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.
