Daughter-in-Law of a Southern Belle Biscuit Maker

Heritage and Lineage. We hear those (obviously important) words a lot. My Daddy is a geneology junkie. Even though he is a king of a man and doesn't seem to understand that fact, he needed validation from his ancestors. He had his DNA examined and has done thousands of hours of investigating murky details of the past. There's no summing it up, because hey, in the end we are all related to Noah and his wife....but Daddy has found that we are the grandchildren (10 or so generations back) of the King of Ireland (Brian Boru), the descendants of a Revolutionary War bigshot (Daddy's now a proud member of the Sons of the Revolution), very close offspring of a Cherokee Indian chief, and progeny of a southern Baptist minister who fought for the Yankees in the Civil War. That's the short list. And we are not going to mention all the horse traders, thieves and pirates. Either way, I have a long, illustrious list of relatives that should make me proud and mark me as a validated human being. But what really bothers me is that, with all that heritage, I have never learned to make a decent biscuit.

I was raised here in the deep South, with a true-blue Southern Daddy and a Yankee Mama. Daddy lived up "there" for only a couple of years, long enough to find my Mama and have me. Then they had to hurry back down here. My children still torment me, saying that their mother is a Yankee, because I was born up there and because my Mama is one. What they fail to acknowledge is that, in the Bible, the Daddy is the one you go by in the geneology and by the way, I was raised down here, except for six months of my life. Now I'm not disrespecting my Yankee Mama. She is amazing. She had a lot to do with finishing my Daddy into a gentleman and she raised us right, with plenty of homegrown love, including hugs, a clean home and lots of good food. She made us behave and expected us to do our homework and chores without complaining. She made Mayberry out of a lot of chaos and I will always be grateful for the security and light she brought to our world. She's a black-and-white woman. Right is right and wrong is wrong. So I grew up thinking everybody was like that. 

When I hit about the fourth grade, I began to realize that there were rules besides the ones I was growing up with. Southern Rules. I had a couple of friends who knew about the Rules. They said "Yes ma'm" and "No ma'm" to our teacher. They said please and thank you with just that extra bit of sugar on top. My Mama had no use for such confections. She said that she'd seen trashy, no-good women use those terms and it didn't make a bit of difference in their character. Let your yes be yes and your no, no. I knew that when my Mama said something, there was no embellishment and you could count on whatever she said to be true. Even if it stung. There wasn't talk behind your back, because she would tell it to you straight up. Now that I'm older, I appreciate that kind of candor. But there's also a place for the Southern graces, when done sincerely. And therein lies the problem...

I married young, into a family of Southern belles. I thought I had learned all the rules by then. But I had not. When we got engaged, I began to realize that I was clueless. There were layers and layers of Southernese that I had not absorbed, even though I'd been here since infancy. Ken took me to meet his people in Lincolnton and Washington, Georgia, where the real Southerners are. The women were as luscious as maple syrup and sassy as fresh lemonade. When they spoke, it sounded like a balmy, sweet breeze across a wide porch in the evening. They were thoughtful. I received the most beautiful, traditional gifts of crystal, silver and monogrammed correctness you can imagine. They wrote kind notes, showed up for showers and blessed us all around. I had known kindness all of my life, but I had not known the full-blown culture that was the Old South. When I partook of my mother-in-law's beyond-heavenly pecan pie and biscuits, I realized that I was in big trouble. I knew how to saw down a tree, clean and scrub anything, mow and trim a lawn, rebound a basketball like a wildcat and run like the wind.... but I didn't know one thing about making a biscuit. Or a pie. Or a roast. My husband had grown up with all the Southern rules that I didn't know, but he had also been the recipient of daily helpings of food that defied description. Food that you can't just make from a recipe. It was time-honored and Grandmama-honed stuff that you can't write down in a book or take in a class.

In our early days of marriage, I cooked a blue streak, making thousands of mistakes and a few successes along the way. My artistic soul won't let me do anything the same way twice, so my experiments with biscuits were nearly always disastrous. The Lord gave us four gargantuan children -- three stunning Lumberjacks and a Wonder-Woman-worthy Amazon. Somehow, with monthly trips to Sam's Club and lots of coupons, I managed to fill up and grow them to adulthood, with (still) no real progress in the biscuit category. One morning, before my boys married, one of them made breakfast and presented a couple of pans of perfectly-made biscuits. I asked in astonishment how he did that, and he said, "I just followed the directions on the Martha White bag, Mama." Now why didn't I think of that?

My days are still full, but not with a whole lot of cooking, much to my husband's chagrin. I'm just really grateful that Hardee's and Bojangles make some pretty mean biscuits. They're definitely not my mother-in-law's, but they beat the sight outa mine.