I am fond of telling people to cook and eat where you are. Do you know what I mean? If you want really good sushi, go to Japan, want a great hoagie, better head to Jersey or NYC. Want goulash? Your best bet is going to be Hungary.
Of course this is a generalization, I have had a lot of good food in South Mississippi that didn’t originate here, but if I am having friends over for Sunday supper, its going to be about as Southern as it can get: fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread, black eyed peas, lima beans, fried okra, you know the drill, right?
But there is one Southern food that is so adaptable, and can be so delicious, when made with the love and care it requires, and that’s the common biscuit. Did you know that the biscuit and the hush puppy are related? The story goes that a group of hunters were sitting around the fire making biscuits for supper. The dogs had gathered around the fire too and were hungry, so one of the hunters rolled several spoon full of biscuit dough into a balls and fried them in oil, tossing one to each dog, saying, “Now, hush puppy.”
It is a bit of a hokey story, but it does illustrate how flexible a little biscuit dough can be. There is nothing wrong with just a plan biscuit, a tab of good butter and some homemade strawberry jam (especially if is was made at the Greenhouse in Biloxi!) but they can also be cut in half, dipped in an egg and milk wash, and fried like French toast. Everyone must have had a biscuit with sausage, but for me the sausage needs to be spicy with red pepper flakes and have lots of sage to be just right. Biscuits go very well with fried or scrambled eggs, cheese of almost any sort, those little round sausages that are so hard to quit eating, even when you have had enough.
But there is just one biscuit combination that beats them all and that’s a good homemade biscuit, with lots of butter, and a bountiful amount of sorghum molasses. When my dad was a kid, living with his very poor family in the Mississippi Delta (they were tenet farmers), biscuits with sorghum was a very inexpensive way to feed a poor family, but dad said it could become a tiresome diet, when eaten three times a day.
As tiresome as a meal it could become, dad ate his fair share of molasses and biscuits all of his life. As have I! Remember, don’t forget the biscuits and also remember to share with your canine friends!