Biscuit Secrets Every Appalachian Grandmother Knew That No Can of Dough Ever Will (I Make Hers)

Every morning for sixty years, my grandmother Ada made biscuits in the dark, before the sun came up over the ridge behind her house. And every one of those mornings, she baked one pan that nobody in our family was allowed to touch. She wrapped it in a towel and set it on the windowsill by the back door, and by breakfast it was gone. I grew up at the head of a hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, standing at that woman's elbow, and she never once used a measuring cup or a recipe card. So sit down with me and I will give you sixteen of her biscuit secrets. Why she used lard from the crock and not butter. The soft flour that the cousins from Ohio could never find, and why their biscuits came out like hockey pucks. The hollow she made in the flour bowl, and how she could tell the weather by the flour. Why she sent me to the springhouse every summer evening. Why she never owned a rolling pin, never twisted the cutter, and only folded the dough on Sundays. The hot skillet, the chicken feather, the cathead, the sour milk, the soda that turned my mother's biscuits green, and what happened to the biscuits that were left over. And I will tell you about the one can of biscuit dough that ever came into her kitchen, what she did with it, and what she said. Women like my grandmother carried every one of these in their hands and their heads, and almost none of it was ever written down. So I put ninety seven of her kitchen secrets on paper, every one with the story behind it and a recipe that proves it. Biscuits are only one of them. I am Burl Sizemore. The next time you make biscuits, make a few more than you need, and take them to somebody who will not be expecting it. Then come tell me who made the biscuits in your family.