I Finally Learned to Make Biscuits the Way My Aunt Lottie Did, at 51

My Aunt Lottie made biscuits every morning of her adult life, and for most of my own adult life I made bad ones. Not inedible, just flat and a little tough, the kind you need gravy to forgive. Hers rose tall and pulled apart in soft layers, and she did it without measuring anything, in a bowl she never washed with soap.

She passed when I was in my thirties and I assumed the secret went with her. Then last winter, at fifty one, I finally got it, mostly by accident and partly thanks to a phone call with her daughter.

The things I was doing wrong

For years I followed recipes from magazines and cookbooks. They were good recipes. The problem was me. Looking back, I made three mistakes over and over:

• I handled the dough like bread, kneading it until it was smooth
• I used butter straight from the fridge, but my kitchen is warm and it went soft before it hit the oven
• I twisted the biscuit cutter, which seals the edges and keeps them from rising

The last one I learned from a woman at church who watched me cut a batch at a fundraiser and said, very kindly, "Honey, you're strangling them."

The phone call

My cousin June inherited Lottie's bowl and her flour sifter. I called her one evening to ask if she remembered anything about how her mother worked. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, "She always did a thing with her thumb. She'd press a little dent in the middle of each one before it went in the oven."

I had seen that a hundred times and never thought about it. The dent keeps the biscuit from doming in the middle and helps it rise straight and even. It seems like nothing. It changed everything.

How I make them now

Here is the version I make on Saturday mornings now, as close to Lottie's as I can get:

Put two cups of soft Southern flour in a wide bowl, the low-protein kind if you can find it. Whisk in a tablespoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon of baking soda and a teaspoon of salt. Grate half a cup of frozen butter into it on the large holes of a box grater and toss it with your fingers until it looks like coarse crumbs. Pour in about three quarters of a cup of cold buttermilk and stir with a fork just until it comes together, shaggy and a bit sticky.

Turn it out, pat it to about an inch thick, fold it in half, pat it again. Do that three times. That is where the layers come from. Then cut straight down with a floured cutter, no twisting, and set them in a cast iron skillet so their sides touch. Press the dent with your thumb. Brush with melted butter. Bake at 450 degrees for about fourteen minutes.

What they taste like

The first time it worked, I stood in my kitchen at seven in the morning and pulled one open and the steam came out in a little puff. It smelled like Lottie's house. I am not a crier, but I had to sit down.

I don't think recipes are ever really lost. They're just waiting in someone's memory for the right question.