How to Impress a Southern Boy

Show him your biscuits!

 

I love biscuits. They’re deceptively simple and infinitely variable. And for some reason they really seem to impress people. As if they’re some kind of fancy or something. Really, they’re not. Yes, it is nice to have freshly baked warm biscuits on the table at any time of day, but the ingredients are basic, and the process is simple.

To me they will always bring back memories of being flat broke, which is quite apropros to the origin of this dish; it gained popularity shortly after the stock market crashed about a hundred years ago. Recipe Guy’s grandma learned to make them from her mom, who was feeding a family of 6 on less than half an income. I learned how to make them when I cooking with Food Bank ingredients. Every week, I got flour, margarine, and powdered milk. Every week, I made biscuits and ate them for breakfast with jam, for lunch with peanut butter, and for dinner with soup.

Had I known back then that I could make a cream gravy with those same three ingredients, I’d have been eating biscuits and gravy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Because for all that it really is cheap Depression-era food, it’s freaking tasty!

Especially when you can dress them up a bit. Like with sharp cheddar in the biscuits and Argentinian beef sausage seasoned with garlic and chives in the gravy...

Biscuits and Gravy, Northern Style

What you need:

Biscuits:

• ½ c whipping cream
• ½ c milk
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• ½ c butter
• 2 c flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ c grated sharp cheddar (optional)

Gravy

• 1 large sausage
• 1 tbsp butter and/or bacon fat and/or sausage drippings
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1 c milk
• salt
• black pepper

What you gotta do:

Let’s start with the biscuits. In your measuring cup, mix the cream, milk, and the lemon juice and let it sit for a few minutes.

I did this because I couldn’t find a smallish container of buttermilk. So yes, you can just use a cup of buttermilk here instead.

Chop the butter into chunks in a large bowl. For once, I’m not going to tell you to have all of your ingredients at room temperature. Biscuits are more like pastry and pastry is best made with cold butter.

Add the flour, baking powder and salt to the big bowl.

With a pastry cutter, or a couple forks, cut the butter and flour together. You can’t do this with warm butter, you end up “creaming” them like you would with sugar and butter for cookies and that’s not the effect we’re going for here.

What you’re making are tiny chunks of butter covered in flour.

When you’ve got a nice mixture with a texture kinda like damp sand, make a well in the middle with a spoon and pour in your lemony cream.

You’re not going to actually taste the lemon in this. That’s not what it’s there for. It’s there to make the cream even more acidic than it already is. The higher acidity will cause more of a reaction with the baking powder (which is alkaline) and you’ll get lighter, fluffier biscuits.

Mix the cream into the buttery flour until it’s just combined.

Turn it out onto a floury counter. Do Not Knead The Dough.

I know it’s tempting, but the last thing you want to do to this stuff is stretch it. Stretching forms gluten and gluten is not flakey. Pat it down into a shape as closely resembling a square or rectangle as you can, then roll it a little flatter. Flour it, fold it into thirds and roll it into a rectangle.

Since I only needed to feed two people and since biscuits are always better freshly baked, I split the dough in half and froze some for later… (I totally promise to show you what I did with it)

Roll out the half you’re keeping into a rectangle. You can flour, fold and roll again if you want. The more you do this, the more layers you’ll have in your biscuits and the flakier they’ll be. But once will do, if that’s all you feel like.

Spread half your grated cheese over the middle, fold one third in. Spread the other half of your grated cheese on top of the folded part. Fold in the other third.

Roll the cheesey foldey dough into a rectangle and cut it into 8 pieces.

Bake these at 400 for about 12 minutes until they’re nicely golden and the cheese is melty.

If you decide to stop here and just eat cheese biscuits, I will totally understand.

But really, it’s only a few more steps to make the gravy. And you can even do it while the biscuits cook.

Remove the casing from the sausage and break it up into a hot pan.

Fry it until it’s golden then remove it from the pan to drain on paper towels.

Depending on how fatty the sausage was, you may or may not need to add bacon fat, but I recommend a little at least, just for the extra flavour.

Add the flour and pepper, and sautee them in the fat for a few minutes.

