Dwight Yoakam’s grandmother kept her bacon grease in a small brown ceramic pitcher. She kept her flour, already sifted, in a big green porcelain pan that, when she wasn’t using it, sat in the bottom of an old, wooden Hoosier cabinet in her kitchen. From these two simple vessels with their plain ingredients, she made biscuits that her daughter, Ruth Ann Rankey, remembers as being “the smoothest in the world. They were lighter than any biscuits I’ve had since—not as short as most people make them. And that little dab of bacon grease she put on the top of each one gave them such a good flavor.”
Nowadays when a cook decides to make biscuits from scratch, it’s a big event in the kitchen that requires getting out the mixing bowl, rolling pin, measuring spoons and cups. But for Earlene Tibbs, biscuit making was an everyday occurrence and she mixed each batch up right in the flour pan.
“A Hoosier cabinet is one of those big, old kitchen cabinets with a shelf to work on, a flour sifter built in and storage above and below,” Ruth Ann explained.
“I can still see that big green pan. Mother would pull it out from the cabinet when she was ready to make her biscuits and make a little nest in the flour and put her rising agents and bacon grease and whatever liquid in it that she needed and work the flour into the nest right there in the pan until it was right. Then she’d lift the ball of biscuit dough out of the pan (the rest of the flour and the pan went back into the cabinet to wait for the next day’s biscuit making) and she’d squeeze it in her hands to make the biscuits. She never rolled the biscuits and cut them. ‘Choking the biscuits out’ is what she called it.”
Plenty of country cooks opted for the quicker method of “dropped” or “choked” biscuits as opposed to the more time- and space-consuming process of rolling the dough and cutting it. But while biscuit batter dropped from a spoon bakes up with a nubby, crunchy crust, choked biscuits come out nearly as smooth as the rolled ones.
Ruth Ann remembers that when the biscuits were on the baking sheet, ready to go in the oven, her mother would dip her index finger in the bacon grease pitcher and bless each biscuit with just a little dab of the savory drippings.
“I know it’s not good for you, but it sure made it good tasting,” she says.
Here is a recipe adapted to the way Earlene Tibbs made her biscuits, with bacon grease for the shortening and directions for ‘choking’ your biscuits out just right.
Earlene’s Biscuits
Yield about 9 biscuits, each the size of half a tennis ball
You Will Need
- 2 cups flour
- 1⁄2 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- Scant 1⁄4 cup bacon grease
- 1⁄2 cup milk
To Prepare
1) Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together in a large mixing bowl. Add bacon grease and work into the flour using your fingers, rubbing the flour into the grease lightly until it’s evenly distributed throughout. Add the milk a bit at a time, and continue to work it into the dough with your hands. The dough is right when it all sticks together easily and can be patted into a ball, but it isn’t too wet or sticky. If you get it too wet, add a little more flour.
2) Pick up a big handful of the dough (about 1⁄3 of what’s there) in your left hand (if right-handed) and pat it smooth lightly, then squeeze about a third gently from the back with your right hand. Put the biscuit on an ungreased baking sheet, with the rough broken surface down. Leave plenty of space between the biscuits on the baking sheet.
3) When biscuits are made, put your finger in the bacon grease and dot each biscuit with a little dab on top—just a streak of grease for flavor, not a big dollop.
4) Then put the baking pan in a 400 degree oven, baking for 15 minutes until just beginning to brown. Serve hot.
Granddaddy’s Honey on Granny’s Biscuits
Dwight Yoakam’s family would leave Columbus, Ohio, on a Friday night when his daddy got off work and drive all night down Route 23 to his grandparents’ house in Betsy Layne, Kentucky. The kids would tumble, sleepy, from the car into Luther and Earlene Tibbs’ arms, and then get trundled into bed still more than half asleep.
“In the morning,” Yoakam recalls, “I’d wake up in Kentucky and it was like a dream, but I knew just where I was, listening to the sounds of my grandmother. It’s about 5:30 in the morning but she and my granddaddy would be up at 5, banging around. And I’d wake up to the aroma of sausage and eggs and her singing out there in the kitchen, humming hymns to herself.
“And that was a pretty charming way to wake up as a kid.
“I also remember she’d cook the eggs in the skillet that the sausage had been fried in and there’d always be that kind of good sausage taste on the fried eggs. It was like an additional season.
“And biscuits. My granny’s biscuits. Honey on those biscuits—that was something else. We always had raw honey because my granddad had hives. He had a lot of beehives up on the hill out behind the house. And he’d go up there in his gloves and mask and smoke the bees out. Rob the bees of honey. We rarely ever bought store honey. And we’d chew the comb. My mother taught us that, because she chewed the comb growing up in lieu of chewing gum.
“In the mornings, you know, after eating a plate just full of her eggs and sausage you’d still have to have one more of my grandmother’s biscuits and some of Granddaddy’s honey on that.”
Excerpted from Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens. Copyright ©1991 by Ronni Lundy.