Biscuits and cigarettes killed my grandfather (in that order). I lost my first tooth eating a biscuit. I know at least four ways to make biscuits and fifty ways to know when someone has done that job wrong. A wrong biscuit is an embarrassment to a Southern cook and a right one could get you elected mayor, should you want that honor-less job. That said, even a bad biscuit is better than good sushi.
My mother has made at least a hundred thousand biscuits in her eight-plus decades roaming a kitchen. She still makes them. In my family, biscuiting is an art form. One of my earliest memories is watching my mom sift
self-rising Martha White into a mound, hollowing out a crater in the middle, pouring in some buttermilk and poking around until she had a biscuit that was so good coming out of the oven that a man would lose money and be late for work just to eat one.
There were cathead biscuits, drop biscuits, and biscuits brushed with lard. The latter killed my grandfather. It can happen when you eat 12 with pork sausage every morning and chased them with Prince Albert roll-your-owns. Somehow he still only weighed 150 pounds. The biscuits got him.
The basic ingredient: Iron. All good biscuits are baked in a cast iron pan. I’m not sure I would even call it a biscuit if it was not raised and browned in a cast iron rounder.
There were times when biscuits were all my family had to eat – the best news in a long day of low pay and muddy sweat. If you don’t have any money, biscuits are a close second. I’m not really sure what ranks third because a lot of things tie for that position.
When I was in college, I had to write a paper about growing up. My professor was hardly enamored with Southern ways, even though he didn’t mind the tenured paycheck provided for his 3-hour workday at a very Southern university. I didn’t mind his criticisms of Faulkner and Capote and Welty. I rather considered him like an impotent animal at the zoo, trapped in a situation he thought demeaning because he wanted to be selling his verbiage instead of trashing ours. After one of my professors had gone senile in the middle of a class and tossed everyone because he didn’t recognize us, nothing much rattled me academically. I assumed if a person in a bowtie was standing in front of the chalkboard, he or she had gotten there because they’d lost a bet many years earlier. So I wrote about biscuits. The title: “Genetic Biscuits.” It told of my family’s propensity for making and eating them. He was not amused.
He ripped into me like I had stuck a biscuit in the gas tank of his ancient Volvo. I smiled and took my low grade. The next class, I brought in 12 still-warm biscuits – made from my mom’s recipe and wrapped in foil – and gave them to him. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with them. After seeing the A on my final, however, I assumed he figured out pretty quick what to do with them.
At the end of the semester, he pulled me aside and asked about the biscuits. I told him how to make them and I asked why he’d ripped me so hard on my paper.
“Reading about biscuits isn’t as convincing as eating them,” he said. “Once you finished that last paragraph with those twelve biscuits, your story improved considerably.”
Moral of story: Biscuit bribes work.
If you haven’t tried biscuits to leverage a better GPA, buy a cast iron pan and start writing.
