Biscuit Therapy and Modern Salt

Published by Saturday, January 2, 2016 Permalink 0
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by Jonell Galloway

In Loss There is Nourishment: A Southern Biscuit Story

One has to be able to work the dough intimately; it is like making love and following every move of your lover. Timing is of the utmost importance. The symphony of movements is different with every batch, and one has to be in step with every beat. A bit more flour, a bit more lard, just enough air pockets, stop, stop. It’s about perfect harmony, ending on a perfect note, at the perfect moment; it’s fast-moving and playful like a scherzo, and, like a live piano concert, once you’ve hit a wrong note, there’s no going back.

Every Southerner has a biscuit story. Biscuits are what bind us and make us Southern, whether they are slathered with sticky blackstrap molasses or sausage gravy. When we say we miss the South, we are missing a wooden swing on a front porch, beads of sweat running down our foreheads, and a welcome breeze bringing a waft of biscuits cooking; we are missing the sound of the oven door opening and of hearing the biscuits coming hot out of our mothers’ ovens, calling us to supper, calling us home.

This is the introduction to my first article for the British publication Modern Salt, published by Penny Averill.

Click here to read the rest: Biscuit Therapy.

Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on two books, The French and What They Eat and What to Eat in Venice.

 

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