On the Flight of the Biscuit

The mundane fascinates me. I enjoy watching people in their in-between moments. Brushing their teeth. Napping. Talking to the pets. Searching the phone book. Sewing buttons.

Completely disarmed, their hair may be out of place, their tongue quirked into their cheek, lips pressed, or faces relaxed into unusual, uncomposed beauty.

Now, with the altered state of war on our minds, and the awful, distracting undercurrents of dread and foreboding, and the world seeming to teeter on a few fine points of the map, we need things to remind us of the good. Whatever our opinions, we are part of it, we are the home front. And we need to carry on with our own frontiers however insignificant they may seem in this context.

Just the gentle feel of companionship when nothing special, nothing external is running the show. Revelling in the quiet hum in the household when everyone is reading. It pleases me. I feel gratified for my efforts on their behalf, and I feel nested, safe.

If I can take roll at this moment and everyone is present for this treasured time, I am indeed fortunate, and usually know to savor it.

Outside the pleasures of one's own hearth, the next best mundane imagery comes when one drops in on someone at an odd time--on legitimate business of course, briefly, apologetic, of course, but alert.

You get to see their mood and tone in its natural state, the shoes they wear in private, feel the temperature they keep, smell the smells, hear their music, their hum--these things hold me completely intrigued.

And this is how I learned about biscuits.

On an early morning sortie, I popped in on a dear friend, catching her in her rambunctious kitchen,still tousled and pink, apron over her nightgown, with her sturdy sons romping, boiling all through the house, just as she drew from the oven, serenely and without pride, a sheet of classic, tall and stately, fresh scratch biscuits, with crusty, golden tops, flaky middles, and a sublime and promising fragrance.

Without a word of summons,her table was filled. I wondered why her family was not aghast at such close proximity to perfection, why they simply inhaled large quantities while gazing raptly in her direction and then resumed their lives so casually, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

She told me then that she whupped out biscuits every day of her life since she had married. Such a notion had never occurred to me. It was an entirely new thought.

And it was fine work,too, work I should be doing as well.

When I tried to install this practice into my own life, I found, actually, that I made very bad biscuits. Tragic ones so flat and hard and salty and gritty and dry that my lack of constancy was a godsend.

Since I am Irish, however, I vowed to prevail. First I made fairly good compensatory drop biscuits, which were mildly successful, but which did not entail that nice patting out of the dough. Nor the cutting into rounds with a small but historic olive can, nothing fancy, nor could I witness, after administering them to the oven, their happy rising like baby angels into puffy, layered cylinders of lovely lightness.

I wanted to make those wonderful biscuits and serve them with jellies and honeybutter, the ideal breakfast poised between buoy and ballast for my darlings as they went out into the rest of real life every day.

I commenced, therefore, with research and practice. And I come to you now with this recipe for Flying Buttermilk Biscuits, which I have discovered and adapted and secured.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Lightly grease a baking sheet. Place the following ingredients into a bowl or food processor fitted with steel blade:

3 C. flour (2C. white, 1 C. Whole wheat) 1 1/2 tsp sugar scant 1/2 tsp. salt 1 Tbsp. baking powder

Whip together. Cut into pieces and add: 6 Tbsp. cold butter

Process or cut in with pastry cutter or knives or fingers until the butter pieces are uniformly integrated and about the texture of corn meal in the mixture.

Add: 3/4 C. + 1 T. buttermilk, plain yogurt or sour milk (3/4 C. milk with 1 1/2 tsp. vinegar)

Process or mix for a few more seconds, or until the dough holds together in large clumps.

Turn out onto a floured board and knead briefly--you want a soft, not sticky ball of dough that is not too ragged about the edges.

And now the secret. Roll this nice mass out to 3/4" thick! Most recipes indicate 1/2" or thinner--you can go as thick as a full inch and just add baking time. You can use a straight-sided juice glass with 2" - 2 1/2" rim as a cutter.

Arrange fairly closely together on the sheet and bake for 10-15 minutes in the middle of the oven.

This recipe will make l dozen biscuits--it can be formed into a log and frozen and the biscuits sliced off for almost instant gratification.

Let the dough sit at room temperature while you preheat the oven. Slice and bake as usual. Check for flakey doneness, adding a minute or two if you need to.

Then off we go into the stormy day, preserving our little portion of man-kind. Amen.