by Rick Bragg
“It doesn’t matter about the size. All mine are not the same size. Some people roll them out and use a cookie cutter so they’ll be the same size, but I like the dome, and you can’t get the dome unless you do it like this.”
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees, for 10 minutes.
Place biscuits on the middle rack. Bake until golden brown.
“How long, in minutes?” I asked her.
“I got no idea,” she said. “It’s like cornbread—I know by the smell.”
Normal people cook them around 15 minutes.
The best thing to do, as with all things she cooks, is to pay attention. If the top of the biscuit is good and brown, the bottom will be crispy, and the middle will be soft, fluffy, but done.
“It all depends on the stove. All stoves ain’t equal. They cook slower when they get about wore out…kinda like me.”
Sausage
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 pound, more or less, seasoned fresh pork sausage, hot or mild
1 tablespoon lard
Yellow mustard (to taste)
HOW TO COOK IT
Frying a sausage patty may sound simple, but if you have had as many bad hotel, restaurant, and fast-food sausage biscuits as we have had in this sad life, you might understand how easy it is to serve up a pitiful sausage biscuit, and how low the standard is.
This need not be exotic; fresh store-bought pork sausage is fine. Some people like to grind and season their own sausage from fresh pork, sage, red pepper, garlic, and other fine seasonings, and some people still sew all their own clothes and think JCPenney is the devil.
We are not aiming to be backward here, but you want plainly seasoned country sausage, not more exotic varieties intended for more complicated recipes, like lasagna and so forth; it should say so somewhere on the wrapping. You can choose between hot or mild. But even mild country sausage can be a little spicy, so hot sausage may be too much, overpowering.
There is a trick to frying it for biscuits. The thickness is everything. You do not want a thick hockey puck of sausage for this, though that is probably a poor standard of measurement in a place where it can be eighty-six and humid on Christmas Day.
Pat it out in your hands. You want a patty just a little bigger around than your biscuit, “because it’s gonna draw up a little bit.” It needs to be, before cooking, just a little less than ½ inch thick, my mother believes.
You do not want a big thick biscuit and a sad, tiny scrap of sausage, so that all you get is a mouthful of dough. Keep that in mind as you prepare both meat and bread.
The sausage begins, of course, with an abundance of fat, so you will not need much fat in the skillet ahead of time. “Use just a little lard, just a little, so it won’t stick,” my mother implores.
She likes to get the skillet hot, over about medium-high heat, so you get that nice sizzle and maybe just a bit of crisping, and in her defense, if you do not put a little fat down first, you will leave a skin of sausage on the skillet bottom when you try to turn it. After a few seconds, reduce the heat to medium.
Fry until the pink edges begin to take on color, just a few minutes, and turn. The sausage should be brown and just the slightest bit crispy. Now do the same to the other side.
Timing is everything in this. If either the biscuits or sausage gets cold, this is ruined. Split the biscuit completely, ease in the patty, and top it with the rest of the biscuit. Serve immediately.
My mother believes you can add just a hint of yellow mustard to the top of the patty, but this is a matter of taste.
NOTE If smoked sausage is your passion, split a 4-inch section of smoked sausage and leave it connected by the casing. Fry on both sides till the casing is crispy and the other side has just a bit of brown, then lay, casing side up, on your split biscuit.
Fast-food biscuits, which have become an essential form of sustenance in the modern-day South, combine big, thick, doughy biscuits and thin discs of rubbery pork sausage. Most likely, the patty was precooked, and just warmed over. Just as you cannot equate restaurant beans and greens with real food, do not make the only sausage biscuit of your life one from a drive-through.
That said, on a lonely highway in the early morning, with a thousand miles to go, even a fast-food sausage biscuit is better than no biscuit at all.
Ham
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 pound smoked ham
1 tablespoon lard
1 dash black pepper
HOW TO COOK IT
Slice into pieces no more than ½ inch thick and about 4 by 4 inches. Ragged shapes are excellent for this, so the pieces do not have to be square. In a strange way, the more ragged, the more appetizing it looks. Try, if you can, to leave a little fat on each piece.
This is already cooked, so just fry in the lard till you have a little brown color and the edges of fat have crisped just a bit, or at least gone clear. As it cooks, sprinkle with a little black pepper.
Smoked ham, when skillet-fried, can go a little tough, so do not overcook or it will be a miserable ingredient for a ham biscuit.
Some people like salt ham for this, but store-bought salt ham is unreliable and errs usually in a saltiness that makes you think of salt pork served on a chain gang, or on sailing ships in 1792. It is not just the saltiness of the ham, but the chemical tang.
Fatback
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 pound fatback or streak o’ lean
1 teaspoon black pepper
HOW TO COOK IT
Whether to use pure white fatback, which my mother calls white meat, or streak o’ lean is a matter of taste, but since this dish will be rendered and cooked slow till crisp, crumbling, the lean can get brittle and seem overcooked and taste strong. She prefers pure white fatback when she can get it.
