In regards to this topic in particular, and to Southern food in general as I may blog about it in the future, let's immediately denounce any citation of works by other authors that seek out the vulgar and defamatory, inciting unsubstantiated racist rhetoric in the name of exploring regional Southern cuisine. Freud never knew good Southern fare, so there is no reason on Earth to assume what his psycho-sexual take might be in the exploration of antebellum race relations as perceivably made incarnate in the form of food. Food as we relish it and by taste, smell and sight remember our past is not a transubstantiated unholy by-product of miscegenistic racial empowerment. In other, plainer words, if you have a sick ole mind, you're gonna fixate on sick, perverse ideas. Southern food has no place in that conversation. When I say "South" I don't mean one color of skin or the other. "South" doesn't infer anything about sexuality or gender identity. We're an embracing, warm, accepting people, more so than anywhere else in this country or elsewhere. When I speak of biscuits, I don't envision anything but loving hands perpetuating that love with flour and lard. Some self-proclaimed "scholars" have taken hate so far as to make our food seem vile, corrupt, evil, a manifestation of all we are NOT. If you're of that vein, or enjoy reading such slanderous venom, please read no further. Take your lust for disgust back to your dog-eared copy of "Black Hunger" and leave the rest of us to appreciate our common heritage in biscuit dough.
Let's proceed.
Image courtesy the Lexington-Herald Leader
BEATEN BISCUIT
by Howard Weeden
Of course I’ll gladly give de rule
I meks beat-discuit by,
Dough I ain’t sure dat you will mek
Dat bread de same as I.
‘Case cooking’s like religion is —
Some’s ‘lected, an’ some ain’t,
An’ rules don’t no more mek a cook,
Den sermons mek a Saint.
Well, ‘bout de ‘grediances required,
I needn’t mention dem,
Of course you knows of flour an’ things,
How much to put, an’ when’
But soon as you is got dat dough
Mixed up all smoove an’ neat,
Den’s when your genius gwine to show,
To get them biscuit beat!
Two hundred licks is what I gives
For home-folks, never fewer,
An’ if I’m spectin’ company in,
I gives five hundred sure!
Howard Weeden, perhaps I should clarify by referring to HER as Maria H. Weeden, better known to family & friends as Howard, was a renowned Alabama artist, poet, author and folklorist of the last half of the 19th century. A once privileged white child of the antebellum plantation system, Howard is perhaps best remembered today for her extraordinary portraits for formerly enslaved house servants. We also remember her for her poetic tribute to a Southern culinary delicacy that was fast vanishing from the common table even as she wrote about it in verse in the 1890s.
What is, or was, a beaten biscuit, you might ask? Try a bite as I venture to explain.
The concept is old down here. Long before the Revolution they were eaten in Charleston. They migrated to Virginia soon afterwards, and into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. Howard Weeden fondly remembered the beaten biscuit, and the hands that traditionally made them, though romanticized recollections fail to tell the whole story. She had it right, though, in that they were already a memory, and sadly are virtually forgotten now more than a century after her poetic musings. But sometimes, memories still have a lingering taste. So it is with the beaten biscuit.
In my family, food is a memory one never forgets. Perhaps it suffices as just a fond remembrance of a particular meal or gathering, though every dish has its own direct association with a person or time for each who consumes it with relish and lust. No, certain dishes constitute more of a connection with feeling that transcends time. It ties us to a sense of belonging. When a special cake is served or that homemade green tomato ketchup canned, the connections to the past just can't be forgotten or ignored. That's the way it is with us Southerners. We can pretty much sustain our cultural ties indefinitely in this fast paced, newly multi-cultural world, so long as the link to generations past is perpetuated, and fed, in the kitchen.
Sometimes I think our entire social history must be founded upon hams, yams, greens and hot bread. Throw in a few other staples, and you have a feast stretching back to Jamestown (Virginia, I'm implying). The joint continuity of food and custom is truly amazing when viewed in the context of social and cultural studies in the Southeast. Each pocket and sector of our most in-homogeneous region of the US has it own delicacies, thought unique but widely shared whose origins, in turn, are hotly declared. But one vestige of the past's table we share without dissent, from Charlestown to Charleston and Baton Rouge to Bowling Green, is the biscuit
Today when we mention a Southern biscuit we visualize the fluffy, softer than down, buttery pillows of golden flaky pastry like my mother makes from White Lily flour (made form soft winter wheat, the Knoxville, Tennessee mill produces the ideal flour for soft, flaky biscuits.) Such delicate creations though weren't always common fare on the Southern table. Until the late 19th century, with the advent of commercially produced baking powder, most biscuits were unleavened and "beaten."
