I am a total sucker for simple recipes with basic ingredients and outsized promises of greatness, so last month when I came across a NYT recipe for a biscuit that had Eric Kim, a NYT Cooking food writer, saying things like “this biscuit is such a new taste for me” and “very unique” and “so different from any other biscuit I’ve ever had” — and he’s from the South! — I knew I had to make it.
Friends, he is right. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but this biscuit is different from regular biscuits.
The butter-flour ratio reminds me of pie pastry. The sugar in the dough made me think they’d be similar to scones, yet they are definitely not scones and I have zero interest in smacking in some add-ins like fruit, nuts, or chocolate. The folding method is reminiscent of puff pastry, but in a craggy, this-is-not-that way. And the addition of buttermilk makes me feel like these really ought to be like ordinary biscuits, and yet they aren’t.
These are less bready, maybe, and more special — part ordinary food and part divine dessert. The inside is tender and the outside has a decidedly un-biscuit-like crunch.
Whatever the case, the salty-sweet ratio is spot on. Absolute perfection. Amen.
The whole family gobbles them up, and I save the leftovers for breakfast. Even three days out, I still wake up excited for my breakfast biscuit.
A few notes:
Use a sided baking sheet because sometimes some of the butter bakes out in the oven. (When this happens, the biscuit edges fry in the butter which turns them deliciously crispy, o happy day!)
The instructions call for grating the butter, freezing it for 10 minutes, and then tossing it with the dry ingredients. I’ve grated the butter on the big grater holes and the small ones (Eric says the small holes are better), and have found that the smaller butter shavings were so fine that they clumped back together and became lumps. I’m not convinced either way.
The cutting and stacking of the dry dough until it turns into a cohesive, many-layered block of buttery, flaky goodness is totally worth it. Also, it’s fun. Try it!
Shaping the dough into a 1½ inch-high square and then cutting it into 9 pieces is smart: it’s fast, and there are no scraps to reroll. (I actually skipped the rolling pin entirely and just used my hands.).
It never ceases to amaze me how the same ordinary ingredients can yield such vastly different results with only the smallest of tweaks. What thrills!
I used homemade butter, and I replaced the buttermilk with clabber. The amount of salt (I used non-iodized Kosher salt) is perfect; don’t skimp.
425 grams all-purpose flour 100 grams sugar 1 tablespoon baking powder 2½ teaspoons kosher salt 2 sticks (277 grams) butter, grated and frozen for only 10 minutes 300 grams buttermilk or clabber More melted butter and flaky Maldon salt, for finishing
Toss together the dry ingredients, and then add the lightly frozen, grated butter and toss to combine. Add the buttermilk/clabber in 2-3 additions, tossing after each addition. The dough will be quite dry and shaggy.
Turn the dough out onto a floured counter and, using your hands, shape it into a rough rectangle. Cut the dough in half and stack one half on top of the other. Press/roll the dough back into a rectangle. Repeat the cutting and stacking process 4-5 more times. By the end, the dough should be much smoother and hold together well.
Press the dough into a square that’s 1½ inches high. Cut the dough into 9 squares, place them on a parchment-lined, sided baking sheet, and bake at 375 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Brush the tops with butter and sprinkle with flaky salt.
Serve warm, with butter and jam. Leftover biscuits can be bagged and stored at room temperature (before heating, reheat for 15 seconds), or frozen.
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. — L.R. Knost
***
It’s been two weeks since we returned, but I’m still putting the pieces together.
Just the other day my husband said, “Do you think it was intentional that they structured the EJI museum so you felt like you couldn’t escape?”
And only then did I catch on to the planners’ subtle brilliance: the place was actually designed to make guests feel trapped, just as our country has trapped Black people — from when they first arrived in chains on the slave ships to how they’re being chained in the jails today — and the museum staff scattered throughout the museum, pointing us toward the exit, mimicked the underground railroad.
***
I’ve never been sure what my place is when it comes to the Black experience. As a white person, how do I fit in? What is my role?
My uncertainty makes me feel feel awkward and uncomfortable. I worry I’ll do something wrong. I worry I’ll say something stupid or make a fool of myself. I worry I’ll hurt someone.
The not-knowing can be paralyzing.
***
Messy stories are hard to manage. Tidy stories with a villain and hero, a clear conflict, and a neat resolution are so much easier to package. But life isn’t like that. People aren’t like that.
One of the things Pastor Hugh told us is that if something appears simple, then you don’t know the whole story. I’ve been thinking about that a lot: how we tweak truth and ignore facts — sometimes willfully — simply because it’s easier.
I think the experience of the messiness was the biggest gift I got from that week. Time after time I was welcomed into the complicated mess. I was trusted with the stories and as I listened, I’d sometimes find myself crying, not because the story was heartbreaking but because I was being included.
I think it’s called grace.
***
A long time ago I came across a chart illustrating the appropriate channels of communication when relating to someone who is grieving: a series of circles with the grieving person in the center and everyone else radiating outward in ever larger circles, with the people more intimately connected to the central person in the inner rings and the people less connected in the outer rings.
The rules for communication are as follows: People can process their grief with other people in the same ring, or with people in the outer rings, but the reverse of this is not true.
In other words, it’s unhelpful and innappropriate for people in the outer rings to confide their pain to those in the inner rings. Why? Because people on the inside are already struggling enough. They do not need the additional burden of the grief of those in the outer rings.
I think of this “communication flow” whenever I’m dealing with situations that I don’t understand firsthand, like infertility, disability, divorce, etc. If I’m not in the inner circle — if the pain is not mine — then my job is to listen to those in the inner circles without attempting to troubleshoot or fix, or to console them by sharing my own sadness. Because when I’m with them, my pain isn’t the point.
