Making biscuits and sausage
Holidays spark a yearn for old tastes. I know what they are: I just can’t duplicate them all.
“Hoppin’ John” is easy. It moved with my ancestors from South Carolina where it emerged and became a family New Year’s staple.
“Ailey Ale” was served during the holidays in my home town. I never knew what was in it.
Breakfast at my grandmother’s table included large, soft, flavorful, hand-formed biscuits made with pure lard. Large tin buckets of it sat in the smoke house.
The elements, flour, lard, salt, baking powder, buttermilk were brought together hardly mixed. You can easily over handle biscuit dough.
There was buttermilk. A facsimile of buttermilk is made from milk with a dash of vinegar. Vinegar make it sour and gives the baking powder something to work with.
At Phillips Mill Uncle Guy opened the gates, to pass water down the race, unlocked the under-shoot water wheel and set the stones in motion.
He ground flour to near the consistency of powered sugar.
Phillips Mill arose on the south side of Dog River during a drought in the 1920’s. The dam was built of granite boulders from a previous mill, his uncle’s “Pray’s Mill” across the river.
There are the basic ingredients leaving the combining of the parts as the remaining mystery. Or so I thought. I recalled one overlooked aspect of my grandmother’s cooking.
Her biscuits were baked quickly in the very hot oven of a woodburning cook stove, probably fueled by dry corn cobs, hotter than our stove can reach.
That wood burning stove is the element I can not duplicate. Then, there was sausage. I would think a business would flourish producing a throw-back cured sausage but FDA, EPA and every department but NASA likely has prohibitions. Uncle Guy’s sausage was made of salt cured pork scraps.
In late fall Guy killed eight to ten yearling pigs. The next day hams, shoulders bellies and pieces were rubbed with salt with pepper and placed in wooden boxes along a wall, then covered with salt. In a few weeks the meat was taken out and washed, again rubbed with the dry mixture plus borax to toughen the skin and prevent “skippers” then returned to the boxes of salt.
When the meat was completely infused with salt it was placed in muslin bags and hung from wires in the smoke house to naturally dehydrate.
At this point trimmings were hand ground, mixed with sage/ pepper mix then stuffed into long tubes of muslin, to return to hang in the smoke house.
Once the meats were covered with a patina of green mold they were ready.
Guy kept two years of meat in the smokehouse so this year we’d eat last years meat.
My grandmother took down a long tube of sausage, rolled back the muslin and cut away what was required for a meal.
Holidays conjure up memories of these tastes, over-riding all others.
Joe Phillips writes his “Dear me” columns for several small newspapers. He has many connections to Walker County, including his grandfather, former superintendent Waymond Morgan. He can be reached at joenphillips@hotmail.com.