Stay and Eat

Light as a Feather

Cebah raised us on biscuits and cornbread. The memories of breakfasts here on the hill are one of the things that keep such a big family close. All of us keep coming back for more biscuits.

The really handy thing about biscuits is how quick they are to make. Once you get the hang of it you can go from scratch to serving in 15 minutes. Knock that down to ten if you make the dough up the night before. What sort of fresh bread can be made quicker? And its very easy, once you understand what you’re doing you’ll find that it is a very forgiving recipe. It would be better, of course, if you could watch Cebah do it.

But I think that if you read my description carefully you too will become famous for your biscuits. People will love you, and they will appear regularly at your breakfast table with expectant looks on their faces. So if that’s what you want, try this:

Put a couple of cups of flour in your mixing bowl and mix in a good pinch, which will be a teaspoon, of salt, and two large pinches of baking powder, which will be three teaspoons, and a small pinch of baking soda, 3/4 of a teaspoon. After you’ve measured these out for a batch or two, go ahead and dispense with the measuring and use the pinches. This is the perfect training recipe for independence.

Work in a scooped-out handful of shortening, which will be one half cup. “Working in” means that you will use your fingers to pinch the shortening into a rough mixture with the flour, not as fine as coarse meal, but I think lumps the size of a pea should be about the upper limit.

What is the shortening? The best thing is homemade lard, but I understand that you may not have killed and rendered a hog recently, so store-bought lard may have to do. It’s not as good, so if you default to it, understand that you just knocked your biscuits down a notch. You can use butter, and its really good, especially if you churned the butter from your own little cow, a Jersy, Swiss, or Guernsey, (not a Holstein,) or if you can get French butter.

Once the shortening is worked in, pour in enough buttermilk to make a sloppy dough, like a wet paste. Sprinkle a half-cup more of flour onto your counter and gingerly knead the dough on it, barely touching it so as not to warm it with your hands. Fold one half over the other until the dough is just smooth, which will be no more than 25 presses. This is the most important part of the process. Your goal is to have the dough be as moist as you can possibly handle when you turn it onto your working surface, then you want to handle it as little as you possibly can, just enough to get it unsticky enough to roll out with a floured rolling pin. If you are making it ahead, from it into a ball and wrap it in plastic wrap and store it in the refrigerator till you’re ready to bake the next day.

When you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 400. Roll the dough out very gently to a half to 3/4 inch thickness and cut out rounds with a SHARP 3-inch cutter. You can use a can if you don’t have a cutter designed for the job, or you can cut the dough in squares with a sharp knife. Press the cutter straight down with one sure motion and pull it back off the same way. Do not twist. You don’t want to seal the edges of the biscuit, as that will decrease its ability to rise, and it will be heavy, and someone like my dad will make jokes about your style of biscuits by pretending to drop one on the floor syncronized with a heavy foot tromp. Is that how you wish your biscuits to be remembered?

Place the biscuits on a lightly greased baking pan that has sides, and place them close together, no more than an inch apart, a half-inch is better. Close grouping will also aid in their rising. Bake the biscuits until the tops are the color you want them to be. Opinions about this vary widely, so you need to decide. Cebah prefers them deep brown, which means they will have a crisp crust on the bottom. I prefer them the way my dad did, with a top that looks like a glance of sunshine on a snowbank. That way they are meltingly tender all the way through.

Biscuits should be split in half hot and have a good glot of butter inserted between the halves. (I’m going to describe a whole breakfast to go with this... maybe the recipe is just in the middle?)

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