Now don't start envisioning a young Brando playing Stanley in "Street Car" with the infamous "beater" t-shirt. I've warned you already about letting your mind stray off topic.
"Beat" means to strike repeatedly, but it's also a rhythmic unit in music or poetry. The latter more ties to the biscuit. Beat meant to pound a dough into layers. Remember now, we're talking about the 18th and 19th centuries. Baking powder wasn't introduced until the 1850s, along with self-rising flour (baking powder mixed in with flour). James A. Church began marketing sodium bicarbonate as baking soda under the Arm & Hammer label in 1867. Baking soda was previously known as saleratus, a combination of the Lain "Sal" (salt) and "Aerates" (aerated). In 1889, William M. Wright developed the double-acting baking soda we know today, marketed in the label Calumet.
I divert, but yes, that's also the Lexington, Kentucky "Calumet Farm" family of Thoroughbred racing fame.
Is something burning? Oh, yes, the biscuits!
This "beaten" biscuit known to early 19th century housewives, without the later kitchen chemistry to make their biscuits rise, was literally pounded, layer upon layer, to make the otherwise tough dough flaky and palatable. Period recipes require the dough be worked for at least 30 minutes. Here, look at a recipe and you'll understand more clearly. I'll borrow from "Garden & Gun Magazine" who borrowed from a famous old Kentucky cookbook.
Pounded Biscuit—No. 2
Adapted from The Kentucky Housewife, 1885
Ingredients
1 ½ lb. flour
¼ lb. lard, shortening, or butter
1 tsp. salt
1 ½ cups cold water, and more as needed
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Combine all dry ingredients, and then cut the lard into the mixture until it is the texture of coarse meal. Gradually add the water. Knead the dough into a stiff ball. Then, continuously fold and whack the dough with a heavy object until it is pale and blistered, 45 to 90 minutes, or divide it into two pieces and give each two minutes in a food processor equipped with a dough blade. Recombine the dough and fold it by hand several more times, or until it looks smooth. Roll it out to a thickness of about ½ inch, and then cut out the biscuits. Pierce each one three times with a fork, and bake for about one hour, or until cooked through but not browned.
60 years earlier, my own paternal cousin, Mary Randolph (1762-1828), included her simpler version in her classic matriarch of all Southern cookbooks, The Virginia House-Wife of 1824. Calling them "Apoquiniminc Cakes", Cousin Mary instructed cooks to:
Put a little salt, one egg beaten, and four ounces of butter, in a quart of flour- make it into a paste with new milk, beat it for half and hour with a pestle, roll the paste thin, and cut it into round cakes; bake them on a gridiron, and be careful not to burn them.
The work was so laborious and intensive that rhythmic pounding resonated from plantation kitchens in the early mornings, offering a musical quality to those listening. One neighborhood in Danville, Kentucky, along its historic Third street preservation district, is known locally as "Beaten Biscuit Row." According to legend, passersby during the 1800s were greeted by the steady pounding of biscuits from the outdoor kitchens of the houses lining that street.
Southern food historian, scholar and author John Egerton talks further in his classic work Southern Food just how much effort went into the preparation of beaten biscuits. He explained, "The old method was to make a firm dough of flour, lard and milk, and to beat it vigorously with a heavy mallet, a skillet or other flat object, or even the side of an ax, continuously folding and flattening the dough until it became soft and smooth. This layering and pounding process introduced air into the dough and gave the biscuits a lift in the oven; it also gave them their name."
The beaten biscuit became such a staple in the Kentucky diet, partly because of its association with our legendary country ham, that the little brown gems were incorporated even into political ceremony. While the origins of the custom have been lost to time, it became tradition in Frankfort for citizens to present beaten biscuits and white cake at the Governor's Mansion on inauguration morning. Following custom, the exiting governor would leave the items on the dining table for his newly elected colleague.
