Yes, they are that gorgeous.
My best friend Greg gave me Shirley Corriher’s book, Cookwise for a gift about 10 or 11 years ago. I read it like a novel, and I’m here to tell you it is a real page turner.
If you’re a cooking aficionado please do yourself a huge favor and buy this book. Half cookbook and half kitchen science primer, if you’re the type of person who likes to know why things happen the way they do in the kitchen, then you will love, no, adore this cookbook.
Short story, follow me for a moment. I recently was given James Villas’ book Biscuit Bliss, a 140 page treatise on the art of biscuit making. In his book he gives Shirley’s recipe for “Touch of Grace” biscuits, so named because her grandmother told her as a child that her biscuits didn’t turn out quite right because she omitted an ingredient…a touch of grace. Intrigued, I reached for Cookwise, found the recipe and headed off to the grocery store at 5:00 am to buy heavy cream and buttermilk.
I preheated the oven to 475 degrees and started measuring the dry ingredients into my favorite stainless steel biscuit mixing bowl. After adding the wet ingredients I was spooning very wet dough onto a plate of flour, turning gently to coat, shaking off the excess flour best I could and placing the uncooked, drop biscuits side-by-side in a greased 8″ cake pan.
As I slide the cake pan into the oven and set the timer for 17 minutes I could feel the anticipation begin to build. I have baked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of biscuits, and I am the proud winner of a Blue Ribbon for my biscuits last summer at the Fair, and yet I could not wait for that timer to run its course. Hurry, hurry I thought to myself. I have butter and orange marmalade waiting patiently.
As my kitchen timer sung its gentle tune, I slowly opened the oven and you see what I saw.
A "Touch of Grace"
A cake pan full of the softest, most tender biscuits known to civilization. I’m not exaggerating when I say that had I not tethered them to the kitchen counter they would have floated away and joined other ethereal and gossamer things somewhere in space.
In your life you have never seen a pat of butter and a dollop of orange marmalade any happier. That first bite was truly amazing. No joke…these are truly light, soft, tender, melt in your mouth biscuits. And, there is no waste, which really appeals to me.
Biscuits are a food connection to our past. I cannot imagine for a moment a pilgrim throwing away any unshaped scraps. That may have been a sin for which no repentance was sufficient.
Before baking these biscuits I had a dozen working biscuit recipes, I now have 13.
Remember, when YOU make it, the first ingredient is love.
Buon Apetito!
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