Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

Biscuits and Red Eye Gravy

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit my parents in Charleston, South Carolina, so my mother and I could have a pandemic version of the Houston Quilt Festival, which was cancelled this year. We watched a streaming video class and made a precision-pieced quilt block.

Before that, we spent a couple of nights in Hendersonville, North Carolina, enjoyed the autumn color atop Mount Pisgah, picked dark red Rome apples, and visited the Western North Carolina Farmers’ Market in Asheville. I really wish we had such a farmers’ market anywhere around here. I found a few things I could bring home in my suitcase—some Sourwood Honey, which I have to say is the best honey I have ever tasted, some slices of salt-cured ham, a jar of sorghum, and some dried apples.

This morning, I made my husband a real southern Appalachian breakfast of ham, red eye gravy, eggs, buttermilk biscuits, and sourwood honey. As I opened my vacuum sealed package of ham slices, I was thinking about my father’s father, Papa, and my father’s mother, Mama Hallie, who raised 15 children in Middle Tennessee. They rounded up and slaughtered hogs in the fall, and seriously used everything but the squeal. They made salt-cured hams, pan sausage, and rendered lard. Here I am opening my little plastic package while Papa had to go out to the shed, cut down a ham he butchered and processed himself, cut away the salty and moldy crust, and carve off the meat for breakfast. Mama Hallie cooked on a wood stove, which had me wondering how early in the morning someone had to get up to get the oven heated up for biscuits, while I set my digital control pad to 425F and go on with my biscuit-making. This morning, I had to use those anemic-looking, store-bought eggs as my old hens are withholding eggs because they are mad at me, and my young hens are not quite old enough to lay. At least I have experienced the henraising and egg-gathering part of breakfast.

Papa grew sorghum, harvested and milled the cane to extract the juice, and cooked it down into sorghum molasses. He robbed bee trees and hives to get honey. They milked cows, skimmed cream, and churned it into butter. The milk left after the butter churning was the buttermilk for the biscuits, or for crumbling leftover cornbread into for a snack or meal.

My dishwasher is out of commission awaiting a circuit board to arrive and be installed. In the meantime, I am washing dishes by hand. I turn on the faucet and wait for the water to get hot, thinking about sending a kid out in this cold weather to pump a bucket of water which I will heat on the stove for dishwashing. Mama Hallie died before my parents met, but I was able to spend lots of time with Papa. He always kept a white enameled pan of water on his back screened-in porch with a dipper hanging on a nail right above it. If you wanted a drink of water, you dipped it up out of that pan and drank out of the dipper. He had a kitchen sink with a faucet, but the water on the porch was far more refreshing.

My breakfast this morning has me missing Papa and regretting that I never got to know my grandmother. It has me feeling a little guilty at how easy we have things nowadays and feeling enormous admiration and awe for both sets of my grandparents, and for my husband’s ancestors who raised their families right here on this ranch where we live. I feel a theme coming on. I will tell you about my mother’s parents in South Alabama next week, and about my husband’s ancestors in the column after that. If this makes you reminisce, please tell me your stories—<SpringCreekArtsGuild@gmail.com>.