Cooking with My Senses

Recently, I made biscuits.  I ended up with a baby biscuit.  I always have that last wee bit of dough leftover and I go on and make a baby biscuit with it.  Granny always made the baby biscuits and we grandchildren fought over whose privilege it would be to eat that tiny biscuit.  I smiled, thinking of Granny as I made my biscuits this evening and ended with that little one.

I've never been able to make biscuits as Granny did.  Mama used the same method but hers were never as smooth and pretty and so exactly shaped as Granny's, though they used the same amounts of everything.   Granny would put her flour in the wooden bread bowl, and she'd make a deep well right in the center of the flour.  Into that well went her measure of shortening and then she'd pour in the milk or buttermilk, and she'd squeeze that shortening into little, tiny bits in that cold milk.  When she felt no more big lumps and was sure that the pieces were all tiny, she'd gradually start dragging in some of the flour from the walls of the well until she had a dough that held together, and she'd knead it right there in her bread bowl in the remaining flour.  Then she'd put the ball of dough in her hand and with her other hand she'd bring the tips of her thumb and index finger together and sort of twist off a little ball of dough.  She'd roll that in her hand until it was a smooth little ball and then she'd pop it into her biscuit pan (a 7x11).  She didn't bake her biscuits separated from one another.  She put them in the pan as one does rolls, with the sides touching.

I tried and tried when I was learning to cook to make biscuits in the way that Mama and Granny did, but I never did get the feel of it.  I got very tired of the teasing my family always gave me, too.  It seemed to me just making the effort to make biscuits was worth at least a polite comment but instead my family roared with laughter over my biscuits.  They'd knock them on the table and claim they were rocks.  I was teased a lot by my family, and I took it in stride, but my pride hurt over those dang biscuits.

One day as I was making dinner, I took down Mama's Better Homes and Garden cookbook (long before it was BH&G) and I followed the recipe for Biscuits Supreme.  They were perfect.  My family was astonished.  I'd made beautiful biscuits, light and fluffy and delicious.  That's the same recipe I used tonight.  And they are good, every single time I make them, as I've been making them now for about 50 years...But I've always felt I had let down tradition somehow by not making them as Granny had, which was the same way she'd been taught by her mother and grandmother and the way she taught my mother, strictly by feel.

I had meat frying in the pan, and I was listening to it as I worked on the biscuits, and I remembered Granny telling me to 'listen to the singing' when she was frying chicken.  She always knew the exact moment to turn her meat or when it was done by how it sounded frying.   I listened but made a lot of mistakes, before I eventually got it right.  The singing she referred to was the sound the meat makes in the oil. When you put meat in hot oil, the contact between the two causes a fast tempo sound or 'singing'.  When the singing becomes a slower tempo then it's time to turn it or remove it if you've already turned it.  

I thought about how she also taught me to 'go by smell' when cooking or baking.  You can, once you've trained yourself, know exactly when a cake needs to come from the oven, or the biscuits have browned or when the potatoes have gone tender as they boil, or even when the chicken broth is at the perfect point, all by the smell.  Katie was always irritated by my sense of smell.  She followed a recipe, and if the recipe said it needed to cook 'x' number of minutes, it wasn't done until the timer went off.   Often enough I'd push her to check anyway.   I won't even say how often it turned out I was right.  Now Katie is an experienced cook, she too can tell by smell when something is done.

It was Big Mama who told me to go by feel when making breads.  She told me the dough would be soft and tender, like a baby's bottom.  It took me years to realize that I stopped kneading too soon, but when I finally got it right, I knew it immediately.  And by the point, I could say I've learned to cook with all my senses.  I look and taste and smell and touch.  That's what my grandsons really mean when they tell me my food is good because it's made with love.  It's really that I've used all my senses when I'm cooking.