Thursday, October 1, 2009

I don't know biscuits ...



All my life, my great-grandmother, Dorcus Kreola Philbeck, was in constant amazement that at the age of 8, 10, 12, 14, 20, etc. – that I didn’t know how to make biscuits. Well, at the age of 29, I made my first rock hard, flat biscuit and in the spring of that year, at 99, my great-grandmother passed away.

I was lucky to have those 29 years with her. I grew up spending weeks in the summer in her garden learning how to pick strawberries and shell beans. Every morning, she made a feast of scrambled eggs, bacon, livermush, biscuits and red eye gravy. She grew up and spent her whole life on the same land; she burned her own trash, made quilts by hand on a loom in the basement and went to church every Sunday. She was an amazing no-nonsense cook and impossible to pin down on a recipe. She threw in dashes, measured by sight and cooked following instinct and memory.

Yet she did have a massive recipe collection, which I was lucky enough to inherit this past summer. I was entrusted with this gift under the condition that I would organize it for other family members to enjoy. This collection represents her life. It's unorganized and spread over 10 notebooks, hundreds of folded slips of paper and a couple of boxes. Some of the recipes are scrawled in her elegant handwriting, some are typed on an old school typewriter, some are from friends and others from even older matriarchs of the family.

It's an overwhelming collection full of Southern staples and rural obscurities. From recipes for homemade wine (combine sugar, water and fruit, then bury in yard for 30 days) to complex cakes that require 15 half inch layers, it’s a diverse collection that harkens back to another time.

As a way of reconnecting and learning something of her through her writing and cooking style, I'm going to try to cook my way through some of her collection and document it here. Hopefully in time, I’ll be able to churn out batch after batch of those perfect biscuits ... just as she always insisted I should. 

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