fruit of the mundane unrush

Music: Danny Paul Grody: In Search of Light (2011)

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me how to make buttermilk biscuits, but we ran out of time. And when biscuits are the thing, taking one's time---and not worrying about getting flour everywhere---is crucial.

Biscuits are to be given away. One should never horde biscuits. It seems strange that whenever I make them, the twin panhandlers with the crooked knees, the doubles who stand like Cesare emerged from Dr. Caligari's cabinet, seem to appear at the median on Airport Boulevard near the Greyhound station. I never give them money, but frequently leftovers and often biscuits. The twins never appear together because they seem to be taking shifts. They share a bike. They seem grateful to get food. I always wonder what has happened to their legs, because they stand crookedly. They move slowly. I have never seen either of them ride that bike.

I've tinkered on my recipe for some years but have never written it down (it's a combination of Cooking Illustrated's "flaky biscuits" and Southern Living's "best buttermilk biscuits" recipes). I think that there are two secrets to good biscuits: (1) freezing the flour after you've cut in the leavening for fifteen to twenty minutes; and (2) not rushing it. Flakey biscuits are the consequence of leisure, the fruit of the mundane unrush.

As a young person I had more in common with the things strewn on the linoleum than the stuff on the tabletop. If I only knew then that one day I would like to cook I would have paid more attention, climbed up on a chair to see, even. I remember many bored, chilly Georgia mornings staring up at my grandmother's apron as she measured the ingredients for biscuits. Handfuls of this and that: flour, powder, shortening; sift it, roll it, lump it. Biscuits smell a certain homey way with shortening. Of course, trans fats are forever and coronary heart disease is ample testament to the fact, so one has to weigh the consequence of olfactory nostalgia: what price, that familiar smell?

Granny didn't cut her biscuits like I do (with a rocks glass, and without twisting); she made "drop biscuits" by creating mounds or lumps that came out, well, that came out with a perfect mix of flake and chew. I cannot replicate them. The recipe died with her. But mine are pretty good---that is, pretty and good---and they smell right.

What You'll Need: 2.5 cups of King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour, and a few handfuls for dusting and kneading; 1 tablespoon of baking powder; ½ a tablespoon of baking soda; a pinch or two of kosher salt; 2 tablespoons of cold Crisco; 1 stick of cold butter; 1.25 cups of cold buttermilk. And coffee (for sipping while you make biscuits).

"I am in the kitchen in a double-wide facing a stove and oven. The stove/oven is candy-apple red, from the 1950s, and I recognize it is one that my friends Gary and Trish resorted and have in their real, dreamy kitchen, except in the dream it belongs to my parents. My parents don't really use it, but I like to. To my right is breakfast bar and past that is the living room and two reclining chairs where my mother and father lounge watching a morning news program. There is a protective, plastic covering on the recliners, and when my parents move they squeak. I am kneading and folding dough to make biscuits."

"Go on."

"I am worried that the biscuits won't turn out right, you know, turn out like my grandmother used to make them. I don't want to disappoint my parents. I think I'm wearing an apron that someone made for me, maybe my granny, I cannot remember. And as I make the biscuits I start to think about how I am becoming the parent now and the struggle of my generation---the exes---and how we are depending on our parents well into our 30s, but here I am this once cooking for them. I don't know if, in the dream, I am visiting or if I am living with my parents again. Still, there's much more at stake than making breakfast."

"Hmm. Making your parents biscuits. Sounds sexual to me."

"Don't you think that's too easy an interpretation, though, too much of a softball?"

"Funny word, softball. Biscuits. Makes me think of---"

"---I know. And I'm a housewife for my parents, the anima anxiety of an only child. If I can't make 'em babies, I'll make 'em biscuits, dammit!"

