Biscuits
posted in Food, OmegaDad |There are a few culinary disasters in my past that still make me wince, like the time I made a birthday cake for my mom using baking powder instead of baking soda (or was it vice versa?). Another time relates to biscuits.
The No Exit Cafe in Rogers Park was a semi-hippy/semi-Bohemian kind of place, where people played chess or Go while sitting around, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and listening to folksy acoustic music played by women with long curling hair parted in the middle and held back by tie-dyed scarves folded into headbands. My cousin K. was very fond of the No Exit, and for a period made a point of hauling me there along with him and his latest girlfriend. For some reason, that Thanksgiving I was not doing a family do, and K. invited me to join in a community Thanksgiving meal at the No Exit.
In my innocence, I figured that I’d bring biscuits, because, well, hey: biscuits. Plain. Simple. Easy. Right?
The cooks in my audience are howling with laughter now.
Of course, it turns out that biscuits–plain, simple, easy biscuits–are distressingly easy to make badly. There are females in many families who are spoken of by descendents in reverential whispers when it comes to biscuits, because they know The Biscuit Secret.
I did not know The Biscuit Secret: my contribution to the feast was a bowl full of beautiful golden hockey pucks: hard, rocky, flavorless.
Sigh.
That was enough to make me swear off making biscuits forever.
Perhaps I have learned by this time to never take something I’ve made for the first time to a potluck or gathering…
A few years ago, OmegaDad announced to me that he was on a quest to learn to make biscuits. I wished him well, but was dubious. His first batch was very similar to my original batch. But he persevered, making an occasional biscuit batch now and then.
Tonight we had “breakfast for dinner”. Bacon, scrambled eggs, biscuits, butter, apricot preserves. Notably not a “healthy” dinner; I could feel my arteries slamming shut as I chowed down.
The bacon was perfectly crispy, falling into bite-sized pieces with the merest crunch of one’s teeth.
The scrambled eggs–which are one of the things I do cook very well–were light and fluffy and gently seasoned with Italian seasoning.
And the biscuits–ahhhh, the biscuits.
Each biscuit had, on one side, a dainty little split beginning. I would insert a fork at the split, and the biscuit would fall open like a flower, with a faint puff of steam rising into the air. A little pat of butter, and then a tablespoon of apricot preserves, and I would open my mouth to a little bite of heaven.
OmegaDad’s biscuits, these days, are a piece of culinary artwork. Delicate, fluffy, delicious, they are meltingly wonderful, and I can’t stop at one. They are comfort food at its peak, and I hope that the dotter will be able to pass on to her children and grandchildren that she learned how to make biscuits from her father, who had the Best Biscuits Ever.
