The wooden trough lived in the bottom kitchen cabinet, the one to the left of the sink. It stuck sometimes, requiring a hip check. Stocked with a heavy blanket of flour, the trough served as the base of all things biscuit. Mom retrieved it from its shelf, bumped the door closed, and began the process with a clump of lard and a pond of buttermilk. She used her hand to swirl the ingredients until they coagulated into dough. I stood beside her on a metal step stool holding my faithful stuffed companion, Winnie the Pooh.
My family has big hands – short digits, broad knuckles. They are the hands of working people, cow milkers and row hoers. I watched Mom’s strong-boned, olive toned hands work magic in flower beds and French braids, but they seemed most at home in flour. A small square diamond and thin gold wedding band adorned her unpolished nails, buffed, and filed into crescent moons.
When the dough consistency satisfied her, she shaped the biscuits onto a greased pan. She didn’t roll or cut them, she molded them – more potter than baker. When the pan was full, the remaining dough was placed onto a small metal disc. We called this coveted, ameba-shaped extra biscuit, “cakey bread.” While it came from the same dough trough, it was special because it was separated out from the others, and it had its own original name.
From the stool advantage, I attempted to reserve the cakey bread for myself. The youngest child learns to act early and often to secure desirables ahead of siblings. “We’ll see,” answered Mom, which translated to, unlikely.
Mom’s biscuits were bronzed on bottom, fluffy clouds on top, taller and more well done than Granny’s, which were lighter in color and texture and robust in density. While I liked Mom’s biscuits, I loved Granny’s. Out of guilt or maybe to ratchet Mom down a notch, I confessed my biscuit ranking.
Granny, #1. Mom, #2.
“Suit yourself,” Mom replied, unphased. “I liked Grandma Needham’s biscuits better than my own Mama’s too.” My four-year-old brain churned with curiosity branding this exchange into my subconscious. Suit yourself? What the tarnation?
Later I would learn to identify this inherent struggle for originality between parent and offspring from my own children and remember that most trails have wagon ruts. Deep runs the desire to fit in with sameness and stretch out with difference.
I was raised in the south, so I’m capable of making biscuits and they score a solid okay, but they miss heart. It’s scientific as I have to follow the recipe on the flour bag and once measuring cups and puny half pint containers of buttermilk enter the equation, the biscuit gods know they are dealing with a poser. I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m at peace with this mediocre skill set.
I have a Smokin’ Hot Love Biscuit and a dog named Toast, so I pay homage to my love of carbs in other ways.
At the end of my arms are the hands of my family. My skin is olive, my fingers stumpy. The hands of a worker bee. I’m more at home on a computer keyboard than in a dough trough, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think about the impressions that were baked into me. Somehow with age, there’s a yearning to draw back to that which no longer exists in earthly form. I wonder how Mom would feel knowing that when biscuiting, I use the frozen variety. If I could ask her about technique now, I suspect she would say I should have paid more attention when I was watching her or maybe she would laugh and put Granny on the heaven phone line since I liked hers better. Perhaps she would employ a phrase common to my kinfolk about my store-bought biscuits, “More money than sense.” All these answers are applicable. Touché, afterworld. Touché.
While I’m a product of my parents, I’m different. In some ways this is better, in others, not so much. The world has evolved, demanding changes and I have grown into my own person. I am grateful for the foundation they established and the encouragement to be my own architect. Just like me, they were first timers at this business of living when they walked the earth and rotated the sun.
A few months back, Riley, Ryann, and I were away together for a weekend. Over dinner and adult beverages, they started revealing things they did in younger years that I didn’t know about. Some I suspected; some I didn’t. I nodded and sipped my Cabernet, knowing that I did my best as their mom and that I love them both completely for the ways in which we are the same and different – yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
With cleansing breaths, I acknowledged and released their secrets. In many instances, I laughed. Until … they professed their intense, undying love for, ahem, Instant Mashed Potatoes. Geez, just when I thought I raised decent humans. How lazy can one’s children be that they resort to faking a potato?
“That does it,” I said. “I’m re-writing the will.”
No frozen biscuits for you.
“ Later I would learn to identify this inherent struggle for originality between parent and offspring from my own children and remember that most trails have wagon ruts. Deep runs the desire to fit in with sameness and stretch out with difference.” wow.
I couldn’t love this more! It’s so amazing to me how much our mothers and grandmothers were alike in their approach to life and cooking. I’ve kept my Granny’s trough, one of the few mementos from my childhood still left. I’ve never heard it called a trough – but that’s what it is, for sure. I’ve always called it "Granny’s Bowl." I remember the same deft handling of the lard, flour, and buttermilk. My mother worked her way through college making biscuits for the school dining hall, but it’s Granny’s biscuits I remember. "The biscuit gods know I’m a poser." Ha. Great line. I’m not even a poser. I don’t try . . . when you’ve had the best, why bother? Another wonderful essay, Emily! "Touché, afterworld. Touché."
I agree @Watson Jane-Page – the most amazing paragraph ever! Save the cakey-bread for me.
Love this “Just like me, they were first timers at this business of living when they walked the earth and rotated the sun.”
Also, I’ve never made a great biscuit.
My mother’s mother was Italian. Growing up, my mother tomato sauce for her pasta dishes. When my brothers and I grew up, she went to jar tomato sauce. We noticed, but did not say anything.
The youngest of 5, I also stood on a stool and watched the "biscuit bowl" come out from under the cabinet at home and at Grandma Dunlaps. It was covered with a clean white piece of sack material that probably had held cow feed at one point. The biscuit pan was coated in lard. If no one was watching you could draw on the pan, making lard pictures. Many times I was told that good children didn’t do that, finally deciding that good children must really have a dull life. Most everything I liked fell in the "they don’t do it" category. I loved the pond of buttermilk and the squishing of lard, milk and flour into the dough. It stuck between fingers until it was ready to form, then it was carefully cleaned off and hands floured for forming of the biscuits. Biscuits at Grandma’s were superb. Mamas were second place. Thank you for bringing these memories to the forefront. We came from good stock.