If you can find freshly slaughtered pork, as for fatback—hog jowl will also work in this—use it, but my mother often has to make do with store-bought salt pork, usually presliced. This cannot be cooked by frying or baking till the salt has been at least partially boiled out.
If you have to slice it, those slices should be about ¼ inch thick, and between 3 and 4 inches long. Cover the salt pork with water, and boil for about 15 minutes; let it cool till it can be handled. Lay the slices on paper towels, cover with another layer of paper towels, and “pat the water out.”
“Then you just fry it till it goes crisp—you know, crumbly.”
I think this is my favorite biscuit, a piece or two of white meat cooked crisp, a circle of fried potato, and a dab of mustard. “And you have flat got somethin’ good.”
Fried Potatoes
This is not the basic Southern recipe of cubed potatoes, which resemble large hash browns. It is, instead, more like a thick potato chip, crisp outside and soft inside.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
3 or 4 medium-to-large white potatoes
3 to 4 tablespoons lard
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
HOW TO COOK IT
Peel the potatoes, and slice them between ¼ and ½ inch thick. No one is giving out a ribbon for this, so you do not have to be exact. But if you cut them thicker than ½ inch, they will never get done.
This may sound as if it should be easy. It is not easy. In a large skillet, over medium heat, get your fat hot, and ease in the sliced potatoes. They may try to stick, from the starch, even if you have good lard.
Cook until they turn golden, the outer edges are crisp, and a crisp golden sheen begins to form on the rest, then turn. Repeat the process. The thinner parts may crisp through, like chips, but this is fine. You want the middle still to have some soft, creamy potato, for contrast.
Of all the things my mother prepares, this is in my Top Ten.
“It ain’t that hard,” she said, after I told her I believed it was. “Cut ’em just right, cook ’em with patience, and drain ’em on some paper towels, so they won’t be so greasy, and you’ll have something fine.”
Spanish Scrambled Eg
gs
This a slightly fancier version of the eggs she cooked that night.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
6 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon good bacon grease
1 small onion, diced
1 blade green onion, slivered
½ cup mild cheese
HOW TO COOK IT
First, season the eggs. Add the salt, pepper, and cayenne to the eggs, mix them in, and set them aside.
In a large skillet, heat the bacon grease over medium-high heat until it goes clear, then set the stove to medium. Add the onion and green onion, and cook until they begin not just to go clear but to crisp a bit.
When just the slightest bit of caramelization is showing on the onion, stir in the eggs and then, quickly, the cheese, scrambling them into the other ingredients with a large spoon. You do not want a smooth omelet here, and you will not be flipping anything. We like our scrambled eggs a little on the soft-scrambled side.
“But why ‘hot Spanish eggs’?” I asked.
She told me it was because, at the last second, Charlie Sanders shook in a big dose of hot sauce—it was just the kind of thing he would do.
“But why ‘Spanish’?” I asked.
She just shrugged.
Why not?
* * *
• • •
“It is not a simple thing, to make biscuits in a hurry,” she said, thinking back to that supper. “Edna could do it real fast, but that might just be because she was married to Charlie Sanders.”
My mother would rather be careful, steady, as she is in all things.
“But I’ll tell you somethin’ you may not believe. Even though I’m old, I think I’m faster than I used to be. I mean, I’m faster at makin’ a good biscuit.”
I told her to be careful not to get sideways, moving so fast through her kitchen.
If she found any humor in that, she did not say.
There is probably more attention paid to the eccentricities of biscuits here than is necessary, but it is hard to exaggerate how much they meant to the people. When I was a little boy, I actually used to agonize over precisely how to eat those biscuits.
Should I eat them plain, with my grits and eggs and sausage and bacon or ham, or butter them and maybe spread on some muscadine jelly, or cherry, or grape, or maybe some apple butter, or fig preserves? Gravy, of any kind, complicated things. How could you choose between heaven and a higher one?
“Why,” she told me more than once, “don’t you have ’em both ways?” And as our people have done forever, she would ask how many buttered biscuits we wanted for dessert, and she would butter that fine second battery of biscuits, and slip the pan back into the warm oven as we ate our breakfast.
I wasted a lot of time as a little boy, wishing I were somewhere other than right here. All children do, I guess. I have been a lot of places, and I have never found any other place where you had a hot, glorious homemade biscuit for your breakfast, and then had a better and even sweeter biscuit for dessert.
* * *
• • •
My mother stayed with her big sister and her family for a few more days after Edna was back on her feet. Childbirth was not something she liked to dawdle over, but she appreciated the help, and bragged on my momma’s food, on all of it, especially her biscuits. It may seem a small thing now, but when one of the truly fine cooks in the known universe gave her blessing on biscuits, the last of the great delicacies, there was not so much victory as relief. My mother got back on her bicycle and pushed it, bouncing, across the trestle—at a dead run this time from beginning to end. But the train was not running, and she felt foolish at the other side.
