Theme: A Scene of Sight and Sound

SUNDAY BISCUITS

I was drawn from the solitude of my room and my conversations with Rainbow Dash, Barbie and Skipper whenever I heard Granny in the kitchen at our Sutter Avenue apartment. I suspected correctly that she was making her famous Sunday buttermilk biscuits from scratch, always made on a Sunday after we got home from church. Pots rattled around underneath the kitchen sink like hubcaps clanging together at an auto shop while she searched for her baking pan. It wasn’t your typical dark gray baking pan that came lined with some type of toxic coating that caused things miraculously not to stick. It was instead a small rectangular pan with a shiny silver center and dark corners of burnt crust from last Sunday’s biscuits, and the Sunday before that, and probably the biscuits that were baked in it before I was even born. I had a theory that the biscuits got their flavor from the burnt corners of the pan.

The pan traveled with granny to New York from South Carolina where it had been used to bake cobblers and puddings and the like. At first glance by an inexperienced eye the pan would appear to have not been washed thoroughly but to a seasoned kitchen observer like myself, that crust was just extra flavor. I liked to imagine that this pan had been used to bake for presidents and that somehow Kennedy or Roosevelt ate something from that pan, that’s how good whatever you baked in it would taste.

As granny walked over to the sink her slippers shuffled against the floor; ninety-nine cent store slippers with the cardboard wedge heel that always seemed to fall apart. She held the pan in all of its small glory under the faucet for a good power wash. Water rushed over the pan while she scrubbed and sang to the tune of “I was born by the river,” her favorite song harkening back to life as the daughter of a sharecropper, raised in a tiny shack on a cotton farm where she first learned to make these biscuits. The dark brown corners remained intact even after the washing.

My round and pudgy 8 year old stomach started to growl and moan like the howl of a hungry wolf under the moon. Granny hummed and sighed while she kneaded the dough against a wooden cutting board with just enough Aunt Jemima flour sprinkled onto the board to keep the dough from sticking. She always had a preference for Aunt Jemima flour and Uncle Ben's rice like they were brother and sister. I supposed that the biscuits would taste bad if she had used something that just said “All-purpose” just like if she had used a pan that didn’t have brown corners. I don’t know what all she used to make the biscuit dough since I was only concerned at this age about eating whatever came out of the oven. I think it was a lot of flour, a pinch of sugar, a dash of salt, some buttermilk-or clabber milk as she called it-that smelled like rotten feet, an egg or two, love and a good kneading.

When Granny finished kneading the dough, she poured some Crisco oil into the pan and let me swirl it around. “Make sure you grease those corners and edges,” she would say. She then dropped the biscuit dough into the pan in imperfectly shaped round balls of goo. They didn’t look anything like the biscuits that popped out of a can. I called those the weekday biscuits. She opened the oven door and pulled out the middle rack, placed the crusty dough filled pan onto the rack and gave it a shake before she slid the rack back into the oven and closed the oven door.

The kitchen was warm with anticipation and I was exactly where I wanted to be. As the biscuits started to bake, I could smell sweetness. Inhale. The scent of fresh dough wafted through the kitchen and made my nose hairs stand on end. I closed my eyes and fantasized about how I would eat them. I would have one biscuit smothered in Welch’s grape jelly and one with honey, both with melted butter on top. I would separate each biscuit in half that way it would feel like I was eating 4 biscuits instead of 2. I loved the biscuits and the biscuits would love me back.

And then I heard a pop. And another pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. I could hear people scream from my third floor window as Granny pulled me down to the floor. She yelled “chile’, bullets fly through the windows and they don’t have no names on ‘em.” We crawled to the bathroom and climbed into the bath tub for safety as we listened to the screaming sirens approach our apartment building and screech to a halt. I rested in Granny’s arms unafraid while I smelled the downy in her housecoat and waited for a sign that whatever madness was happening outside of our kitchen window was over. It was just another day in the hood.

As we talked about the biscuits, I realized that they were burning. The smoke detector rang out with a sound that was much louder than the sirens on the street. I sprang from the tub and ran over to the kitchen and opened the oven door and were greeted by a puff of gray smoke and the stench of burnt bread. The biscuits were black and crumbly and the pan had a new crust but not in a good way. Granny pulled out the rack and lifted up the pan. She stared at me as she held the pan over the trash can. One by one she plucked the biscuits up from the bottom of the pan and let them slide into the trashy abyss. Sometimes when things burned she would take the top of the thing off and only throw out the burnt bottom. But not even the tops of these biscuits could be saved. They were a deep burnt brown and in some cases, black. There would be no Welch’s jelly dancing in my mouth. “What do we do now?”, I asked. “Make a cake”, she said! We didn’t have any lemons to make lemonade.

Granny never acknowledged the sirens or the minutes in the tub or the pops we heard from the street and she spent no time discussing the biscuits. As with most things that didn’t work out, Granny just moved on to something else. She opened the cabinet above her head, pulled out a box of Duncan Hines yellow cake mix, a mixing bowl and two round cake pans sans the corner crust. Duncan Hines had a sister named Betty Crocker, but Granny always had a thing for Duncan. I had a thing for Duncan too and I thought to myself, “There is more love and comfort in a cake than a biscuit anyway.”