The Way to a Man's ♥
Grandma's Biscuits
When I was a kid growing up, my grandparents lived in the country and we spent nearly every Saturday at their house for as long as I can remember. I wandered around the junkyard my grandpa and uncles ran as a business or spent time around the animals my grandfather owned, but when my grandma fixed a batch of biscuits from scratch, I was always at her elbow.
Most of those
Saturday afternoons would find me in the kitchen, sitting on my knees in
one of the mismatched kitchen chairs (some were wooden with upholstered
seats and backs, others chrome and vinyl to match the table) watching
my grandma make biscuits that would make your mouth water. She knew the
recipe by heart, as she did with most recipes she ever made, I believe.
After cleaning off the surface of one end of the now-retro yellow
Formica and chrome dining table, she sifted the flour with the old
crank-handled sifter until she had a mountain of soft white.
Then she would
hollow it out and fill the hole with lard and fresh cow’s milk one of my
uncles brought home from his milk route. It wasn’t the store-bought
pasteurized stuff. Nope, we had the good kind that had cream on the top
and it was so rich, filling and good with cookies. She mixed and kneaded
until she had the dough the right consistency, something she’d done for
years long before I existed and I’m 99.9% certain that she could “feel”
when the dough had the proper measurement of love added to it.
I waited impatiently
for her to use the old aluminum can to cut out the biscuits and place
them on a cookie sheet. She also had, what I assume was, a donut hole
cutter that she would also cut out tiny biscuits, just especially for me
and my sister to have. Then came my favorite part- the leftover bits,
if there were any, she would give me a small portion of raw dough to eat
as a treat while waiting for the biscuits to bake. In the summertime,
the wait nearly killed me until I could slather a hot biscuit with
butter or throw a slice of tomato or cucumber on it with a dash of salt.
I could have, and probably did, eat enough to make myself sick. It’s
one thing I really missed once she was gone.
My mom swears it
took her years to get it right and even now, she still doesn’t think
hers can compare to her mom’s biscuits. When I first became a wife and
mother, making my grandma’s and my mom’s biscuits became quite the
obsession. I couldn’t get them right for the world. I used shortening
and it just wasn’t working. I wanted tall, flaky, airy, fluffy biscuits.
These were not it. My biscuits were hard as a rock, flat, usually
inedible, and in no way, shape, or form did they come close to either of
my predecessors. If worse came to worst, I could’ve used them for
weapons because I know they could have knocked a decent knot on
someone’s head.
Being I don’t live
close to my parents anymore though, I knew I had to do something about
it. I bought a bucket of lard, intent on getting it right, even if it
killed me. It’s taken time, and a lot of practice, especially when there
was never a written recipe to go by, but I’ve started making progress
in the past couple of years. That’s when I learned the secret. How I
didn’t see it before I’ll never know—It’s LOVE.
I was always in a
hurry when I tried making them, growing up in a generation that rushes
through things, but that’s part of the secret- you can’t hurry through
it, you can’t rush “love”- not in life and not in food. You have to take
it slow and think with your heart, not your head. That’s how my grandma
knew it all those years ago, how my mom does it without a second
thought nowadays, and how I’ve learned the secret they knew- they were cooking by heart.
Of course, they’ll never be my grandma’s, or even my mom’s, but they’re
close enough to perfect for me. I make them for sausage gravy, to go
with chicken, and they taste pretty darn good with a slice of tomato or
cucumber, too.
This is basically my grandma's recipe, an eyeball/know it by heart kind of recipe, based loosely on my grandmother's and my mom’s instruction, though my grandma didn't use butter, just lard- I used the following—
Ingredients-
approximately 4-5 Cups Self-Rising Flour, sifted
approximately 1/2 stick butter
3 Heaping Tbsp. Lard
1/2 cup to a Cup Milk (definitely an eyeball measurement)
Optional: a squirt of honey makes them sweeter and lighter.
1. Sift
flour into large bowl. Make "volcano" in center. Put in butter and
lard. Begin working flour/butter/lard with one hand until it begins to
come together, then start working in a little milk at a time until it
reaches a wet, pasty consistency.
2. Putting
the milk aside, begin sifting extra flour over the wet dough and start
working it in until the dough takes on a dry, but elastic texture that
"breaths."
3. Turn
it out onto a clean counter top covered in flour and continue to work
and knead dough. Roll it out to about a 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch thick and
use round biscuit cutter (I use an old cleaned vegetable can with both
ends cut out just as my grandmother had.)
4. Place biscuits on foil lined cookie sheet, sides touching and bake in 400º oven. I bake it on the bottom rack for 10 minutes and check the bottoms at the 10-minute mark. If they are lightly golden, I move the cookie sheet to the top rack (placed at the center) and bake for another 10 minutes or until golden on tops.
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