The Curious Case of the Flat Biscuits

W h y weren’t my homemade biscuits fluffy? That’s the question that has haunted me since I stared at the dense, flat discs cooling on my baking sheet last night. They weren’t terrible — the taste was there — but they weren’t the dreamy, cloud-like, puffy pillows of my childhood memories either.

I had followed what I thought was a foolproof recipe: all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, butter, Crisco, and whole buttermilk. I’d carefully cut the fat into the flour, just as I remember my mother and grandmothers doing countless times. I’d rolled out the dough with precision and cut perfect circles with a round biscuit cutter.

But somewhere between the mixing bowl and the oven, something went wrong. These weren’t the bold, buttery biscuits that my Grandmother Lanier made in Metter, or the delicious wonders my Grandmother Jarriel turned out daily in her farmhouse near the Ohoopee — the ones I devoured with homemade fruit preserves or a concoction of forkmashed butter and syrup. Both of my grandmothers were biscuit queens, wearing their well-worn, flour-dusted aprons like royal robes as they produced thousands of perfect biscuits throughout their lifetimes, seemingly without effort. How sad they would be to learn that all these years later, one of their granddaughters can’t produce a single decent biscuit. For shame!

What makes my failure even more ironic is this: I have an engineering degree for heaven’s sake and can pretty much learn to do anything I set my sights on doing by reading instructions or watching a video. So how is it possible that I can’t replicate something as simple as a biscuit? It’s a question that challenges both my intelligence and my Southern upbringing.

My mother, Wanda Collins, can make fine biscuits, when she puts her mind to it. Throughout my childhood, her biscuits were a blessing to our family, and she always saved the last bit of dough to pat out a special “baby biscuit” just for me — her youngest child. Even now, decades later, I’m still her baby, though she hasn’t made me a biscuit in a while.

When I called her last night to ask what I’d done wrong, even she was stumped.

“I don’t know why your biscuits were flat,” she said. “Just keep trying.”

I’d used a coated baking sheet and wondered if that had something to do with their flatness. Both my grandmothers used beat-up, silver pans, and sometimes they used their black iron skillets, because in truth, they used those big black skillets for almost everything — like a multitool. Maybe my coated baking sheet was the reason for my failing.

This morning, I Googled the words, “Why aren’t my homemade buttermilk biscuits fluffy?” I read through the results. Maybe I overhandled the dough. Or maybe I didn’t cut in my fat (butter and Crisco) well enough. Or maybe my baking powder was old and dead.

So I will try again over the weekend and like a chemist, I’ll carefully adjust a few things and record my data. I refuse to let this art form end with my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations. My grandmothers may be gone — God rest their sweet souls — but their legacy lives on in me, my memories, and in my determination.

So I’ll try again, because accepting defeat is not in my DNA, and certainly not an option here. I’ll keep trying until my batter-coated hands learn what my mind can’t seem to master. Because sometimes the most important family traditions aren’t written down in recipes — they’re passed down through muscle memory, through the feel of the dough and the weight of history in an old mixing bowl.

My next batch of biscuits might not be perfect, but they’ll be made with the same grit and persistence that my grandmothers poured into every biscuit they made. And maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll bite into a biscuit that takes me right back to my childhood, sitting at their supper tables and feeling nothing but love. Until then, I’ll keep baking, meeting the challenge with renewed hope, and knowing that every flat biscuit brings me one step closer to the fluffy biscuits of my dreams.