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Gonna Be an Interesting Night

Growing up coke, rootbeer and other colas were an extravagance we didn't indulge in very often... was usually a treat ... our beans were straight pinto beans with either salt pork or ham hock in them... we did sometimes shake a few drops of pepper sauce in them... especially if they were warmed over for the 3rd day.... Pepper sauce was also used on turnip greens or whatever greens were were being fed.... didn't do kale in those days, although grandmother did grow kale and I'm sure fed the grandkids some.... Pepper sauce was just some version of hot pepper dropped in a jar then vinegar poured over the top....as the vinegar got used, just added some more.
 
Mondays are Red Beans and Rice at our house... We eat other beans on the rest of the days. #1 wife soaks them overnight and it seems to diminish the aftershocks... I think I was the only kid in school that went back through the cafeteria line for seconds on White Beans and Rice...

Mom made lots of Pintos. She would add two or Three Chili Petines and some salt pork and bacon grease... #1 wife made 15 bean soup about two weeks ago... I think I kinda ODed on that batch... Took me a few days to get back to normal.

I don't like refried beans, even on something like a chalupa. I'd rather just have beans as beans...

Every trip to New Orleans we load up on Camellia Red Beans and Reisings French Bread. They have Camellia's in the store here but the turnover is slow or not at all. The ones we bring back taste better. And of course the French bread is non-existent here.

Alan
 
Chuck Ellis said:
Growing up coke, rootbeer and other colas were an extravagance we didn't indulge in very often... was usually a treat ... our beans were straight pinto beans with either salt pork or ham hock in them... we did sometimes shake a few drops of pepper sauce in them... especially if they were warmed over for the 3rd day.... Pepper sauce was also used on turnip greens or whatever greens were were being fed.... didn't do kale in those days, although grandmother did grow kale and I'm sure fed the grandkids some.... Pepper sauce was just some version of hot pepper dropped in a jar then vinegar poured over the top....as the vinegar got used, just added some more.
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Pepper sauce was a staple in our house growing up. I wasn't that fond of it, but my Texan dad was. It stayed on the kitchen table alongside the salt and pepper shakers. My granddad (my dad's father) was the same way.
 
We eat quite a lot of beans, just as well I don't go out much. White bean and sausage soup with greans, red beans and rice, bean burritos, lentil tacos, split beans on bread, mung beans, and so on. But I gotta say we grew some borlotti beans last year and made some stewed french style beans with them fresh shelled and those were the biggest, best textured, and best flavored beans I've had in a long time. We have a fair bit of saved seed so I'm planting a bigger patch of those this year (the white pole beans also made some really excellent soups and white bean chili's as well).

Pepper sauce? I dunno we don't usually just do just the peppers in vinegar style but tend to blend them up a bit and yeah some sort of hot pepper goes on and usually in almost everything around here.
 
My mother cooked pinto beans until the pot liquor (likker) was thick and rich with flavor. Of course she seasoned them with chunks of our own country ham that my father cured. Ummm, ummm, good! Sometimes we had fried fatback as a side which was always fun to eat. Lord knows the doctors would have a fit if they knew you were eating fatback. I fixed some fatback one time. My wife had never had any. She was upstairs working and I put a pan of store bought Grands biscuits in the oven and fried up a pound of fatback. A pound of fatback yields two pounds of grease when you are frying it up. When the smell of the fatback and those biscuits wafted their way up the stairs she came running. She gobbled it up like it was the best thing she ever had. Of course after the eating the lecture about how bad it was for you ensued. Around here some of the local restaurants will have fatback on the buffet. It is always a treat to get a couple of pieces of fatback to gnaw on.

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Pintos and dried butterbeans were served up with Mom's homemade biscuits to sop up the gravy. She could whip up a pan of biscuits in no time. We had biscuits twice a day for breakfast and supper.
 
Mike Stafford said:
. She could whip up a pan of biscuits in no time. We had biscuits twice a day for breakfast and supper.
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In our house growing up biscuits were for breakfast... buttered, with home made jelly, or preserves.... sometimes with just syrup and butter, or on days Mom made sausage, we would sometimes have red eye gravy from the sausage grease and Ber Rabbit syrup poured over.... I think when we ate and Grandpa Ellis's house the syrup would be home made sargum syrup... he died when I was 4, so not so sure, but Mom and Dad both talked about Grandpa running sargum stalks through a wringer and making syrup.
Dinner and supper was always cornbread... sometimes with syrup on it too.
My mother's mother was the biscuit make ... hers were the fluffiest and lightest ever.
 
