Superb Cook

Within a minute, a soft dough formed from which she pinched pieces. Each piece spun around in her hand as fingers tucked ragged edges underneath presenting a seamless roundness on top. After being put into a flat, wrought iron skillet, each biscuit received a four-finger tap to flatten it a touch and a brush of butter.

I watched in admiration and desperation. She expected my stubby fingers to do the same thing her long, limber digits had done? May I add, not one tidbit of flour escaped the bowl during this process.

Hopeless Student

Adding Ingredients

Following her lead, I poured most of the flour into the sifter, added a large pinch of salt and shook out the baking powder just like Mama. There may have been a little more of salt and baking soda, but what difference would that make?

Cupping my fingers, I rammed my hand into the flour to make a well. After the sneezing ended, flour covered the counter, but a well had, indeed, been formed in the remainder. I scooped a huge spoonful of lard into the well and poured buttermilk straight from the jug into the bowl, filling the well.

“That may be just a bit too much lard and milk, Maggie. Maybe you should add more flour.”

“I did it like you did it.”

“If you think it looks right, mix it together.”

By that time in my short life, I should have realized when Mama gave in too easy, a lesson followed.  Unfortunately, the Lord blessed me with a shortness of smarts and an overgrown case of stubborn.

Mixing and Forming Biscuits

My fingers fairly itched by now to mix all the ingredients and come up with biscuits like Mama’s. (Note for new cooks – when making biscuits, if after you’ve swirled the flour, lard and milk together for five minutes, you still have a lump of lard, loads of buttermilk and the flour well is still intact, something is WRONG!)

My squishing fingers couldn’t get the lard to form little pieces and the flour may as well have been glued to the sides of that bowl. None of it dropped gracefully into the soup I’d made and the buttermilk never thickened. My motto, as a child, was if at first it doesn’t work, throw a fit.

Mama’s motto if one of her kids threw a fit; toss ice water in their faces and tan their backsides, then get on with the business at hand – once the child wiped up the water from the floor.

After Mama’s motto pulled mine back into line, we started all over again with one difference. I tried to listen. As a result, I had some pretty nice-looking biscuits for supper.

The Test

“I made the biscuits,” I said, grinning with pride.

Daddy picked up one of my treasures, which seemed a little heavier and denser than Mama’s. He bit down and didn’t make a dent in it.

Being a kind soul and not wanting to hurt my feelings, he let his jaws rip for all they were worth and chomped down on that biscuit. He came up screaming and missing one of his upper front teeth. It now resided on his plate beside my pretty biscuit. The biscuit had not a scratch.

After that first cooking lesson, I refused to cook biscuits again until far into my marriage. Daddy got a trip to the dentist and a hefty bill for having his tooth replaced. My brother got great biscuit bullet ammunition the next time he and his friends played war.

Forced to Cook

Cooking never appealed to me, yet I made the mistake of marrying a man who expected me to put meals on the table. Bless his patient little heart. For a good five years he, not only ate burned meat and raw potatoes, hard peas (didn’t realize you had to soak those dried ones), he thanked me.  But not once did he have to suffer through my biscuits. And that’s a good thing…right?

Now, at the age of sixty-eight, a dream literally gave me the key to great biscuits.  Or, it may have been sleeping following a lumbar block under anesthesia.  Whatever the reason, I remembered every instruction as though I saw it written on paper.  The following morning, following this recipe (which is very similar to Mama’s.)

Recipe From a Dream

Dream Biscuits

2 c. Self-rising Flour

1/2 stick Lard (this comes in packs of three sticks, which makes it much easier for me to measure)

3/4 c. Buttermilk

2 Tbsps. Melted Butter

Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees.  Measure the flour into a mixing bowl, add in lard which is cut into pats like butter. Using a fork, mash through the lard until it forms little pieces in the flour.  (Sound familiar?)  Form a ‘bowl’ in the center of the flour, add buttermilk.  Using the dough hook, turn the mixer onto its slowest speed.  This keeps the dough from getting tough, as it doesn’t release too much gluten, a toughening agent in the flour.  When dough pulls away from the sides of  the bowl, it will still be a wee bit sticky, so remove it from the bowl to a lightly flour surface.  

I was instructed in the dream to form a loaf, much like making bread.  Next, I cut slices about an inch thick and gently formed them into a pretty biscuit with rough edges neatly hidden under the bottom.  I like flattened biscuits, so I pressed them down fairly thin. As it turned out, this made exactly the number of biscuits to fit my flat cast iron pan, which holds about six large biscuits.  I used more lard to grease the pan generously and brushed melted lard over the tops.  Cook about twenty-five minutes.  Time may vary with your stove.  

For only the second time in my life, biscuits came out lusciously soft, easy to split to add butter and jam.  This recipe is a keeper.  But, I have to ask, Mama, did you send the dream from your heavenly home because you figured maybe I matured enough to listen this time?