Prompt: Breakfast
I always associate breakfast with my grandmother’s kitchen. If I close my eyes I can still smell bacon frying in her very old, very loved and very worn cast iron pan. On the counter cocktail sausages hugged by rolled out biscuit dough (the canned kind) are still steaming. I always burned my fingers and tongue from sneaking one fresh out of the oven, well before they were cool enough to eat.
My grandmother is an intimidating woman with bright red curly hair that’s starting to thin on top. She fusses and chases my cousins out but doesn't seem to mind me kneeling on a stool watching her make from-scratch biscuits. She never measures anything. She scoops out flour from a worn sack by the handful, adds a pinch of salt from her palm, baking soda with a teaspoon and rubs butter--always butter, never margarine or lard--with her fingertips. She pours buttermilk into a well in the center of her bowl and knows exactly when to stop. She mixes with hands, pours the whole bowl onto a floured counter and kneads briefly. “You’ll always know when it’s enough, and then you stop” she says, looking down at the dough before glancing at me with a smile “It will feel right in your hands.” She folds the dough over once and then dusts the top of a small juice glass. The circles of dough go onto a cookie sheet snuggled up close together (“they’re better when they’re together, too rough when they rise up alone”) and drizzled with melted butter.
She doesn't use a timer, but exactly 13 minutes later (always 13 minutes) she pulls them out. She tells me that she could smell they were ready to come out. My grandfather enters the kitchen, drawn in by the intoxicating scent now wafting out of the kitchen. From the living room I can hear my brothers and cousins fighting over a cartoon. My grandfather leans over and kisses my grandmother, trying to sneak a still hot biscuit from the tray behind her back. She notices, of course, and swats at his hand, but he takes one anyway and gives me half. The biscuit is hot in my hand and hotter in my mouth but is buttery and delicious and melts on my tongue.
My grandfather passed away when I was a teenager, and my grandmother stopped making biscuits. I am a mother now, with my own husband and child. I don’t think I will ever be able to make her biscuits by instinct, without the precise measurements afforded to me by special cups and spoons, but I make them anyway. I never wait for them to cool before trying one. I always burn my fingers and tongue just a little bit, but as the buttery biscuit melts in my mouth I close my eyes, and, for just a moment, I’m a little girl again, in my grandmother’s kitchen.
Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup (5 1/3 tablespoons) butter
1 cup buttermilk (or 1 cup minus 1 tablespoon milk + 1 tablespoon lemon juice or while vinegar. Stir and let it sit for a few minutes).
1) Preheat oven to 425.
2) In a medium bowl sift together dry ingredients. Rub in butter with fingertips (or forks, or a pastry blender, or whatever you want) until mixture resembles coarse meal.
3) Pour in buttermilk a bit at a time, mixing with a wooden spoon or your hands until dough sticks together and pulls away from the sides.
4) Turn dough onto a floured surface and gently knead 15-20 times. Dough will be sticky.
5) Pat or roll out dough to 1" thick. Cut biscuits with a 2.5" cookie cutter or the edge of a glass dipped in flour. Repeat until all dough is used. Brush off excess flour and group biscuits together on a greased baking sheet. Brush tops with melted butter if you like (I recommend!)
6) Bake 13-15 minutes or until tops are golden brown. Serve hot with butter, jam, honey, sausage gravy, bacon gravy, jelly...
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