Chuck Ellis said:
...My mother's mother was the biscuit make ... hers were the fluffiest and lightest ever.
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My dad was the biscuit and cornbread maker in our house. He didn't make them for every meal, but he made a lot nonetheless. Not sure about the cornbread, but he learned to make biscuits from his mom. For him the biggest challenge was figuring out the quantities of ingredients. His mom made them by eye (and feel). She'd start with a mound of flour in a big cutting board and just start adding the various wet ingredients to the center of the mound. I believe she learned it this way from her mom, Mama Cantrell. Dad did using measuring cups, and I do have his recipe. They're not light and fluffy though (which is how I prefer them) so I usually use canned biscuits or another recipe.

When I was a kid we went to visit Mama Cantrell in Texas. She was well into her 80s at the time and her hands were so arthritic she could barely use them. I remember her being very embarrassed to be serving us canned biscuits one morning with breakfast.
 
My mother had an enameled bread pan that was large enough to hold 10 pounds of flour. She kept it covered with a piece of bakery linen cloth.

To make biscuits she would clear out a circular area in the center of the pan into which she would throw a handful of Crisco. To that she would add some buttermilk. She didn't measure anything. Then she worked the Crisco and buttermilk into a homogeneous mass. Gradually she would work flour into this mass of dough until it was the consistency that she wanted. She would pinch off a piece and roll in her hand, pat it out and put it on her greased bread pan. Her biscuits were the same size day in and day morning and night. I don't know how she got the size so consistent but she did. Her "batch" made 10 biscuits 99% of the time. They were light and fluffy with a golden brown top and a slightly crunchy bottom.

Lord have mercy, you could put a piece of sausage or a slice of country ham in that biscuit and it was to die for. Nobody made biscuits like my mama.

I have tried to make biscuits the way she did and on occasion I made some that were reasonably facsimiles of her but never as good. Most of the time mine were lumpy as a result of inconsistent mixing. She made biscuits for breakfast every morning and biscuits for supper every evening.
 
#1 wife's grandparents made cornbread EVERY day. It was a staple... and not just any old cornbread, but homegrown corn ground at a local mill. I don't know how they stored it but they had about a million mason jars with everything you can grow out of the ground put up in them. Later they had two huge chest freezers for meat, peas, butterbeans, corn, etc... The man's garden was at least two acres, maybe three... they put up something every day. The pressure cooker was a permanent fixture on the stovetop. He knew where every fig tree, peach tree, mayhaw bush, dewberry patch, etc. was in West Carrol Parish and surrounding areas. She lived to be 98 and he was 100. Their big meal was at noon. Supper usually included a glass of buttermilk and the last of the cornbread along with whatever else was handy. Their breakfasts were simple too, maybe and egg and grits and pork pan sausage. Fried chicken every Sunday, no exceptions. The best sweet potatoes in the world grow between Delhi and Epps Louisiana. They ate lots of those. We still get two cases of them every year. Plant them anywhere else in the country and they are just a sweet potato. Something about the soil up there makes them the best.

For his 100th birthday he wanted to go to a catfish place. While we were eating, I asked him what he was going to do for his 101th birthday.... He said, "Come here and eat catfish". Simple people, simple healthy long lives...

They came to visit once in South Texas... On the morning they were leaving he was packing his trunk. I had gone out and picked a sackful of vegetables for him to take home. I set the sack down by the rear bumper and leaned my cotton hoe on the edge of the trunk. I said, "I have something for you to take back to North Louisiana with you"... He looked down and said, "Why, thank you Alan!" and picked up my hoe and put it in his trunk.... That was a standing joke for a long time... #1 wife's dad got that hoe when the old man died and I finally got it back in 2020 after 35 years.... That hoe is well over 100 years old, but it still works like new!

Alan
 
I learned that you have to make biscuits in the north different than you make biscuits in the south on account of the flour. Down south it's all (well most anyhow) really low gluten flour so you have to work the dough a bit. Up north it's higher gluten and if you work the dough you end up with rocks.

