I never mastered the art of biscuits.
Though she didn’t do it very often, my mother made excellent biscuits. She called them Angel biscuits. Feeding a family of my own, I googled the recipe, and tried it. My children, whose exposure to sports was limited to the southern mainstays of football and baseball, exhibited an unexpected knowledge of hockey in describing an appropriate use for these biscuits.
My father enjoyed bread with dinner but, more often than not, his yen was satisfied by two slices of “Colonial” white bread riding one side of his generously filled plate. The rest of us ate breadless, and the blessing does not go unrecognized.
Holidays were marked by “dinner rolls”, usually purchased from Rich’s bake-shop. I remember them as small, delectable, little fluffs of bread. I probably could have eaten my weight in them, but the napkin lining the bread basket was carefully secured after the first offering, and my father’s hand was the only one allowed a second chance.
To my mind, the pièce de résistance of the roll kingdom measured a mere finger-width, and was only offered as an accessory to a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. One of these, cradling a dollop of gravy, and I forgot all about the chicken. Long ago, these rolls went the way of Rich’s bake-shop, replaced, of course, by biscuits.
Occasionally, and usually at breakfast, my mother rapped open a can of biscuits. My father seemed satisfied no matter what form of fiber sat upon his plate. I, however, found canned biscuits an unsatisfactory fabrication of the real thing. No amount of grape jelly transformed this pig’s ear into a satin purse.
My former husband was raised in the tiny town of Jefferson, Georgia, by a mother who knew her way around a southern kitchen. And while he never complained about the dinners I fashioned from the tins and boxes of my youth, he moved canned green beans from one side of his mouth to the other, as he told stories of bigger, greener beans, slow-cooked on the back of a stove for hours, and biscuits, used to sop up the “pot liquor”.
He was there when I attempted to recreate my mother’s angelic recipe, graciously refusing to lend his voice to the discussion of ice-hockey, choosing instead to described biscuits the way he’d come to know them; large squares, cut from a single slab of dough. It became my mission to uncover this long-held culinary secret.
Viola Carroll was a formidable woman. Striated skin, hanging from space once occupied by her tricep, spoke of former girth. She was tall, a good six inches taller than I, and vocal. If she thought it, she said it; and, this knowledge, alone, was enough to put me on my best behavior. I dressed, before we left, in my most becoming casual outfit, in an effort to quell her tongue. Viola expected a woman to be “dressed”.
Our arrival was always met graciously, as Viola went for her purse. Viola always needed something from the grocery store. She gamely folded her generous frame into the bucket-seat of my aged Toyota wearing a look of anticipation heretofore only seen on a canine head hung from a car window.
As we bounced between traffic lights, Viola steadied herself upon a black, vinyl handbag boasting a faux-gold snap.
“I like yowah little cah, but this heah road sho is bumpy!”
Even now, the memory of those words brings a smile to my face.
Our foray of the local discount grocery store complete, Viola demonstrated, for me, the artistry of southern biscuits. They were, indeed, carved from a single slab of dough which she manipulated between country-sized hands, for several minutes, before slamming the mass onto an unsuspecting jelly-roll pan. A large, well-worn, butcher’s knife quickly separated the colorless blob into generous squares before her hands bounced the sides into shape. The result was toasted to a golden hue on top, leaving the middle ethereally transparent. As the fibrous mass melted upon my tongue, I knew nothing I could conjure would recreate that kind of bliss.
Fortunately, for me, there was “Bisquick”; a couple of cups of powder, poured from a gaily-colored box, mixed with water, and voilà, biscuits! Following, Viola’s example, I slammed tablespoon-sized blobs onto an unsuspecting jelly-roll pan.
Today, on the rare occasion I venture to place biscuits on my southern dinner table, I must first remove them from a frozen, plastic bag. I understand the result is every bit as satisfying as my mother’s Angels, and Viola’s squares, especially when dunked in yellow syrup.
© Copyright 2007-2009 Stacye Carroll All Rights Reserved
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