Cooking with Nana-Hot biscuits, melted butter, and homemade jam

My mom and grandmother could make biscuits in their sleep. Grandma made them for breakfast and then again at lunch. Supper was usually leftovers. Mom made them for supper, almost every night. Now days you can pop biscuits out of a can or buy some really good frozen ones in a bag that taste good, but they don’t compare with homemade ones fresh from the oven.

As a little girl I would sit on Grandma Layne’s counter top and she would give me my own little pile of dough to work with. Usually she’d give me a cookie cutter and I’d make a star or a heart biscuit. When I got older mom let me use the rolling pen and I thought that was a big deal.

Grandma always had homemade jellies, jams and preserves.  Mom made some great crab apple jelly and some cherry preserves, but not as much as Grandma did.

During my teen years my friends would drop in and eat mom’s biscuits cold and declare them “wonderful.” I prefer mine hot with butter and jam. The more fattening the better!

Mom’s and Grandma’s Biscuits

4 tablespoons crisco

2 cups self rising flour (Grandma preferred Martha White)

1 cup milk

Mom and Grandma both made biscuits so often that the biscuit bowl, rolling pin and biscuit cutter were kept in the same place under the sink. Evidently this was my great-grandmother’s custom as well because Grandma Layne said that once Ma (Great-grandma) got some arsenic (they used it for rat poisoning) mixed in with the biscuit flour. Someone had put it under the sink next to the flour (a definite no-no) Thankfully she got just enough to make everyone sick, but not kill anyone or I might not ever have been born!)

Sift flour into large mixing bowl. Drop crisco in. Add milk and then mix by hand (you can use a spoon but not nearly as effective) Scatter flour on clean counter top where you will knead dough. Mix flour and crisco by hand until you have a nice round ball. Plop it on the flour.  Knead until well mixed. Coat rolling pin and your hands with flour to keep it from sticking so much. Roll out dough until it’s about one half inch thick. Take cutter and cut out biscuits. Give spare dough to grandchild and let them make shapes, play with it, whatever.  Then let them put their biscuit on the pan next to yours. Bake at 450 degrees until golden brown. Take out, melt butter, add jam and enjoy!