Southern Biscuits

 I blew on the small, three-bite biscuit in my hand, nudging it to cool. Tangy hints of dough and buttermilk wafted from the golden disk. It was the scent I most associated with my grandmother. This batch wouldn’t be exactly like hers; I’d tried, unsuccessfully, over many years to replicate her recipe. My mother had tried before me and neither could she.

Grandmother was never Granny or Grandma. Such titles were for someone other than a respectable Southern lady. She wasn’t one of those genteel ladies living in a white house with Grecian columns on the front porch, serving iced tea and cake to gossipy neighbors. But her family had deep roots in the town, and she was respected in the community as the president of the Sunday School class at Thompson First Baptist. That alone merited the formal title of Grandmother.

She had broad shoulders and curly, fluffy red hair with no hints of gray. She fought with her hair, to keep it down, but on a rainy day it was a losing battle and it sprang from her head. Her hands were large to match her shoulders and often looked beat up from overuse. In the kitchen, she wore a house dress, an unshapely calico cover, over her work or dress clothes. Her skin-toned pantyhose often sagged at her ankles just above clunky, industrial style shoes. Sundays were dress-up day and she wore a conservative suit over a floral blouse. It was the only day of the week she didn’t cook, instead heading to the cafe after church services for meatloaf or pot roast.

Daily tasks required most of Grandmother’s time and she rarely sat. She tended the yard, house and job with German stoicism, never complaining, while Pap smoked cigarettes on the front porch.

Her parents named her Fannie Ruth, but she insisted being called Ruth. She lived her entire life in Thompson, Georgia, a town so small nobody would know it existed if the high school Bulldogs weren’t such strong contenders every year for the state football championship. Like every other employed woman in the 1930’s in that town, she worked for the garment factory, sewing zippers into trousers. When she retired after thirty years, the company gave her a set of silverware, and no pension.

Ruth’s father died when she was eleven, forcing her mother out of the house and into the cotton fields with the other workers. Ruth cared for the younger children and cooked dinner, the large meal served at noon, for the family and workers. Just after clearing dinner away, she began preparing supper. Meals consisted of country ham with lima beans or black-eyed peas, fried chicken with potatoes and red-eye gravy, or fat-back and field peas. All included biscuits, served with honey or fig preserves.

The biscuits should have been easy. They only comprised three ingredients: self-rising White Lily flour, Crisco shortening, and cold buttermilk. In Grandmother’s hands, biscuit-making was a menial task, simple enough for an eleven year-old child feeding hungry cotton harvesters. But their construction depended on touch and texture, abstract, indemonstrable technique.

 I had sat at her kitchen counter as a child and watched her sift the flour, crumble it into shortening. She never measured.

I took a bite of the biscuit I held in my hand. The center was too dense, the crust over crumbly. They lacked the tenderness of hers. But with each bite I tasted the childhood days I spent in her home.

Each morning, Ruth rose before anyone else in the household and prepared breakfast: eggs and grits, spicy pork sausage links, and biscuit toast—halved and buttered biscuits leftover from the night before, toasted under the broiler. The only time breakfast varied was when the biscuits were gone from the night before. Then, she made a fresh batch.

I began my quest to replicate her biscuits when I was newly married. We lived across the country from Georgia, in Idaho. My husband had never met Grandmother or tasted her biscuits. He didn’t understand why I was unhappy with my efforts to make them. “They are fabulous!,” he said.

A year later when I had my first child, Grandmother flew out and spent a month with us, watching the newborn while I finished my final semester of college. That’s when my husband learned the difference in our competency at making biscuits. Hers were small, pillowy morsels, melting layers of flakiness, the perfect bite of warm buttery softness in a crumbly exterior. Their tangy saltiness coated the mouth and the throat burst with an involuntary “Mmmmm.”

My husband’s admiration for Grandmother’s biscuits only fueled my resolve to make them as she did. I kept trying.

 It wasn’t a formal lesson, but one day I baked with her. She sifted her flour, I sifted mine. She plunged her hand into the large Crisco can and scooped out a handful of shortening. I mimicked her and was certain our batches were identical. I followed her lead as she crumbled the shortening with her hands, working it into the flour between her thumb and fingers. My mix looked like hers. She poured cold buttermilk into the mixture, folded it as gently as if she were stroking a baby’s cheek. I did the same. Together we turned the dough onto the floured counter and patted it into a circle.

In her own kitchen, Grandmother always cut the biscuits with a two-inch jelly jar. But I had bought a real biscuit cutter, with a red wooden handle. When I brought it out, Grandmother smiled in the way that said “Well, bless your little heart.”

We shared the biscuit cutter. Grandmother placed her dough rounds on one baking sheet, mine on another and put them in the oven. Exactly seven minutes later, they browned to a golden ochre.

Neither batch was perfect that day. Grandmother was unhappy with hers, and mine were worse. We concluded the fancy cutter with the red handle was to blame.

While cleaning the kitchen, Grandmother opened her thoughts about her childhood to me.

“It was awful hard. I never got to be a kid,” she said. “That’s why I was always glad I raised two boys. I never wanted to bring a girl into this world to work so hard. It’s done me real good to have granddaughters, to see y’all’s life is easier than mine was.”

I kissed her cheek.

Grandmother returned to Georgia and I saw little of her. As she aged, she couldn’t travel as easily, and I was in the thick of raising three small children. I practiced making the biscuits as she had taught me, but they never turned out like hers. It seemed the biscuits couldn’t be replicated; they only responded to Grandmother’s fingers, her touch.

I sent my grandmother a plane ticket when my oldest child was five and graduating from preschool. In his sweet, child-voice, he asked her to make him biscuits to share with his classmates.

I found her standing at the counter the next morning, covered in flour. The biscuits were ready to go into the oven, but she seemed confused over the temperature. I put my arm around her shoulder and told her the problem was my quirky oven, then helped her with the knobs.

I walked my son into his class that day. He held a woven basket filled with the small warm treasures. I whispered into his teacher’s ear. She nodded then steered him forward.

Throwing his shoulders back, he marched step by step to the front of room, holding the basket in front of him, his little face beaming.

“My grandmother made these,” he declared boldly. “She’s a biscuit artist!”

Unlike her rejection of Fannie or Granny, my grandmother accepted this new title; along with Grandmother and Ruth, she became The Biscuit Artist.

When my children were old enough to leave with their father for a few days, I traveled to Georgia and visited Grandmother. By this time she lived in a nursing home.

“Kathy’s here! Y’all didn’t tell me Kathy was coming,” she exclaimed.

I let out the breath I had been holding in apprehension.

She knew me.

Once I got her started, she told me stories of her past. She recalled details of the houses she’d lived in, remembering the years she occupied them. She knew how many zippers she’d sewn into trousers for The Thompson Company, and the exact year Taco Bell built the first fast food restaurant in town.

I wished she had been as precise with her biscuit recipe.

When a nurse entered the room to help Grandmother to the restroom, I stepped out of the nursing home and into the sun. The air carried warm humidity, unfamiliar bird songs, and a pleasant breeze. This might be the last time I see her.

Thinking I’d given her enough time for privacy, I returned to her room. She was dressed and sitting in a vinyl chair next to the window, the nurse beside her. Grandmother raised her head and looked into my face.

“Kathy’s here! Y’all didn’t tell me Kathy was coming.”