Step One: Stir together the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside. Cut up the shortening into little squares and dump into the bowl with the flour. Put a handful of four on the kneading surface and coat the stick of butter; slice the stick into thin squares and sprinkle over the flour in the bowl. (Note: you do not have to use shortening; you can substitute another half-stick of butter for the two tablespoons of shortening, however, your biscuits will be a little less chewy/spongy.) Now is the time to have some fun playing with your food: squeeze the shortening and butter together in your fingers in the flour, making tiny, thin saucers (about a nickel or penny size). Do this until your flour is full of little leavening saucers and peas. Then, stick the bowl in the freezer for twenty minutes. Seriously: in. the. freezer.

Jack Spicer drank himself to death by the age of forty, which is too bad. Among many things, like media technologies and magic, he wrote of the sporting life, because he started-out as a linguist unsullied by deep structures of Chom(p)sky. From his final collection titled Language: "The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counter-punching radio./And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even/know they are champions." He wrestled with the word, a lot you know, even giving himself the one-over; the booze was really just lube, in the end, but there's a point at which you need the friction to re-member. All that forgetting gets you somewhere, you bet, but it's not the kitchen.

Still, I see myself cutting butter with the women rather than in a recliner next to cousins and uncles watching a match. (Counterpunch.) On Thanksgiving holidays, when I grew old enough to understand the division of social favor, I knew my assigned place was watching football on the floor with the boys while the girls confabbed in the kitchen. Nothing was more boring than watching football on the floor. I would have rather watched my grandmother make meringue, even though that was almost as tedious as the Atlanta Falcons. To this day I don't care to eat either of them. Still, the shortwave radio was in the kitchen, and I liked to play with its knobs. Jesus sermons and Floyd Kramer, and warble inbetween their stations climbing that amplitude.

Do you know Floyd Kramer?

Step Two: remove the flour-leavened freeze and add the buttermilk to the bowl and, with a spatula or fork or your fingers, get the stuff into a sticky ball. Dump the ball on a pile of flour and, with a well dusted French rolling pin (much better than the American flat roller, which gives you little to no real control or feeling---manual or automatic?) flatten the ball into a rectangle. Then, fold the dough like a business letter (twice from each side), turn 90 degrees, flatten. Only do this one or two more times---if you fold and flatten too much the dough won't rise into flakey layers. Using a rocks glass or biscuit cutter, cut your biscuits and put them in rows on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Step Three: Brush those puppies with some melted butter (about a tablespoon and a half) and bake at 450 for about fifteen minutes or so. After browned on top, take them out and brush with any remaining melted butter you have and let them sit for about seven or ten minutes before serving.

Here's a gallery of the most recent biscuit-making session. I didn't make them for anyone, really, just sensed I should make them. Because . . .

I wrote though Thanksgiving, for the most part. Mostly. At the special moment, about one in the afternoon to the ambient blares of referees whistling, I remembered the boys would be summoned and lumber into my grandmother's tiny kitchen and she would "say grace." Always the same, patterned grace, about nourishing bodies and soldiers doing something over there. What is Thanksgiving, really, without young people from the lower classes fighting a war for someone else? (Sucker punch.) Always a war, about who wears the apron and who wears the helmet.

I stumbled across another "found object" blog. Someone discovered a note from his or her father's desk, a list of "to buy" items for the first, new apartment with mom, penned before she was conceived (or, at least, was gestating). A plate. A sink stopper. A jigger, for Manhattans she supposes. She doesn't know what a Pyrex dish is---but isn't this essential, even today, for everyone's first apartment? She also doesn't know that a biscuit pan is (or used to be) round.

The handwriting of the found list resembled that of people from my grandparent's generation. Granny had no use for round biscuit pans because she dropped hers, on a cookie sheet. Times were tight and tough and I can still remember finding books and books of unused S&H green stamps in one of her desk drawers.

At the bottom of the "found object" blog is Spicer's famous "Letter to Lorca" from 1957, where he instructs the other poet's poet on fetching the alive from the "garbage of the real," the garbage of the visible or picture or image, because "that is how we dead men write to each other."