The following is a post from a guest blogger. Not just your ordinary guest blogger, but a person I would like to put into the category of a quintessential Southerner. Very proud, and a great resource for me when I want to get the Southern perspective on anything. We have talked many times on many subjects, Yankee vs. Rebel, North vs. South. The civil war, Gone with the wind, Mason & Dixon, Dukes of Hazzard and much more. When I asked him if he would write something for the Yankee Exposure blog, he wanted to write something that was near and dear to his Southern heart......Biscuits!
So I give you, from my Southern pal and all around good guy.....Berkeley Clayton and a blog post on ...
Light Fluffy Biscuits
(I thought of changing his title to a more manly one, but somehow this one works)
Gordon approached me about writing for his blog and said I should write something from a southern point of view. I am a 5th generation Floridian and have lived here my whole life. I told Gordon I would write about biscuits since it is well known that Yankees such as Gordon know nothing about biscuits. Yankees probably get their biscuits from a cardboard tube. They may know bagels, toast or Heaven forbid, croissants, but they know nothing about light fluffy biscuits.
I was in a well-known fast food breakfast place several weeks ago and was eating a chicken biscuit. While it was good overall, the biscuit itself tended to break apart as I was eating it. This started me thinking about the biscuits that I ate when I was a kid. No one could make biscuits like my grandmother. I can still see her standing in the kitchen taking flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, buttermilk and............
....Crisco from a can, mixing it together and making the most succulent food ever made… at least when you are 10.
She would mix all this in a blue enamel pan that served double duty to make clabber, (another story) made a ball, slapped it on the table a few times, and pulled off just the right amount to make a biscuit that would not break apart while you ate it and soak up whatever you wanted to put on it.
You can’t do that with......
.... a bagel, (they have a hole in the middle and everything falls out) or toast or anything else. A half opened biscuit made right will hold any filling you want to put in it.
When my brother, sister and I would get home from school we went to grandma’s house and got a biscuit that sat out on the stove all day on a plate covered with a dishcloth. A pat of butter from the butter dish that sat on the table all the time, along with some cane syrup or a piece of left over bacon was an after school snack that stayed with you until supper time. I was eating a bacon biscuit long before any fast food place thought of it.
She made flat biscuits, “cathead biscuits”
more of a round biscuit than flat and even half-done biscuits for my great grandfather who got his own biscuits because he did not like his “burned”, just barely warm, mostly raw dough.
Biscuits and jelly, biscuits and sausage gravy, biscuits and cane syrup which is a dessert in and of itself. All of these are fond memories of childhood.
- Berkeley Clayton
So um, biscuits don't come from a cardboard tube? And what the heck is a clabber?
I am hungry now after this post...................I might have a cardboard croissant in the fridge...
