“Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick maker,” which one fits you? It seems that just here lately everybody wants to be a baker and they want to use White Lilly flour and they want to make biscuits. I have never seen so many different ways to make and prepare the ever hopefully light as air and high as the sky concoctions. Everybody has their own recipe and theirs is, of course, the best.
I was taught at an early age the best way to make the perfect biscuit. I had the best teacher, my grandmother. Of course, we did not have the special flour everyone wants now, but we had a good flour and made delightful biscuits.
She had a big dough trough, which I was fortunate enough to have been gifted by her, that she kept her flour in and stored it inside her old pie safe, with her old sifter with the wooden handle. There was a small opening in the bottom of her safe that her dough bowl and her sifter would fit and that’s where they were put each time, she finished using them.
Every morning she would bring these treasures out and make those delicious biscuits. She always made herself two regular sized and made my granddaddy two about the size of a saucer. He would always brag that he only ate two biscuits every morning, but he never said how big they were.
I can remember standing on my little box my granddaddy made me to boost me at the table and to stand on as I helped her in the kitchen, to “help” her make these morning delights. She would always start by making a ‘well’ in the flour, filling it with lard made from the last hog they had killed, working it through the dough and then adding some of her home-made buttermilk to form the pinched off dough for each biscuit, laying them on the flat iron skillet and slipping them into a really hot oven. As she pulled them from the oven, my granddaddy would be sitting at the long roughhewn table tapping on the flowered oil cloth saying, ‘biscuit, biscuit.”
I have made these mouth-watering savories many times, but I have never duplicated the same taste that she would pull from the old wood fed oven.
Grandmother’s Biscuits
Add 2 teaspoon baking powder, 1 tablespoons sugar, ½ teaspoon salt, ½ cup shortening, 2/3 cup of buttermilk, and work together with your hands. After mixing and smooth, pinch off desired amount or roll out and cut out with a biscuit cutter. Place in a hot oven, 400 degrees for about 10 – 12 minutes. Then all you would need would be some of her fresh churned butter.