Being so tiresome to prepare, it is no wonder that a table was created to save the backs of the cooks, who had it bend over their kitchen table to knead and pound biscuit dough. The biscuit table was devised as a worktable of appropriate height at which one could stand and beat the dough into layers for the required half hour (or more). Early versions were likely just wood. One very "nostalgic" account by the author James Battle Avirett in the Old plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin Before the War (published 1901) described the importance of the biscuit table in the antebellum cookhouse in North Carolina. He wrote, "What large block of wood is that standing between the windows on one side of the kitchen, about three feet in diameter and four feet high? That is where the old cook beats her famous biscuit, which are the most delightful of all breads. Defying and despising both baking powder and soda, the old-fashioned Southern beaten biscuit is the very nonpareil of breakfast or supper bread, equally good hot or cold, in its flaky lightness. The French cooks of neither New York nor Paris have ever been able to equal it. In very truth it surpasses the famous Vienna rolls of the Washington City club houses. In their highest perfection they have sadly disappeared, with the old turbaned cooks of the old plantation régime, who mastered all their secrets. Later on we shall sample old Aunt Patty's beaten biscuit but we must hurry out of the kitchen, for we have much to see before we go down to the quarter."
The biscuit table, like the sugar chest, evolved into a unique furniture form as the 19th century progressed. Increased sugar production and demand for candies in Creole New Orleans shed light on the ingenious concept of utilizing marble slabs in preparing confections. This worked so well, the idea crossed over to bread making. By the middle of the 1800s we begin to see slabs of marble, limestone, and granite incorporated into the once simple wooden biscuit slab. Going one step further, hinged covers were added to the tabletop to allow dough to rest without fear of insects or other critters, ruining a morning's labor.
Like the beaten biscuit itself, the biscuit table seems to surface in several states, all of which take credit for its origin. Covered slabs of a similar form, however, seem to be concentrated in the central portions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, while a related form, likely for the candy making, has turned up in Louisiana. Poplar predominated as the wood of choice in the making of plantation biscuit tables, though yellow pine and walnut, examples are known Most biscuit tables that have survived are sturdy but crude in construction, with many having been fashioned from roughly finished lumber and square nails or pegs. The slabs, or stones, are generally of limestone, quarried locally, with some of "Tennessee" marble displaying the rich rusty chocolate striations of that indigenous stone. The addition of stone surfaces gave rise to a new colloquial name for the regional furniture form, the biscuit rock.
A traditional Biscuit Rock, photo courtesy Case Auctions, Knoxville
The best documented biscuit table surveyed was made "on the place" at the cabinet shop of "Auvergne", the Bluegrass plantation of Brutus Clay in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Others have been associated with varying monumental homes in the select Kentucky-Alabama Biscuit Table region, including Isaac Franklin's "Fairvue" plantation in Sumner County, Tennessee.
The biscuit table lost its usefulness with the invention of the beaten biscuit machine, or brake, a roller contraption cranked by hand much like that which is found on old wringer washers. This little device could be mounted onto the kitchen worktable, but also was made w onto a cast iron table and could be ordered and delivered to one's home. The were produced commercially in St. Joseph, Missouri and perhaps other cities, and shipped throughout the South to eager housewives. One model, in fact, was eventually manufactured right in Lexington, Ky. Called the "DuMuth Improved Beaten Biscuit Machine", it was as well once made in Missouri, but later was manufactured & sold by Gem Sales who promoted their product by giving away a free "how to make beaten biscuits" book. Customers could write in for this guide up through the 1930s.
It seems that by the beginning of the 20th century, the beaten biscuit had pretty much become romantic Southern folklore, though still preserved in many old fashioned kitchens of the day, relegated primarily to the inner parts of those states curing and eating country hams. Some food scholars say the biscuit ended up surviving in the "ham belt" of Alabama to Kentucky, but I would rather call this the "biscuit belt."
Silent move star and Tennessee native Virginia Bradford, in her autobiography, remembered, "In the summer were Protracted Meetings at the County Churches. They were held more as social gatherings for the people who lived miles apart then to bring sinners to the Lord. It lasted for weeks, and was the holiday part of the year. Families came in wagon loads, bringing with them their choicest hams, baked or boiled with spices, and sweetened with rich molasses from their own sugar cane; rich cakes and pastries; and pickles, jellies, spiced peaches and pickled watermelon rind; and boiled eggs deviled into a succulent mixture. Never have I know such flavors. Even my aunt forgot her snobbishness, and prepared food for days. She made beaten biscuit, caramel cake and creamy lemon pies. I was happy then. The children didn't have to sit in church and listen to the preacher save sinners. I'm sure these people didn't think much about sin. The service was mostly song singing."
