An old women's biscuits

[fletamae]

I am 70 years old who had 4 children and a husband and I can't learn to adjust my cooking for my self and my daughter.
I make biscuits by using self raiseing flour.
this is how I have made biscuts for years.
Dump some self riseing flour in bowl
add some powdered milk.
stir this until the milk is mixed in even.
Add water until you have a nice wet dough
dough should be fluffy and not to wet.
I pour this on a floured board and turn over until the dough is covered with flour and looks dry pat the dough in about 1/2 thickness.
The less you handle the dough the better.
cut your biscuits with something. I use a small tea cup.
Mean time I have the oven heated and a pan with a table spoon rounded over with melted lard.
place the biscuts in the hot fat and turn over once.
Biscuits should be cooked in a oven about 500 degrees.
I make about 7 biscuits and usually have 5 raw biscuits left.

I put these in a pan top with a dab of margine on top.
I place 5 raisins on top of the these biscuits after flattening the round disk as flat as I can in the pan.
I mix a small amount of sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl covering the flat biscuits with the sugar
mixture.
then I pour canned milk over this .If you have cream this would be better.
I cook these in the hot oven along with the biscuits.
As soon as the biscuts are brown on top remove from the oven and your cinnamon biscuit are firm remove them also.
these are very good as a snack.
Ok mine boiled over in the oven. what a mess.
I poured table salt on the bottom of the oven to stop the smoke and smell. after oven cools I scrap the mess from the bottom of the oven. Pressto clean oven.

 

[ncnative]

That sounds like a good recipe for my son to take to Boy Scout camp! Dry ingredients and add water!

We have used a simular recipe:

Put self rising flour in a bowl (however much you want).

Add whipping cream until biscuit consistency.

Pat out on floured board. Cut and bake pretty much as you did.

I like easy! My husband, however, makes the best biscuits so I don't have to anymore.

 

[the simple life]

Thats great fletamae, thanks for sharing.
I know how hard it is to adjust when you are use to cooking for a large family. I had three of my 7 children go off to college and I am still making too much at dinner time.
You spend all those years doubling or tripling recipes and it seems strange when you make less, like you won't have enough for everyone.
Its good though, if you like to have leftovers.

 

[Ozark Hen]

These biscuits sound real good, but I will add some cheddar cheese and garlic with fresh parsley for them tonight to go with our chicken salad. Yum, thanks for sharing.

 

[Cassandra]

<sigh> That makes me miss my grandmother. I will share her biscuit recipe, which I have never learned to make as good as she did.

Mamaw had a big wooden bowl that she kept flour in all the time and it had an old odd boiler lid on it that kept it loosely covered. When she wanted to make biscuits (almost every day!) she would take down her old wooden bowl and go about it like so:

Many mornings I was awakened by her banging a metal spoon full of Crisco shortening on the side of a cast iron skillet. cLaNg! She left the skillet on a burner to melt the shortening.

Then, she would dump a mound of self rising flour in the middle of the wooden bowl. (about two cups I would guess, but she never measured anything.)

Put her whole hand in the mound of flour and make a big well with the back of her hand by turning the bowl round and round.

Pour some buttermilk into the well.

Then, pour the melted shortening into the well, turn off the burner and leave the skillet on the stove.

Then, with a metal spoon, she would start stirring to slowly incorporate the flour into the liquid ingredients until the dough was the right consistency. Then she stuck her hand in the flour, then into the dough and started kneading the dough with her hand by digging her fingers in and turning the dough over as she turned the bowl round & round.

After a few turns, she would pinch off a piece of dough and roll it out in her hand (like you were rolling a ball of play-doh.) She put the ball in the skillet and flattened it down with the backs of her fingers.

She filled up the skillet like that, with all the biscuits touching each other and baked them until they had a crust on the bottom. Then she put them into the bottom of the oven to broil them until they were golden on top.

Best thing ever.

Cassandra

ETA, she always left the flour that was left in the bowl. It always had a wall of flour around the inside of the bowl with a big well in it.

 

[Tutter]

Thank you both, Fletamae and Cassandra. I, too, have wonderful memories of my granny making biscuits.

Fletamae, you are so right about handling the dough. I have to say that biscuit making is something that I do better than some things, and I am careful to handle them as little as possible.

Hi, NCnative! I used to make sour cream biscuits sometimes. Self-rising flour and sour cream....that's it!