I make two kinds of biscuits and I'm still learning some tricks on them. The first kind is cut biscuits which are good for splitting (and are the best kind with gravy) and are my day-to-day biscuit. Those benefit from a bit of a roll and a couple folds whichever kind of flour you use but they're easier in the south. You have to be real careful no to pinch the sides to. I usually make mine mostly fresh ground whole wheat so it's a bit of an extra trick to get them to rise well. I've taken to mixing the fat into half the flour and then add the baking powder, soda, and salt with the other half. That gets mixed together then I add in some sourdough starter blended with some milk (powdered usually or fresh if I have it) for extra flavor and a bit of acidity to pop the soda. Then it's pat out, fold, cut and bake. I used to use 3/4C of fat for 2C flour but found they're just as good with half that or even a bit less so in the interest of health and cost have cut them back a bit (not really measuring much except I kind of eyeball what's on the spoon when I scoop).

The other kind of biscuits are drop biscuits and you have to treat them even more gentle. They're made about the same except I might add a wee bit more liquid to the dough and would fairly often add some herbs (chives, or parsley or similar) and maybe a bit of cheese to the flour & fat mix before I added the liquid. Then you take gentle scoops and drop them onto a lightly greased sheet pan and bake.

I have on occasion made sourdough risen biscuits as well which are a lot like cut biscuits but you have to plan ahead some hours (most commonly I'll start them the night before, let them get a bit of a rise then let them rest in the fridge overnight to slow it down a bit). I pretty much always do those in a big cast iron pan and put the whole kaboodle straight in the oven.

Dumplings are just drop biscuits cooked in the soup pot, lid on, no peaking for 20m :)

Cornbread depends on my motivation to grind the corn so we perhaps have it less often than I'd prefer otherwise haha. It's usually in the mix if we have chile or baked beans though.
 
My grandmother made biscuits the way Mama Cantrell did... she kept flour in a pan, made a hole and added her wet ingredients then worked the dough to what she wanted. I asked her for a recipe to something she had made, it was a pinch of this, a handful of that, a little of this and a little of that... no way I could have duplicated that....

Our big meal was dinner (at noon)... the evening meal was "supper" and usually left overs from "dinner"....
my dad like cornbread in buttermilk or clabber, but I prefer "sweet milk" old timey term for regular milk. Clabber is raw milk that has been allowed to "turn" and the milk solids settle with whey (water) on top.... once clabbered, chill the milk and eat it with a spoon... or run it through a cheese cloth and it becomes cottage cheese.
I like fresh butter milk and still buy commercial buttermilk but it's not the same as real churning left over.... commercial butter milk has chemicals added to thicken it and give it a tang that fresh buttermilk usually doesn't have.
 
Ryan Mooney said:
I learned that you have to make biscuits in the north different than you make biscuits in the south on account of the flour. Down south it's all (well most anyhow) really low gluten flour so you have to work the dough a bit. Up north it's higher gluten and if you work the dough you end up with rocks.

I make two kinds of biscuits and I'm still learning some tricks on them. The first kind is cut biscuits which are good for splitting (and are the best kind with gravy) and are my day-to-day biscuit. Those benefit from a bit of a roll and a couple folds whichever kind of flour you use but they're easier in the south. You have to be real careful no to pinch the sides to. I usually make mine mostly fresh ground whole wheat so it's a bit of an extra trick to get them to rise well. I've taken to mixing the fat into half the flour and then add the baking powder, soda, and salt with the other half. That gets mixed together then I add in some sourdough starter blended with some milk (powdered usually or fresh if I have it) for extra flavor and a bit of acidity to pop the soda. Then it's pat out, fold, cut and bake. I used to use 3/4C of fat for 2C flour but found they're just as good with half that or even a bit less so in the interest of health and cost have cut them back a bit (not really measuring much except I kind of eyeball what's on the spoon when I scoop).

The other kind of biscuits are drop biscuits and you have to treat them even more gentle. They're made about the same except I might add a wee bit more liquid to the dough and would fairly often add some herbs (chives, or parsley or similar) and maybe a bit of cheese to the flour & fat mix before I added the liquid. Then you take gentle scoops and drop them onto a lightly greased sheet pan and bake.