Slowly pour in the milk, stirring as you go.

Don’t worry if it gets all clumpy,

just add a bit more milk and keep stirring.

You can use a whisk to break up any clumps or a soft spatula to mash them.

Just keep stirring and adding milk,and maybe a little more pepper,

and eventually you will have a lovely smooth, happy gravy.

Add the sausage to the gravy to make it even happier.

Put a couple of the cheesey biscuits onto a plate and smother them with gravy.

Um, I need to go make more now.

What did your family make during the depression?

Pistachio Porn

Around the same time I posted the request for recipe requests, I also asked the guys at work. Most of them defer and claim they’ll love anything I make. I think they’re just afraid I’ll stop bringing them cookies if they offer any critical feedback. Anyone who’s ever critiqued my writing knows that’s just not true. I’ve been absolutely shredded in the past and I’m still… um, if I wasn’t in school I’d still be… writing.

Fortunately, we’ve got a new guy at work.

When I told him I’d make anything, any recipe that would challenge me, but still fit in the magic cookie tin, he came back with this:

Indian Spice Cookies

Wow. Neat! I’ve used garam masala in curries, but I’d never seen garam masala used in a dessert.

Garam masala isn’t a spice on it’s own, so this isn’t quite like making a snickerdoodle which has the cinnamon on the outside… and it’s not quite like a gingersnap. Ginger snaps use a mixture of spices, but they’re all “sweet” spices. Garam masala includes things like cumin (used in making chilli and curry) and black pepper!

I was so making these things.

But of course I can’t just make a plain old cookie even if it was crazy spiced. But I didn’t want to mess with the reportedly soft and chewy texture by adding nuts or something, so I decided they needed some kind of prettying up. A little bit of icing never hurt any cookie. So I made a rosewater glaze and then pressed the damp glaze into finely chopped pistachios.

A bit of a gilded lily, yes, but I think the sweetness of the nuts and glaze worked well to balance the amazing bite of the cookies.

These went over amazingly well with the guys in the construction trailer. And yes, I know, I’m shooting fish in a barrel, but I figure if the cookies weren’t great, 6 guys wouldn’t have cleaned out the entire tin in half a day.

Unfortunately I didn’t actually have garam masala on hand. What I did have were many of the spices that often go into the mixtures that you find in the spice section. Those mixtures can vary in content, and in heat level so I made my own, and scaled down the more savoury spices. If you’ve got some in your cupboard already, give it a shot. If not, here’s what I did for mine:

Garam Masala:

• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 1 1/2 tsp ground pepper
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves (I think I may have used allspice though)
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Put them all together in a jar and shake.

Now that you’ve got perfectly balanced garam masala, you can make the cookies.

What you need:

Cookies:

• 1/2 cup butter (softened)
• 3/4 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. Vanilla
• 1 tsp. Garam Masala
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

Topping:

• 1 cup icing sugar
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 tsp rosewater
• About 1/2 to 3/4 cup of very finely chopped pistachios

What you gotta do:

Preheat the oven to 350° F. Cream the butter and brown sugar.

Add the egg and vanilla and mix well.

If you feel like dirtying another dish, sift the dry ingredients together into a bowl. If not, pile the flour on one side, and put the other dry stuff on top.

Mix the dry stuff together a bit before starting to incorporate it into the wet part.

Spicey!

Drop teaspoons of dough onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment if you don’t want to have to wash it afterwards.

Bake the cookies for a mere 10 minutes. Watch them. Don’t let them get too brown. They’re quite golden in colour already and a little extra will have them looking too dark.

Cool them on a rack while you chop the nuts. 

put all the glaze ingredients (not the nuts) in a bowl and mix them.

Dip the cooled cookies into the glaze

and then press them into the nuts.

Once they’ve set, pack them up in the cookie tin, take them to work, and see if anyone can guess what they’re seasoned with.

I’m going to give Lyra Marlow’s suggestion of creamsicle cookies a shot in a couple weeks. And I’m really wondering how I can pull of angel’s suggestion of strawberry shortcake!

What’s the strangest ingredient you’ve ever put in a cookie or dessert??