Interesting that the biscuit she describes was clearly part of a litany of desserts and fine baking early in the 1900s, but then that's exactly how it would have been thought of decades prior. From Bradford's pre-WWI childhood through to modern times it would continue to be served in connotation with special events and celebrations, though in relation to and regulation by an old system of caste that, unlike flour, was never quite shaken off.
Easier left unspoken even now, we need to concede that the original cadence of the biscuit making ritual was echoed for the benefit of others to start with, and not for the maker. War changed society, though, even in the kitchen, and ladies of leisure became rarities of the rural South. Former mistresses of domestics became the domestics, and the party biscuit of decades gone were recreated by those meant to partake of them. Finally, during a nostalgic literary time of remembrance as two centuries were crossed did "White Lily" refer to something more poignant than just the flour and at last failed to mask the origins of the hands that sifted & pounded it. In the early beginnings of the beaten biscuit, there was no end celebration for the biscuit maker. In its late 19th and early 20th century revival, with some help from industrial America, it was revived as a romantic symbol of Southern hospitality and plenty once again. Now, for the most part, the cook came to the party.
Annie Fellows Johnston, author of the "Little Colonel" series of books (that were decades later immortalized in film by Shirley Temple), made such contemporary early 20th century reference to the survival of the beaten biscuit in the Southern diet. Johnston recounted the continuity of the biscuit, and its original architect, in those years following the War in novels such as Maid of Honor, as too did author Alice Hegan Rice. Only W. E. B. DuBois, who spoke of its paring with chicken rather than the traditional ham, offers us the possibility that some African-Americans also enjoyed the labor intensive layers. I tend to think his recollections rare.
Ms. Weeden was sure not the only Southern writer and artist of her day to memorialize, in a positive way, the former slaves of her childhood. Minnie Fox of Kentucky compiled food history, recipes, and incredible photographic portraits (by her brother, writer John Fox) to document the vestiges of a way of life in central Kentucky that was by 1911 quickly vanishing. Only in pockets of Southern society like Charleston, Savannah, and Lexington did old wealth hang on to a pre-war way of life. In her uniquely illustrated The Blue Grass Cook Book she preserved imagery, recipes, and folk ways of the antebellum period as they were preserved by the remaining "great houses" of Kentucky's horse country.
Aunt Frances, cook at "Auvergne", seat of the Clay family of Bourbon County, KY
Among the entries, Minnie specifically discusses the beaten biscuit, including images of not only a relic biscuit brake, but a studio-like portrait of the farm's cook, "Aunt" Maria, who still used it to make traditional beaten biscuits for special functions and family meals at "Mount Airy" in Bourbon County. She included the instructions from the farm, provide of course by the mistress, not "Aunt" Maria.
MT. AIRY BEATEN BISCUITS
Mrs. Simms (widow of Mount Airy's master, Confederate Colonel Wm. E. Simms)
3 pints of flour sifted,
1 large kitchen spoon of lard,
1 teaspoon salt.
Have the lard well chilled on ice. Rub the lard into two pints of the flour. Make this into a stiff dough with ice water and a very little milk. Work through a kneader 150 times, gradually adding the other pint of flour, or till the dough is perfectly smooth. Roll out one-half inch thick, cut into biscuits, stick with a fork, and bake in a moderate oven till light brown. Serve hot.
Beaten Biscuit Suggestions
The dough can be kept for two days if put in a tightly covered jar and kept on ice or in a cool place. Roll from 150 to 200 times through the kneader. Bake from 20 to 25 minutes in a hot oven. If the stove is hot enough to blister them before they are baked, place a bread-pan on the upper grating. Many of the best housekeepers prefer the old way of making the biscuits out by hand to the use of the cutter.
John Fox must have had some fascination for the biscuit, too, as he included images of the finished product as well as professional portraits of Mt. Airy's cook rolling out the dough on the brake and cutting out the biscuits. His photographic contributions caught a moment in time without criticism or disdain for his menial subjects. Fox's pictures display an appreciation not only for "old times" but for the talented hands still preparing dishes from the past, though they as well make clear to modern viewers that stations in life, for Kentucky Blacks, hadn't changed in the prior 50 years.
