When I was home over the summer, I decided to take the opportunity to troll through some of my mom’s old cookbooks. The best ones have yellowing pages, ripped covers, and recipes for things like “Angels on Horseback” (a classic involving oysters and water chestnuts that probably tastes best served by a corseted, aproned, lipsticked woman), tuna pate (that, quite frankly, sounds revolting) and “Grossmommy Martin’s Kuddlefleck” (WTF?).
I could not make this shit up.
Amongst these recipes, in a book written by Manitoba Mennonites whose spine is cracked and whose pages are flour dusted and molasses stained, I found a recipe for Ada’s Crisp Biscuits. Ada is my daughter, and though I don’t know the Ada for whom these crisp biscuits are named, I thought it only appropriate that I make them.
I used whole wheat flour instead of white for the ones I made, and served them hot with melting butter and borscht made with garden-harvested beets, a dollop of sour cream and a crumble of feta. It made a simple Friday night meal that brought us back down to the earthiness of root vegetables and crumbled biscuits, preparing us for another sweet Fall weekend.
- 2 cups flour
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1/3 cup butter
- 3/4 cup milk
- "Mix in the order given. Roll out to 1/4" thickness. Cut in small rounds and bake 12 minutes in a 400-degree oven - or hotter if you're willing to risk it"
- WTF? Anyways....have fun!
we also have a really old cookbook that i have not been able to dig into to blog about. it’s actually a cookbook written by the black servants of southerners. and the directions are hilarious. recipes written back then were not catered to the novice cook, they were written for the sake of writing them.
anyway, these biscuits look great. was the butter cold? (i like how the recipe totally did not specify!)
It is pretty funny eh? So many of my grandmother’s recipes say “bake ’till done.” I wonder, though (and this is me getting philosophical) if it’s a sign of the lack of food literacy that we have now. Nowadays if you don’t spell everything out in a recipe people can’t figure out how to make something; back then, your mama or your gramma taught you what a biscuit looked like when it was done, or how to make your cookies gooey in the middle…