I have on occasion made sourdough risen biscuits as well which are a lot like cut biscuits but you have to plan ahead some hours (most commonly I'll start them the night before, let them get a bit of a rise then let them rest in the fridge overnight to slow it down a bit). I pretty much always do those in a big cast iron pan and put the whole kaboodle straight in the oven.

Dumplings are just drop biscuits cooked in the soup pot, lid on, no peaking for 20m :)

Cornbread depends on my motivation to grind the corn so we perhaps have it less often than I'd prefer otherwise haha. It's usually in the mix if we have chile or baked beans though.
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Flour is different depending on the wheat from which it is ground. There are four basic kinds of wheat. hard red winter and hard red spring have the highest level of protein. These wheats when ground are most often used commercially for breads and rolls. Soft white and hard white have the lowest levels of proteins and are most often used as flour for cakes, cookies, crackers and pastries.

In the south you can buy biscuit flour which is indeed low gluten flour but you can make your own reasonable facsimile low gluten flour by adding 2 parts corn starch to 8 parts all purpose flour sifted together several times to ensure thorough mixing.

Most flours are ground solely from the endosperm and have almost no nutritional value. Those products made from whole wheat include the endosperm, germ and bran. To be correctly labeled as whole wheat the resulting flour must have the proportions of endosperm, germ and bran the same as in the original grain.

In my past work I spent a lot of time in several very large bakeries, bread, cookie, crackers, pastries etc. as well as a number of flour mills so I learned enough to be dangerous.

P.S. My mother made dumplings by rolling out her biscuit dough to about 1/8" in thickness and cutting it into short strips which she gently placed in the chicken broth. Have mercy! That was some good stuff. There are now a couple of firms who sell "chicken pastry" i.e. dumpling strips in the frozen food section of stores in my area so you don't have to make your own. There is one that even makes a chicken and pastry base to add to chicken broth as it is cooking to enrich the flavor. I make chicken and dumplings using the commercial chicken pastry. It cooks perfectly and tastes great.
 
Mike Stafford said:
Flour is different depending on the wheat from which it is ground. There are four basic kinds of wheat. hard red winter and hard red spring have the highest level of protein.
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Even within those categories there's a fair bit of variation in protein content and also protein structure depending on the specific variety and where it was grown. The continental french "Soft white" for example actually makes a decent baguette although the protein content (usually below 11%) is quite low because the type of protein is extra good at sticking together. The hard white can vary from 10-14% which overlaps a fair bit with hard red at 12-15%. The soft white is mostly sold as "cake" flour. I did pick up some soft white grain that was really low, maybe 9% or a tad less and tried it.. it did make some dandy drop biscuits and worked a bit better kneaded or worked a bit to build a little more structure (kinda like "white lily" flour from down south). LOML wasn't super enthused by the whole wheat cakes although she will generally accommodate me on the bread and biscuits (and pie dough and.. most things other than cake I use fresh ground).

I use probably 90% hard white from the Palouse region of WA which is a pretty decent all around wheat coming in at around 12% or maybe a bit lower depending on the year. It gets ground in our nutrimill so it's definitely 100% whole wheat cause actual whole wheat berried go in and flour comes out hah.

The fresh ground is a lot better than most store ground. The germ is pretty high in oils, which is fine for years when it's trapped in the kernel but once you grind it will start to go rancid within a couple weeks (depending on temperature and storage). The kind of weird "bite" most people don't like in whole wheat comes from it being rancid, and when they try fresh ground it's usually a bit of a surprise.

I've also gotten some oregon winter hard red from a local grower but the bran content from that was also really high so it's challenging to use as a flour out of a hand mill (commercially that would be separated off but I lack the tooling..), but works pretty well as a pilaf, bulgur (I use a hand mill to crack it for that), or a sprouted wheat bread.

I don't really understand the canned or frozen biscuits myself :dunno: Maybe I'm just old fashioned haha. It takes me maybe and extra 5 minutes to mix them from fixings (and maybe 3 more for the mill to grind the flour), most of the time is in the cooking anyway. The ingredients are all multi-purpose so I don't have one offs taking up freezer space either.
 
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