the aroma of biscuits, bacon, and sausage coming from the kitchen, my cue to get out of bed on Saturday mornings. Since I slept until breakfast was served, I didnt learn to make biscuits in my youth. As a young bride, I tried to duplicate my mothers breakfast. The biscuits were terrible, and the gravy was a lumpy mess. Finally, as an adult living in a new city, I went back home for a visit and asked my mother to teach me the secrets of making biscuits. There were just a few things I needed to know, and with a little practice, it became easy to make good biscuits.

Little did I know that I would make a career of being the biscuit lady. Ive made biscuits for thousands of people through the years at county fairs, cooking classes, culinary shows, senior expos, and the like. Needless to say, I got plenty of practice.

It doesnt surprise me when people say they just cant make a good biscuit because so many people never had someone to show them how. With that in mind, Ive included detailed instructions for making biscuits in the recipes that follow so anyone can do it. My best advice is dont play with the doughthats the secret to making good biscuits more than anything else.

The old-school bread in the South is trendy across the country now. Go to Tom Douglass Serious Biscuit in Seattle, Egg in Brooklyn, or the Biscuit Bus in Nashville and youll see how cool hot biscuits can be.

Biscuits are humble food to most of us who grew up in the Southeast, made to be served alongside eggs, as dumplings, as a topping for casseroles, with chicken, or for dessert. Sure, there are biscuits in New York City, Seattle, and all places in between, but its in the South that biscuits matter.

Almost every time I taught a biscuit class, someone would come up to me afterward to share a story. They were stories of hands, the mother, grandmother, grandfather whose hands patted out the dough with nothing less than love. Biscuit making is a touch, an art, a simple act of giving. The memories of biscuits live on; theyre the stuff of immortality, a remembrance of simple times. The art of making them was once passed down through the family right along with the cast-iron skillets and handmade quilts.

Biscuits hold such a cherished place in southern culture that when a play, book, song, or movie is set in the South, biscuits are sure to have a supporting role. Biscuits symbolize the South.

In any classic southern film or book, biscuits are sure to be on the table. In The Help by Kathryn Stockett, biscuits are served up by Minnie as a cure. In Harper Lees classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, biscuits with syrup are a symbol of equality, as both black and white bystanders at the courthouse eat them for lunch. Pulitzer Prizewinner Eudora Welty often mentions them, such as in The Optimists Daughter, when Laurel is given biscuits from the table to feed to pigeons.

People even sing about biscuits. In the 1930s, blues singer Memphis Minnie sang Im Gonna Bake My Biscuits:

Im gonna bake my biscuits,
Aint gonna give nobody none.
Im-a tell you something,
I dont know if Im wrong or right.
But if you want my bread,
You got to stay all night.

In the 1970s, Kinky Friedman sang the antifeminist song, Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed, a sentiment that may have contributed to a decline in the number of women from that generation who cooked.

Quite a few country songs feature biscuits, my personal favorite being Alan Jacksons Where I Come From:

Well, I paid the tab and the lady asked me,
Howd you like my biscuit?
Ill be honest with you maam,
It aint like mama fixed it.

On the International Biscuit Festival Facebook page, someone noted that Faith Hill sings a song about Bis-kits, bis-kits. I searched for the song and couldnt find it, then while listening to her sing This kiss, this kiss, I realized there had been a little southern misunderstanding of the lyrics! Sometimes biscuit songs are in the hearing rather than the singing.

Few foods have become so enmeshed in southern culture and have made such an impact on the regions history, temperament, and tone of life as biscuits. In the words of author and food historian John Egerton, Theres just nothing else like em.

What are biscuits? According to Websters, theyre any of various hard or crisp dry baked products, to which I respond, Not my biscuits! But the origin of biscuits predates baking powder, and biscuits used to be very different from the light biscuits we think of now.

What the British call a biscuit, Americans call a cookie. What Americans call a biscuit, the British call a scone. Confused yet?

The word biscuit comes from Middle English and early French words meaning twice-cooked bread. Also known as hardtack, the biscuit sustained ship travelers and warriors for centuries.

So how did biscuits as we know them come about? According to John Egerton, the first American biscuits were a cracker-like bread, 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick, usually round, and pricked with a fork, called beaten biscuits. Dining on beaten biscuits was a sign of wealth in the antebellum South for two reasons: flour was expensive to make and transport, and beaten biscuits required the laborious task of bludgeoning the dough with an ax, rolling pin, or other tool for at least thirty minutes until the dough was smooth and slick, a task usually left to slaves or servants. Beaten biscuits werent the bread of the sharecropper or the farmermaking them required too much effort.

Biscuits as we now think of themhigh-rising, light, soft, and tendercame about when people discovered that a mixture of refined ashes from burned wood called pearlash, which left a bitter aftertaste, and later cream of tartar or baking soda with buttermilk created bubbles in baking.