Ingredients: In Search Of Biscuits

My Biscuit Background

My mother-in-law was a marvelous cook. She was also by necessity a frugal one. She counted it an economic victory if she could keep her grocery expense down to ten dollars a bag. While meat was a treat, many of her meals would include rolls or biscuits. I follow her recipe for fruitcake successfully, and have tried to replicate her  heavenly version of Southern Ice Box Rolls (so far a fail) and her scrumptious biscuits (some modest successes along with some hockey pucks). Dorothy Remington Pollard used Crisco, which of course, having read the ingredient label, I prefer not to purchase. I keep lard in the fridge instead. My most recent online supplier is  South Chicago Packing.

Biscuits are not in my wheelhouse. In my childhood,  dinners were supplemented occasionally by Pepperidge Farm French rolls, which were really, really good and of course, are now really, really  discontinued. After several  heavy-handed biscuit disasters, I remain extremely grateful to the book by Cynthia Graubert and Nathalie Dupree, Southern Biscuits from which I made my first truly successful biscuits. 

I check out biscuits in restaurants, too, and I have a friend who, as a professional Southerner, shared with me her thoughts on the  mysteries of what makes a good biscuit. First of all, they really should not be too big. A case in point was a huge biscuit that I was served in a restaurant with a lonely, diminutive fried egg staring haplessly up at me and  accompanied by a couple of stingy pats of butter. Biscuits should not fall apart either, says my friend; rather, they should split easily so you can slather butter on them while they are still warm. To quote her directly: 

The biscuit qualities  I highly value are buttery and fluffy inside and golden flaky outside. I don’t like dense , hard,  dry or crumbly ones. And if there is a protein between the halves (chicken, sausage, ham, bacon) the biscuit better stay intact until the last bite. 

Interestingly, biscuits as we know them really came about with the discovery of baking soda and powder. Previous to their invention, biscuits were hard and, in the South,  some recipes called for them to be beaten with a hammer for an hour to break down the gluten and build air bubbles to create some lift. 

It Takes Two

I actually have two favorite recipes for biscuits, one for slathering butter and jam on at breakfast and another for berry shortcakes. Berries need a more mellow,  gentler, and sweeter biscuit than the one that can support loads of melting butter, dollops of jam or a piece of pork. 

My favorite breakfast biscuit is still from the first baking book by Brian Noyes,  who left a career as an an art director for several publications to create a bakery in rural Virginia. After winning a prize for his jam, Brian  sold his baked goods at a weekend market in Warrenton,  Virginia. He and his husband had bought a a farmhouse as a weekend  retreat in the area and are now fixtures with two Red Truck Bakeries – I encourage you to make a day trip to either location in Warrenton or Marshall.   Once set on this course, Brian enrolled in the professional pastry  program at the now closed L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, MD.  But he also badgered cooks throughout his travels for their techniques and recipes.  And his biscuit recipe is a beneficiary of his badgering and baking. I bake these on the sheet as recommended but I also bake them in a cake pan, as in my oven the cast iron skillet alternative gets them too brown for our liking.  I slavishly follow his biscuit placement technique, which is to push them close to each other  so that they rise up with one another to soaring heights.

A Sweeter, Gentler Biscuit

Since I really don’t like “breakfast biscuits” to be my shortcake for sliced strawberries and loads of whipped cream, I used to substitute pound cake or even better the Biscuit Milanaise from Dione Lucas. But being admonished at home that I just hadn’t found the right biscuit, I continued my search. think I have found the right one with this recipe from Claudia Fleming’s first dessert book,The Last Course. She also makes a  cross between a blueberry  cornmeal muffin and a friand that made me rethink the muffin scenario. I make these in a food processor, but you can do it by hand. Although there is no almond flavoring, you could swear it exists when you bite into these. And they also have a bit of a shortbread texture too. These are best when used the day they are made. I don’t think they freeze well, so I never make more than six at a time.  You can gently and quickly pat together the trimmings, turn the “scrap biscuit” over to bake with the other or simply cut the dough into sections, like brownies and then you don’t have “scraps”. In this case, allow the biscuits to cool thoroughly before splitting them for shortcake.