Grandmother's Kitchen, and Mother's, and Biscuits

Someone wanted "poems" on the topic of "Grandmother's Kitchen," with particular attention to biscuits. I didn't think my memories were what they wanted. The standard Southern biscuit made with selfrising flour and, yes, buttermilk if you have any, as imitated by fast-food restaurants, is made from recipes printed on flour bags. It's palatable enough, and my mother and grandmothers knew how to do it; I think all Southern women do. But, for their own various reasons, they almost never did it. Mother's reason was that she baked whole-wheat biscuits.

Grandmother really lost 

her kitchen with her leg.

Grandfather and Aunt Dotty

cooked after their own

uninspired fashion

until Mother, who had

the talent for cooking,

climbed on a chair to

show them what could be done.

At five my mother

cooked for the family

and summer laborers.

And washed up afterward.

Grandmother sewed and

raised foster children,

twenty-nine, all told,

all from a wheelchair...

Usually Granma

did not discuss food

but one day, when Mother

was late in town, she

offered us biscuits.

Even at age ten

I could do better

biscuits, like Mother’s,

no sour old buttermilk,

not too much butter,

wheat flour with bran in

(the trick to which was

grinding it minutes

before you baked it).

I put more salt in

biscuits than Mother did.

Call them Yankee biscuits,

make the most of it;

relatives ate them.

I surreptitiously

checked out my Granma’s

kitchen. It was bare.

Like Mother Hubbard’s.

Even the Bisquick

and buttemilk, used up.

No wheat, no grinder,

no baking powder,

no jar of fresh milk,

no bowl of butter;

even a box of salt

Granma did not keep.

Adults could choose to

do whatever they liked,

even to have a

pitiful, bare kitchen.

I knew that Granma had

plenty of money

but hated cooking

and did it badly.

Her biscuits were sour

and burnt on the bottoms.

No worries, she said,

no rules like Mother’s.

If we didn’t like

the world’s worst biscuits

Granma would as soon

serve children candy

instead.

THE RECIPE

Mother and I enjoyed making these “health food” biscuits before we realized that we were celiacs who should never have eaten them. Here is the recipe in case non-celiacs can enjoy it:

INGREDIENTS

Milk: About 1 to 1-1/2 cups milk, which you have obtained from your Jersey cow earlier in the morning and shoved into the refrigerator, in screw-top glass quart jars, as soon as you got back from the barn. Homogenize by shaking the jar before you pour out milk. Pasteurizing is for town dwellers. (It was not a concern for us, but might be one for you, that some nasty diseases can be spread between cows and people who drink raw milk. The reason why selling raw milk is subject to legal questions is that it's possible for cows to be carriers of tuberculosis. Ours weren't. We were lucky.)

Butter: No more than 2 tablespoons butter, which you have obtained by churning milk earlier in the week. This is fresh, unsalted butter. If you don’t have any, you’ll have to churn some. This is done by screwing the lid on a glass quart jar of milk as tight as it will go and shaking the jar for about an hour. Margarine would work, but it costs money.

Salt: Mother used a scant ½ teaspoon salt. I used a full teaspoon.

Baking powder: 1 level teaspoon. We used a lot of Clabber Girl, because that was what was in the store, but Mother always bought Rumford’s when she could.

Flour: Whole wheat flour goes stale and bitter fast and should be bought only as a last resort. If you grind the wheat right before using the flour, it will be as bland as the awful denatured white stuff in the stores. Grind about 3 cups. Sift out large pieces of bran.

METHOD:

Heat oven to 350-425 degrees Fahrenheit. This takes a while, with a wood stove; you started preheating the oven before you milked the cow. Scoop out butter and rub enough to leave a thin film over the baking sheet. Put the rest in the bowl, the colder the better. Sift in flour, salt, and baking powder. Stir briskly and lightly, scraping the bowl rather than crushing the flour against it, just to let the butter and wheat-germ oil (in the flour) mingle. Stir in 1 cup cold milk, then enough to make a stiff dough. Do not roll this dough. Pat it out ¼ to ½” thick on the baking sheet. Cut biscuit shapes in the dough but leave them and the cut-out shapes where they are in the pan. Bake15-25 minutes depending on how hot you’ve been able to get the oven. Biscuits will be flaky and tender if baked fast, heavier if baked slowly. Biscuits can be spread with butter, honey, or molasses, but are yummiest if eaten fresh out of the oven, a bite of hot biscuit alternating with a sip of cold milk. After everyone has had one regular biscuit, people who don’t want a second whole biscuit will ask for one of the cut-out shapes.

Jersey cows are special. Traditionally small, slim, pale yellow cows with enormous dark eyes and dark-shadowed eyelids, they produce very creamy milk. When you skim the milk to drink it cold out of a glass you skim almost half of it away, but when you cook with this milk all that cream saves most of the time needed to combine cold butter with flour. So, traditionally, people would keep a Hereford cow and a Jersey cow. The Hereford might have any name and probably answered to none; the Jersey probably answered to “Jers.” You drank the milk from the Hereford cow and used the milk from the Jersey cow to make biscuits.

TRADITIONAL VARIATION:

If you substitute corn for wheat and bake it in an iron skillet rather than on a sheet, you have a traditional Southern cornbread.

GRANOLA GREEN VARIATIONS:

If you substitute other grains for wheat you’ll get a variety of interesting flavors. Try oats, rye, barley, buckwheat, brown rice, and millet, alone or in combination. Corn, oats, rice, and millet are naturally gluten-free grains, which means they’ll make very crumbly breads.

If you grind a few nuts or seeds with the grain you’ll get a high-protein flour. Pumpkin and other cucurbit seeds, sunflower seeds, and sesame seeds are nice. Beans, peas, and lentils will make usable flours, but they’ll be heavy flours that need a longer cooking time, definitely not ideal for biscuits.

The reason why biscuits and cornbread were not traditionally sweetened was that sweet doughs burn easily. If you want to bake bread quickly at a high temperature, leave the dough bland or salted. Save the sweeteners to spread on the baked bread at the table.