Biscuit Bullets

I began my cooking destruction early in life. Mama, a superb cook by any standards and certain her talent would be passed along genetically, brought my resisting body into the kitchen at the tender age of nine. She believed baking made a house into a home, therefore, it would be my first test.

Into a wide-lipped bowl, she sifted flour, salt, and baking powder. With fingers cupped, she used the backs of them to form a well in the flour mixture. After adding buttermilk and soft lard, she deftly squeezed the lard into tiny pieces while combining it with the flour and buttermilk.

Within a minute, a soft dough formed from which she pinched pieces. Each piece spun around in her hand as fingers tucked ragged edges underneath presenting a seamless roundness on top. After being put into a flat, wrought iron skillet, each biscuit received a four-finger tap to flatten it a touch and a brush of butter.

I watched in admiration and desperation. She expected my stubby fingers to do the same thing her long, limber digits had done? May I add, not one tidbit of flour escaped the bowl during this process.

Following her lead, I poured most of the flour into the sifter, added a large pinch of salt and shook out the baking powder just like Mama. There may have been a little more, but what difference would that make?

Cupping my fingers, I rammed my hand into the flour to make a well. After the sneezing ended, flour covered the counter, but a well had, indeed, been formed in the remainder. I scooped a huge spoonful of lard into the well and poured buttermilk straight from the jug into the bowl, filling the well.

"That may be just a bit too much lard and milk, Maggie. Maybe you should add more flour."

"I did it like you did it."

"If you think it looks right, mix it together."

By that time in my short life, I should have realized when Mama gave in too easy, a lesson was in the making. Unfortunately, the Lord blessed me with a shortness of smarts and an overgrown case of stubborn.

My fingers fairly itched by now to mix all the ingredients and come up with biscuits like Mama's. (Note for new cooks - when making biscuits, if after you've swirled the flour, lard and milk together for five minutes, you still have a lump of lard, loads of buttermilk and the flour well is still intact, something is WRONG!)

My squishing fingers couldn't get the lard to form little pieces and the flour may as well have been glued to the sides of that bowl. None of it dropped gracefully into the soup I'd made and the buttermilk never thickened. My motto, as a child, was if at first it doesn't work, throw a fit.

Mama's motto if one of her kids threw a fit was to toss ice water in their faces and tan their backsides, then get on with the business at hand.

After Mama's motto pulled mine back into line, we started all over again with one difference. I tried to listen. As a result, I had some pretty nice-looking biscuits for supper, although I added quite a bit more flour than Mama. It took the dough a long time to lose its stickiness. (Note #2 for new cooks - too much of anything is not necessarily a good thing.)

"I made the biscuits," I said, grinning with pride.

Daddy picked up one of my treasures, which seemed a little heavier and denser than Mama's. He bit down and didn't make a dent in it.

Being a kind soul and not wanting to hurt my feelings, he let his jaws rip for all they were worth and chomped down on that biscuit. He came up howling and missing one of his upper front teeth. It now resided in my pretty biscuit.

After that first cooking lesson, I refused to cook another biscuit until far into my marriage. Daddy got a trip to the dentist and a hefty bill for having a new tooth put in and my brother got great biscuit bullets for his slingshot to use the next time he and his friends played war.

Cooking never appealed to me, yet I made the mistake of marrying a man who expected me to put meals on the table. Bless his patient little heart. He had a good five years of burned meat and raw potatoes, hard peas (didn't realize you had to soak those dried ones), but not once did he have to suffer through my biscuits. And that's a good thing...right?