By Kara Kimbrough

 The homemade biscuit, a beloved American icon, is on the endangered species list. I blame it on supermarket biscuits marketing themselves as “homemade,” with an “old fashioned buttermilk taste.” 

In reality, they’re pale spheres of sticky dough ready to spring from their cans offering little more than synthetic butter. Here’s the main reason I’m upset about the neglect of the biscuit. I consider an old-fashioned, no-carbs-barred biscuit one of life’s top necessities. It’s a flaky bite of bliss that we all need now and then.

  I could go on and on…a  homemade biscuit is a soft pillow of comfort that makes eases life’s trials. Only the most hard-hearted Southerner would turn down a piping hot, fresh-from-the-oven biscuit. Plain and unadorned or filled with a little homemade jelly, it just doesn’t get any better than a biscuit.

Not many people make homemade biscuits anymore, but it wasn’t always this way. Flip through any cookbook from the 1960’s up until the health-conscious 1990’s and you’ll find page after page of biscuit recipes of every description. Key ingredients included whipping cream, sour cream, cream cheese, mayonnaise and even sourdough starter.

 

Of course, these fancier versions were predated by real biscuit pioneers, women like my grandmother who made a pan of biscuits each morning with hearty ingredients like shortening, flour, buttermilk and baking powder. These fist-sized balls of buttery goodness were one of the best reasons to get out of bed every morning.

  3 Ingredient Biscuits

(adapted from Best of the Best of Bell’s Best Cookbook)

2 cups self-rising flour

8 ounces sour cream

1 stick butter, melted (do not use margarine)

    Mix all together and spoon into greased muffin tins, filling halfway. Bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for 25 minutes or until brown.

Kara Kimbrough is a food and travel writer from Mississippi. Contact her at kkprco@yahoo.com