To say that the family I grew up in was "dirt poor" might for a long time have been giving us credit for riches we didn't have. My sisters recall our mother receiving bills she couldn't pay and crying as she tore them up and threw them away. From what I gather, she might as well have; tucking them safely into the little desk where she always did the family's business would not have changed the fact that she didn't have the money to pay them and she didn't know where she would get it.
A huge part of the problem was that my parents had moved to our little town a couple of years before I was born so Daddy and one of his brothers could start a new glass business—in direct (and probably unfortunate) competition with another glass company that got its start at just about the same time. The other business is still in operation, but even now the town isn't overrun with glass companies.
As is true with most young businesses, Daddy's struggled for the first few years, and while Daddy took care of the business of running the business, it fell to Mother to run the house. With her growing young family (I was the fourth of five children; the oldest was 7 when I was born), she must have been a Trojan to hold up as well as she did.
Because of either my young age or my natural inability to perceive what's going on around me, I was spared Mother's pain; all I knew was that I had a roof over my head (with a big tree and a sandbox in the back yard), clothes to wear to school and church, and food on the table.
In retrospect, I'm amazed that I never remember being really hungry; I look back through Mother's old recipe book and see that she fed the seven of us (and it seems to me we had eight pairs of feet under our table as often as we had seven) on meatloaf that started with a pound of hamburger but somehow usually had enough leftovers for Daddy's sandwich in the next day's lunch. I loved the smell of the pot roast that simmered on Sunday mornings while we all trooped off to Sunday school and church and yielded enough food for Sunday lunch and homemade soup on Monday.
If Daddy had to be away at dinnertime, we could usually count on Mother's tuna casserole, which she always passed off as the go-to meal because Daddy didn't like it. For the life of me, I can't remember ever hearing Mother say she liked it, and now I wonder whether we ate tuna casserole when Daddy was gone because Daddy didn't like it or because Mother knew she could stretch her food dollars a little farther by feeding us canned tuna and rice when Daddy wasn't home.
I'm sure we all had our favorite meals and our favorite memories of food when we were kids (who couldn't like homemade ice cream on the front lawn on summer Sunday afternoons when the cousins came from The City?), but when we're all together, the one thing we seem to miss the most may be Daddy's biscuits. I have no idea how or why he had the job of making biscuits, but I don't remember Mother ever doing it, either while he was alive or after he died, although I never lived with her after he died. My memories are all and always of "Daddy's biscuits."
Daddy often made biscuits when we had "breakfast for supper," which I thought was wonderful because Daddy almost never made his biscuits for breakfast, so eggs and bacon and biscuits for supper suited me just fine. Looking back, I have an idea that we had breakfast for supper when the only meat in the house was a few residual strips of bacon and eggs were cheap enough to give us some nourishment.
And we had biscuits for supper when Nana came. Nana—who never drove a car in her life—lived far enough away that she took the train to come to see us, and from my earliest memory, we had to drive to a little burg about 30 miles away to pick her up because passenger service didn't come to our town. I suppose she boarded the train after she got off work in the evenings because my memories are always of picking her up at night, and driving home and eating. (Nana must have been starving!) My "standard" memory is that the "meal" centered on Daddy's biscuits. I guess we sometimes had eggs with them, and I think we usually had bacon, but mostly I remember biscuits and gravy or biscuits and honey.
And Daddy made biscuits on camping trips. With our large family, all slaves to habit, Mother and Daddy learned early on that the best way to get away from home was to take us camping. Daddy loved to cook on camp outs, not just the "macho" grilling that other dads were doing but also the pineapple-upside-down cakes he cooked in a hole in the ground and later in a Dutch oven because for years we celebrated his and my sister's birthdays on camping trips. One year I remember that he was planning an apple pie but found that his new pie tin was way too large for the single can of apples we had, so he dumped in a can of peaches and we had great fun with "pea-ple" pie. So it's no surprise that he also made biscuits.
When my siblings gather and talk turns to memories, one of our fondest is always Daddy's biscuits. I really don't know whether his biscuits were very much different from anybody else's or whether they had another kind of magic: for one thing, it says something very special to a kid to know her Daddy cares enough about her to make the biscuits; for another, those times when Daddy made the biscuits almost always had something "special" associated with them, like visits from Nana; for a third, we may not have realized how really desperately hungry we were when the larder was bare enough that we were reduced to biscuits. But you can almost feel the hush when talk turns to memories of Daddy and his biscuits.
