Flour on the Floor: Buttermilk Biscuits and Sir Mix-a-Lot

Without meaning to, I gave the cold-shoulder to my Southern roots thirteen years ago when I stopped eating pork. I knew I would miss some of my childhood staples like fried pork-chops, pinto beans stewed with a ham hock, and hand-formed sausage patties; but I didn’t calculate the loss of my favorite breakfast: biscuits and gravy. In fact, on my first visit home after announcing my pig-free status, my mom made me a giant plate of crusty biscuits smothered in lumpy, brown-specked gravy. Mom was respectful of my new choice and didn’t serve me the side of bacon and sausage that adorned the other plates.

But as I dug in, I tasted the familiar salty goodness and grisly feel of sausage bits and had to ask, “Mom, there’s not sausage in this gravy, right?” Mom smiled, “Of course there is, hon, that’s what makes it so good.” She conveyed no malice or trickery in her response—she simply didn’t connect my new semi-vegetarian status with the pork in the gravy. When I handed her back the plate, my grandmother crinkled her nose in confusion and disgust and said in her slow, Southern way, “Well, Pam, you’re not even going to have pork in gravy?”

Often families can be slow to adapt to our ever-growing selves. Since none of my family members live nearby, I find that there is always a warming period at the beginning of every visit, a little bit of this-is-me-now time. And sometimes families never fully accept our new identities. For example, I went to the elongated name of “Pamela” post high-school, but twenty years later I am still “Pam” to my extended family. I wonder if it is simply habit or an unconscious want to keep me (and them as a by-product) young. Maybe it’s their way of holding onto me even after I’ve changed so much: geography, religion, and income bracket.

Even though I’ve ditched the sausage-studded gravy, I still enjoy the biscuits I had as a child. But, I’ve never made them from scratch before. According to my mom, my great-grandmother used to make biscuits so high they were like yeast rolls. They ate biscuits with at least two meals a day for snacks, grabbing them from their warming spot by the coal stove. My grandmother made biscuits too. Sundays found my mother and her siblings gathered around a table in their coal mining town wolfing down a giant breakfast of biscuits and gravy before being bundled off to church while her parents stayed home. Several hours home on a Sunday without kids underfoot? Coal camp Christianity is sounding pretty good.

Likewise, my mother made big Sunday biscuit breakfasts for me as a child. My grandmother used to encourage her to make them frequently so she wouldn’t “lose her hand at it.” At forty-one, I’ve never made biscuits and realize that though they were a big part of my childhood and that of each generation before me, I have no hand.

I plan to learn today. In addition to making homemade biscuits I decide to test the fill-in that I’ve been using when the kids ask for biscuits and I’m pressed for time (which means always): refrigerated canned biscuits. We will be making a “batch” of Pillsbury Grands Flaky Layers Honey Butter Biscuits (a name so stuffed with adjectives it barely fits on its container) to eat alongside our homemade version. I want to know, does it really matter; are my shortcuts any less satisfying than the real thing or were my fore-mothers onto something? It is with a lot of genealogical pressure that I approach this week’s task.

I assemble the ingredients for both sets of biscuits. In one corner we have two types of flour, butter, baking soda and powder, sugar and buttermilk; in the other we have, well, a can. More specifically, a cardboard can containing pre-shaped, ready-to-bake refrigerated segments of dough chock full of simulated buttery goodness. My homemade biscuit ingredients are already at a disadvantage as far as impressing kids goes because they don’t make an exciting “pop” at their seams when opened.

As we fuss over cutting the cold butter into the dry ingredients to produce dough, I marvel at being the first generation with cooking conveniences like canned dough. But a little research reveals that refrigerator biscuits were available as early as 1931, in plenty of time for my grandmother to serve them pre-Sunday school; she and my mom simply opted to keep the traditions they were passed. And they have a right, as Southerners, to be proud of their biscuit heritage. Back before national food distribution was available (a development that the “buy local” trend is currently bucking), the long warm Southern summers produced wheat with less protein which made better biscuit flour. Biscuits were popular in the South because they were better in the South.

Once the dough is ready, the biscuit-maker must choose—drop the dough by rounded spoonfuls onto the cookie sheet or roll and cut into circles (my grandma used a tin can for this). This Baking Illustrated recipe mixes these two (rough vs. smooth) tacts and has us form the dough into a large circle then cut it pizza-like into wedges which we form by hand into misshapen circles for baking.

The kids dub the first batch of buttermilk biscuits “round” and the second batch “lumpy.” It’s now 6pm and my plan was to serve other breakfast items like orange juice, scrambled eggs, and turkey bacon with the biscuits to complete our dinner. But as most things motherhood-related, I am recalibrating and downgrading my expectations of myself on the fly. I decide that we will have our first annual “All-Biscuit Dinner.” I gather jam and butter to help turn this bread into a bona-fide meal. In his song “Buttermilk Biscuits,” eighties rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot suggests, “add a bit of honey if you want to get funny; microwave the suckers if you want your honey runny.” Thanks Sir! I add honey to the table.

The match begins. Just entering the plate we have Round Biscuits which are perfect circles and stand over 2 inches tall; they are the current and reigning champion of modernity and my morning sanity. Coming out of the oven and fighting for the South we have Lumpy Biscuits which stand just over an inch-and-a-half; they have discernable ingredients and represent my culinary and familial history.

I find myself rooting for both contenders. Bites are taken and the voting begins.

KO! It’s an upset—Lumpy is the winner! He takes his victory lap swathed in butter while Round heads for the trash can. No one at the table is interested in finishing the canned biscuits. Instead, we gorge ourselves on the homemade ones, eating all twelve. I feel a vague sense of guilt at giving my children an all-carb breakfast-dinner but Sir Mix-a-Lot once again reassures with, “You eat ‘em in the morn, you eat ‘em at night.” Then adds: “Kentucky Fried Chicken makes ‘em just right” (remember when it was still socially acceptable to have the word “fried” in a restaurant name?). My daughter leans to me and whispers a secret, “This is the best dinner ever.”  

It makes me feel happily connected to my children to see them enjoying the biscuits of my youth. Maybe my extended family’s clinging to things past is as simple as that—they want to me to hold onto some bit of them, to keep them with me, to pass them on to my own children. What they don’t understand, perhaps, is that gravy and nicknames aside, I will carry on the important things they’ve given me: patience, love, unwavering support and encouragement, and now a new hand at biscuit-making.

I consider the possibility that one day my son will announce that he’d like to be called “Master T” from now on and that my daughter might pierce her nose or some private place that makes me want to rush her to the doctor. I will try to understand their metamorphoses while trusting that they will retain what matters.

Families are all about compromise and adjusted expectations. I have started viewing “Pam” as a not-quite-secret handshake, a term of endearment from those who knew me when. And my mom has stopped sneaking me pork products. Now she makes butter-based milk gravy just for me.

When I make biscuits again, I think I’ll serve our family’s traditional sausage gravy too; maybe the pork-loving gene skipped a generation and my kids will find something new to love. Next year we’ll host our newly-annual “All-Biscuit Dinner” on May 14th—National Buttermilk Biscuit Day. Who knew? I’ll bet Sir Mix-a-Lot did.