She had no written proof. She had no ribbons from the county fair, for pies or cakes or pickles or jams. No one wrote a story about her in the paper. The word just spread, among family and friends on both sides of the state line, and that is what she would be known for, something attached to her name like a blood type on one of those stainless-steel bracelets they sold at the drugstore. She was a beautiful girl, and a kind girl, but what she would be known for, more than anything, was this:
Margaret Bundrum was a good cook.
I asked her once if she ever wanted to be something else.
“Well,” she said, “I always wisht I could dance.”
· 21 ·
PEOPLE WHO COOK
Buttermilk and Cornbread Patties
Mom, in her thirties
1955
THEY DANCED UP A FOOL at Darby’s Lake. The bands, mostly local boys who worked in the cotton mills and steel plants, played mostly old, traditional country, and some bluegrass, but now and then they would risk salvation by whipping a little “Lovesick Blues,” and even some of that new stuff, that rock and roll. They might even have jiggled their legs a little bit as they picked, but if they had shaken it like that boy Elvis, the police would have dragged them off to jail and gone to hunt for an exorcist.
“I never danced,” she said, “but I watched ’em dance. I loved to watch ’em dance.”
It was largely square dancing, and some wild boys could do a mean buck dance, the way her momma and daddy used to dance when they were young.
“They had little boats out there, little boats you could ride in, and paddle around. But I never went in any of them, neither. I guess I was shy.”
She would go with her sisters, stand in the back, and tap her foot.
In all her years, she never learned a step.
“I was busy, son,” she told me—usually in the kitchen.
She learned to cook because she loved the craft, but also because, as the family changed in her teens, there was no one else. Her daddy was ill, and her momma was losing her battle against an early-onset darkness that some people might call dementia, but we just referred to, politely, as “not all right,” in the same kind way that a drunk is “not all right.” As the older girls left and her momma wavered between eccentricity and something worse, there was no one else to cook for her momma and daddy, or for her little sisters, Jo and Sue. Even before her teens, she had been the cook. You miss a lot, standing over a stove.
She still went to Darby’s Lake when she turned eighteen, but not to listen to the music. “I went to clean house and cook for some people,” she said, to help make a living for her people. She cooked for others, for strangers, and at suppertime she went home to her momma and daddy’s house in the woods, catching a ride with whatever kin she could. She walked a lot when there was no other way to and from work.
There was no school to miss. They had moved so many times, it had been impossible, year after year, to rejoin her own grade, and as she slipped behind, she finally just gave up, which broke her heart.
“I went to work over there to Darby’s Lake one time, to this old man’s house, an old army man named Major Bryant. I never heard him called nothin’ but ‘Major.’ ” She went to cook and clean, and as she worked she noticed the young people drifting toward the lake, to swim, and dance, and ride in the little boats.
The old man, who was a nice old man, saw this.
“Why don’t I cook for you?” he said.
He cooked good cornbread, and a big skillet of potatoes and onions, and stewed cabbage, “and, I mean, it was good. He could cook some awfully good food. And he poured me the biggest glass of milk.”
Most people were nice to her when she was in their houses. They seemed to like her food, and sometimes they let her take food home to her people, though it is a point of pride with her that there was usually little of it left. She cooked country food, the same food that these people who could afford a housekeeper had grown up on, cooked either by their family or by the hired help who came before her. But none of them had ever cooked for her before that day.
Her rides had all failed to show. She remembers walking home in the dark, for hours, walking into the quiet house, late.
Her
daddy was standing over the stove, frying hoecakes, singing softly. The rest of the house was in bed.
I had not been in Washington
Many more weeks than three
I fell in love with a pretty little girl
She fell in love with me
Fell in love with me
His old truck was broke down, he said, or he would have fetched her.
“Thought I’d make us some supper,” he said, “while I waited up.”
She took me in her parlor
She cooled me with her fan
She whispered low in her mother’s ear
I love that gamblin’ man
Love that gamblin’ man
He crumbled fried cornbread into two glasses, poured in cold buttermilk, put in a dash of salt and pepper, and stuck in two blades of fresh green onion and two spoons.
It was funny how such a simple thing could be so good. They sat on either side of a lantern and ate, talking quietly, because they did not want to wake the others.
She had met a boy, she told him, a good-looking marine from the mill village, and though they had known each other only a little while, they had talked about getting married someday. But then who would cook for y’all? she wondered aloud. He told her she was not the only good fry cook in that little house, by God—and he smiled—so everything would probably be all right.
He said he would take the mill-village boy fishing, to see if he was any-’count, and maybe just to threaten him a little bit. There was something about being in the middle channel of the Coosa, in a rocking, raggedy boat, with whole trees floating sideways in the current, that tended to give a young man religion.