Apparently neither of my sisters ever asked for the recipe (and if my brothers did, they never admitted it), so I may be the only one who ever tied him down long enough to try to learn his secret. I was somewhere in junior high school, and I had convinced him that I should learn to make the biscuits for our family camp outs. By that time, the three older kids were all out of the nest, and Daddy had bought a ski boat. We had observed that the best time for skiing was early morning, before the wind started to rise and ruffle up the surface of the lake.
Daddy was willing to get up and drive the boat for me and the younger brother, and we loved to ski, but all three of us were famished by the time we got back. Mother refused to cook breakfast for us: she didn't go in the boat with us, she never knew when we'd be in, and she was on vacation, too. I wasn't crazy about cooking bacon and eggs on a kerosene stove, and I don't think Daddy was crazy about having me do it, but he was willing to teach me how to start the charcoal for our big Dutch oven and cook the biscuits. Only I had to have the recipe.
Now, a man who came up with a peaple pie because he hadn't planned ahead for a big enough pie plate is not the sort of man to use standard measures. So I stood one evening at his elbow and watched him assemble the main ingredients for the biscuits and explain to me the amounts: one sifter of flour, a dime of salt, a quarter of baking powder, a dollop of shortening, and an ant bed of powdered milk.
I've heard all sort of cooks arguing the merits of whole milk vs buttermilk vs skim milk for the finest possible pan of biscuits, but Garrison Keillor's tales of Lake Woebegone and his sponsorship by Powdermilk Biscuits has always rung truest to me because that's how Daddy taught me to make them. I'm sure Keillor thought Powermilk Biscuits was a wonderful joke; I've always thought the joke was on him.
I'm not sure why Daddy dumped in the powdered milk, but I have a couple of theories. For one, he was teaching me to make biscuits for our camp outs, and with powdered milk, we could mix up all the dry ingredients and take them to camp in a canister so we could just measure out a bit of "mix" and add shortening and water. For another, we always had powdered milk in the house because it was another trick Mother used to try to save money: Mr. Dobbins, the milkman, would drop off a couple of gallons of milk regularly for her brood, and mother would pour half a gallon at a time into her big enamel pitcher with half a gallon of "instant" milk. And maybe Daddy was just stretching those milk dollars a little bit farther by using the powdered milk in his biscuits.
We have a recipe from a cousin that looks a lot like Daddy's recipe, and I suspect they both came from his mother—except that the cousin's recipe uses ordinary whole milk and recognizable measurements. When I made Daddy let me measure everything, it looked a lot like 2 c. flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbs baking powder, about 1/3 c of shortening, and 1/3 c of powdered milk. Daddy always measured out the flour in the sifter that Mother kept in the flour canister, and I wonder now whether sifting it affected the texture of the biscuits; certainly, I haven't sifted flour for anything in years, and I don't know if it would make the difference now that maybe it did back then.
He "measured" the salt and baking powder in the palm of his hand, and he swirled a wooden spoon around the edge of the shortening can to "measure" the shortening. I never saw him "cut" the shortening into the dry ingredients with anything fancy; he just chopped at it a bit with his wooden spoon. He made a well about the size of a teacup (my cousin's recommendation of 3/4 c is probably about right) in the middle of the dry ingredients and filled it with lukewarm water. He worked it all together a bit with his wooden spoon and then his hands, dumping it onto the floured counter to pat it out for cutting. If he miscalculated and got the dough too wet, we were likely to have "drop" biscuits; if he was up for adventure, he'd stir in a bit of grated cheese.
I have the recipe all recorded in my own recipe book, and it says to cook at 400°, a bit cooler than my cousin's recommended 450°. I really can't say which is more accurate; I know that I used two coffee cans of charcoal on the bottom of our 12-in. Dutch oven and one on the top, however hot that turns out to be. They're done in about 10 minutes.
Now I'm starting to wonder if part of the reason I never baked biscuits much is that they never seemed right without his touch—or maybe it was the powdered milk!
And Garrison Keillor probably thought he was making that all up....
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