GRITS (girls-raised-in-the-south) have no choice but to learn to cook. I wouldn’t say I’m as good a cook as my sister, or my niece, but I can hold my own. One of my biggest regrets in life is that my grandmother (Daddy’s mother) died without giving any of us her recipe for sugar cookies. I haven’t gone through all of Mama’s old recipe boxes, though, so I’m still holding onto a sliver of hope. I did, however, learn how to make Mama’s biscuits, and they’re so easy, you don’t even need a written recipe.
Grandmother's Biscuits
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup butter
- 2/3 cup milk
- 1 egg
- self-rising flour
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350.
- Microwave butter in a glass measuring cup to melt.
- Add the milk on top of the butter (to make a full cup of liquid).
- Pour that mixture into a large bowl and add one egg, beating it in with a fork. Stir in self-rising flour until a dough ball begins to form. (Don’t measure; just keep adding till you get it right.)
- Dust more flour over and around the dough ball until you can pick it up without it sticking to your fingers.
- Dump the dough ball onto a sheet of flour-covered parchment paper.
- Pat the dough down softly until it’s about an inch thick. Don’t overwork the dough; it should feel soft and pliant and cushy, like a plump Grandma’s bosom. If you want, you can brush the top of the dough with melted butter, then fold it over and pat it down again, so the baked biscuits will break open in the center. Just don’t pat the dough so much that it loses that soft, bosomy feel.
- Use the rim of a drinking glass dipped in flour to cut biscuits from the dough, arrange them on a baking sheet, brush the tops with butter, and bake till they’re golden brown.
- Any bits of dough left over from the biscuit-cutting process can be used to make bite-size biscuits, or even dog treats.
- For variation, you can add-in cheese, or cooked sausage crumbles, and instead of rolling out the biscuits, drop them by the spoonful onto the baking sheet, then bake as usual. Enjoy!
