In the South, good breads are a legacy.
Martha Pearl Villas remembers Sunday mornings at her childhood home in Charlotte, N.C. After church, her mother would whip up a batch of yeast rolls and place them on a stool in the back yard, cover them with a tea towel and leave them in the heat of the sun to swell.
“It was my sister Jane’s and my job to watch those rolls to be sure they would rise right. In my mind’s eye, I can still see us tending those rolls,” says Villas, who with her son James (she calls him “Jimmy”) is author of “My Mother’s Southern Kitchen.”
Margaret Agnew has a different vision from her youth in Bainbridge, Ga. She remembers watching her mother making corn bread in a cast-iron skillet. “You can cook it in any pan you want but a cast-iron skillet gives it a wonderful crust,” says Agnew, the author of “Southern Traditions.”
And Daisy King, author of “Miss Daisy Cooks Light,” grew up on a farm just outside Atlanta. She recalls her grandmother rolling out biscuits with a glass rolling pin–a wedding present.
In the era after the War Between the States, people were poor and had to eat what they could grow or find growing wild. Their corn and wheat was milled into meal or flour and traded for a bit of sugar. The cows provided milk, cream, buttermilk and butter. Pigs rendered their lard and cracklings. Then these ingredients were used to make inexpensive yet filling breads.
Cornmeal, buttermilk and a little lard were used to make corn bread and corn sticks.
You’ll rarely be served vegetables in the South without corn bread to sop up the pot liquor. “In fact, when I was growing up we thought corn bread was a vegetable,” Agnew says.
Villas remembers sitting on her grandmother’s lap enjoying corn bread crumbled into the vegetable pot liquor. “It was so good,” Villas says.
In summer, corn bread would be served with lots of fresh vegetables. In winter, after the hogs were slaughtered, it would be flavored with cracklings (bits of pork fat or skin left after the pork is rendered). Never a scrap of the pig was wasted.
“We’d slaughter our hogs the day after Thanksgiving–we’d kill about 10 of them–and enjoy crackling bread throughout the fall and winter,” says King, who lives in Nashville. That time of year, hush puppies also would be popular–deep fried bits of corn meal batter–because lard would be available for frying.
But even when corn bread graced the table, there was a good chance biscuits–made from flour, buttermilk and probably lard–would be right alongside. “It wasn’t unusual to have both biscuits and corn bread on the table because they are both so wonderful,” James Villas says. “Biscuits are an absolute staple throughout the South and they aren’t just eaten for breakfast.”
At age 6, King learned to make the perfect biscuits from her grandmother, who would prepare two batches a day. The secret ingredient, says King: “Love.”
But Pearl Villas says she never could teach her son to make good biscuits. “He fusses with them too much, so they are tough.”
At breakfast, biscuits would be enjoyed with eggs, lots of butter and some preserves made from strawberries or peaches grown in the yard. At dinner, another batch of biscuits would be served. When King was old enough for school, her grandmother would tuck a little country ham into one and King would take it to school for lunch.
As we said, in the South, nothing goes to waste. Any leftover biscuits–which tend to be too dry to eat as is–would be split, buttered and broiled the next day for breakfast.
To this day when Pearl visits her son in New York, James asks his mother to make biscuits in the evening so they’ll be “leftover” and ready for toasting the next morning.
But Pearl doesn’t mind. “I can make biscuits as quick as I can open a jar–I can make them in nothing.”
As the South became more prosperous, people could afford luxuries such as yeast. And yeast rolls quickly became a part of the South’s baking legacy.
As the South became more cosmopolitan in the latter half of the 20th Century, fruit breads and muffins became popular, King says. She found her muffins in demand at Miss Daisy’s Tea Room, a restaurant she opened in Nashville in 1974.
Over time, not only the breads available in the South have changed, but also baking styles. King says that when she was a child, breads were made with lard. When she moved from the farm to the city, she started using vegetable shortening in her biscuits. Today, cooking for a diabetic husband who has to watch his saturated fat intake, she uses safflower oil.
But some things never change.
Martha Pearl Villas is still trying to teach James to make perfect biscuits; King is teaching Patrick, her 17-year-old, to make yeast breads; and Agnew’s 7-year-old son, Robert, watches her make corn bread–in her own mother’s cast-iron skillet, of course.
ANGEL BISCUITS
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Rising time: 1 hour
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 17 biscuits
Recipe from “Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House Cookbook” by Pat Mitchamore with recipes edited by Lynne Tolley.
1 cup buttermilk
1 package ( 1/4 ounce) active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon each: baking soda, salt
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1/4 cup cold butter plus 2 tablespoons melted butter
1. Heat buttermilk over low heat in a small nonreactive saucepan, stirring, until lukewarm (do not let boil). Remove pan from heat; stir in yeast and sugar; set aside.
2. Stir together flour, baking soda and salt in a large mixing bowl. Cut shortening and 1/4 cup cold butter into flour mixture with a pastry blender or two knives until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Stir in buttermilk mixture until blended–dough will be very soft.
3. Turn dough onto a floured work surface and pat it out to 1/2-inch thickness. Brush top with half the melted butter. Cut dough into rounds with a 2- to 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter and place, buttered side down, on a well-greased baking sheet, close together but not touching. Repeat with scraps. Brush tops with remaining melted butter. Cover with a sheet of plastic wrap and set aside to rise in a warm, draft-free place for 60 minutes.
4. Heat oven to 425 degrees. Bake until tops are golden brown, about 20 minutes. Serve immediately.
Nutrition information per biscuit:
Calories…..160 Fat…………..10 g Cholesterol…..10 mg
Sodium…….245 mg Carbohydrates….14 g Protein………2 g
COUNTRY CORN BREAD OR STICKS
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Yield: 8 servings
Recipe from “Southern Traditions” by Margaret Agnew.
1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup vegetable oil or bacon drippings
1. Heat oven to 450 degrees. Combine cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt, stirring well. Combine eggs, buttermilk and oil; add to cornmeal mixture, stirring just until moistened.
2. Place a well-greased 8-inch cast-iron skillet, 8-inch square pan, or cast-iron corn-stick pan in oven until hot, about 4 minutes. Remove pan from oven; spoon batter into pan, filling indentations in corn-stick pan three-fourths full. Bake until lightly browned, 15 to 20 minutes.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories…..200 Fat………….9 g Cholesterol…..55 mg
Sodium…….425 mg Carbohydrates…24 g Protein………5 g
HUSH PUPPIES
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 4 minutes
Yield: About 40 hush puppies
Recipe from “My Mother’s Southern Kitchen” by James Villas with Martha Pearl Villas.
2 cups all-purpose Southern flour (Martha White)
1 1/2 cups yellow or white cornmeal
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon each: baking powder, salt
1/2 cup finely minced onion
1 1/3 cups milk
1 cup water
1/3 cup vegetable oil plus more for frying
1 large egg, beaten
1. Sift together flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add onion, milk, water, 1/3 cup oil and egg; stir just long enough to blend.
2. Heat about 2 1/2 inches oil in a deep-fat fryer or deep cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat to 375 degrees. Drop the batter by the tablespoonful into the fat in batches, making sure you do not crowd the pan. Fry the hush puppies until golden brown and cooked through, about 4 minutes. Drain briefly on paper towels; serve very hot.
Nutrition information per hush puppy:
Calories…..65 Fat………….2 g Cholesterol…..6 mg
Sodium…….82 mg Carbohydrates…9 g Protein………1 g