Funny, with all the rumination about a mere biscuit, many like Howard Weeden & Minnie Fox offered us only a melancholic link to slavery, and even while some like these ladies attempted to offer just praise and credit to formerly enslaved cooks, few hinted at the eventual transition of legacy from black cook to white. Realistically, beaten biscuits were never prepared and consumed by antebellum slaves. Slave cooks would not have been allocated the time, or the ingredients, necessary, thus with few logical exceptions beaten biscuits were always intended for consumption by white Southerners.
Think on it a moment. Few traditional regional recipes outside of desserts can be "segregated" in this manner, though we didn't, and still don't, talk of it. I have yet to read of an African-American tradition anywhere within the "biscuit belt" that included them in their menu outside of DuBois' fictitious allusions. Traditionally, Blacks didn't eat beaten biscuits, don't eat beaten biscuits, and, but for rare exceptions, didn't continue to make them, even for white patrons.
One major exception to note here was "Miss Susie" Jackson of Woodford County, Kentucky, who was taught as a child how to make the flaky morsels, and continued to specialize in their creation as a caterer well into her 80s. She understood the relationship between social custom and food, explaining once, "If you have a party around here and don't have beaten biscuit and Kentucky ham, why you ain't had no party at all! They means hospitality!" A great & gracious lady, and iconic image of Southern African-American cook, I do wonder if anyone ever made a beaten biscuit for her?
Miss Susie was particularly proud of the refined, delicate but sturdy texture of her finished product that sliced just right in order to fill with salty bits of ham. Crunch without crumble was her motto of sorts, an accomplishment her loyal white patrons should have been as proud of as she was. Miss Susie clearly had an understanding of the near-demise of the beaten biscuit and its salvation by hands far less accomplished than hers.
Clearly, not all beaten biscuits by this later period were beaten evenly, and not all memories of the biscuit, by this final stage in its evolution, were quite so pleasant. Perhaps they were fortunate even to survive past the late 1800s but for literary homage. No longer now the handiwork solely of well trained black cooks, the beaten biscuit tradition seems to have been carried on predominately by white cooks after the turn of the century. This was especially true east of the inner Bluegrass region. In a 1978 interview with Mrs. Jefferson Patterson of the Frontier Nursing Program regarding her arrival in Eastern Kentucky, she fondly remembered this vestige of Southern culinary arts during the early parts of the 1900s. Mrs. Patterson stated, "Cousin Mary Breckinridge, founder of the Frontier Nursing Program, had arranged for the people in the cabin to give us some breakfast, what they called coffee, which was a little different from the kind that comes from a bean, and some beaten biscuits, which we could hardly chew, but we were very grateful to have it."
Patterson wasn't alone in her less than complimentary observations on the aged generation of beaten biscuits. The worst description known follows:
“May I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast? They are hard as a haul-seiner's conscience and dry as a dredger's tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship's keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. What's more, eaten first thing in the morning and followed by a cigar, they put a crabberman's thirst on you, such that all the water in a deep neap tide can't quench --- and none, I think, denies the charms of water on the bowels of morning? ”
― John Barth, The Floating Opera
As the 20th century progressed, the once common beaten biscuit was seldom seen on the Southern table. Perhaps we've figured out why! Biscuit tables were burned for kindling or relegated to the meat house and barns, and cast iron brakes were scrapped for the war effort, all while a "tasteful" reminder of our past was nearly obliterated from memory. Today a renewal of interest in food origins and history perpetuates many nearly lost cooking practises, and the beaten biscuit can be found once again in select regional restaurants and specialty food shops, white its recipes and instructions for preparation have been updated for the modern cook. And no more tough and chewy hockey pucks calling themselves biscuits. Today's revivalist chefs, like Midway, Kentucky's restaurateur Ouita Michel who held her first "Beaten Biscuit Workshop" in 2015, have reached back further to the time the beaten biscuit was a celebratory bread, and not Civil War hardtack. Even Alabama's infamous actress Tallulah Bankhead might eat her dry & crumbling words today could she taste the changes, having once bemoaned the then beleaguered beaten biscuit by recalling, "My Grandmother wouldn't have known a baseball from a beaten biscuit."
No ma'am, Miss Bankhead, you can't make that comparison now. And, awful sorry your grandma couldn't make a good beaten biscuit. Maybe her rock was cracked.
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