It’s not a perfect tool, I realize, and the rings aren’t always obvious, but it’s a start.
I’ll take it.
***
Right before we left on our trip, I learned that our group was supposed to be in charge of our church’s worship service two Sundays after we got back.
I didn’t give it much thought at first, but just a couple days into the trip, I knew I wouldn’t be able to participate: there was no way I’d be able to wrap my head around what I was learning fast enough and well enough to share it in any meaningful sort of way, nor did I feel that it was even my place — at least not yet.
Instead, I needed to let go of any pressure to turn my experience and the information I was learning into a tidy little lesson for other people. For that week, I needed to simply be present. To listen to the people. To feel the weight of their stories. To let the pain wash over me and seep into my body.
To be uncomfortable and confused.
To be sad.
To be.
***
My daughter-in-law, the only person of color in our group, spoke that Sunday morning, though. She spoke masterfully, with piercing insight and vulnerability.
***
That morning in the sharing time, another member of our congregation shared about a friend of his who lives in our county and has a Black child, and who gets letters in his mailbox from someone who identifies as the Ku Klux Klan.
“So this is still in the communities that we occupy,” my friend said, his voice breaking, “but it’s hidden from most of us.”
And that’s when I realized that that, right there, was exactly the reason I’d decided to go on the tour in the first place: to learn to see the things that are usually hidden from me.
***
Postscript to the postscript: I took creative license with the quotes in this series. None of the statements — or almost none of them — were direct quotes, though the essence of them was, to the best of my memory, totally true. (I figured you knew that, but I thought I should say that out loud since real people are connected to the quotes.)
Day Seven For our last day, we toured Jackson with Pastor Hugh, a lifelong Southerner.
Hugh spoke slowly, rhythmically: sweeping stories bulked up with meaty facts. Thoughtful, meandering exposition punctuated with truth bombs. Roundabout answers that forced me to connect the dots myself. We’d only been with him for an hour or two before it occurred to me that it might be wise to take notes. So I did (thank goodness).
Hugh used a boarded-up building to explain Mississippi’s two deltas: there’s one at the southern part of the state, but when people mention the Mississippi Delta, they’re almost always referring to the river delta in the upper west corner of the state.
Here are some of my main takeaways from our day with Hugh:
People won’t give you the tools you need to overthrow them. At the fairgrounds, Hugh told us that back in the 60’s the 10-day event was divided into two fairs: nine days were for white people, and one was for Blacks. When the Blacks protested (and I think this happened for a couple years running), the protestors were rounded up and caged in the fairground’s cattle barns — within view of the capitol building. At that time Mississippi law said that a person had 40 days to post bail, so the protestors leveraged that against the system: they’d get arrested and then wait to appeal their case until the 39th day, effectively clogging up the jails.
Silence doesn’t mean peace. Hugh pointed out the old library where The Tougaloo Nine — students from Tougaloo College — held their read-in in 1961. It was a tiny event, but it effectively kickstarted the civil rights movement. At the time, Hugh explained, many white people didn’t even realize there was a race problem. “White culture confuses silence with peace, so the people who talk about the problem are assumed to cause the problem, when in reality the problem already existed.”
Heroes versus Movements We walked by the bus station where the Freedom Riders ended their journey. “You saw that wall of photos in the Civil Rights Museum yesterday, right? Of the 450 people that participated in the Freedom rides, did you notice that none — not one — of the people on that wall are famous? They were all just regular people who protested, did jail time, and then went back to doing whatever they were doing before — going to school or cooking food or farming.”
Hugh asked if we were familiar with David LaMotte. “If you aren’t, you should be,” he said, and then he explained told us what LaMotte says about heroes versus movements: Heroes are bigger than life, so if we always look for a hero to get the work done, then we won’t ever do anything — it feels too impossible. But a movement is made up of ordinary people; everyone gets to play a part.
The Banality of Evil Black southern homes often have photos on the wall of the same three men — Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy — “but let me tell you something about Kennedy,” Hugh said.
By the time the Freedom Riders were entering Mississippi, the whole world was watching, and the violence was making Kennedy look bad. So right before the bus entered Mississippi, Kennedy struck a deal with state authorities: in exchange for providing police protection for the riders, he wouldn’t intervene when state officials arrested and jailed the protestors. In other words, as long as the state made Kennedy look good on the news, they could do whatever they wanted in private.
Did this mean Kennedy was a horrible person? Not really, Hugh said. Governments are about compromise. Kennedy’s face-saving deal at the expense of the Freedom Riders didn’t necessarily mean Kennedy was a bad person, or even racist. “People make the best decisions they can at the time based on the opportunities they think they have,”
Evil isn’t just a few monsters doing all the terrible things, Hugh said. In fact, there might not be any monsters. Rather, evil is the accumulation of thousands of small compliances that enable evil to happen — and may make room for monsters to emerge. This, Hugh explained is called The Banality of Evil, and the converse, the Banality of Good, also exists: lots of small positive acts that enable great goodness.
History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. Hugh led us down Farish street, the section of town that was the heart of Jackson’s Black community in the 1960s. He pointed out Peaches, the restaurant that MLK loved, and the Alamo Theater, and the building that at different points had housed the headquarters for everything that was anything: NAACP, SNCC, COFO, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember now.
Farish Street is now deserted — the unintended consequence of desegregation was the collapse of the black middle class, Hugh said, echoing the same theme we’d been hearing all week — but a few years back the city obtained funding to restore Farish street. They put in trees and redid the road and sidewalks, but then the money vanished, pocketed by investors and contractors, and now Farish Street is lost once again: a partially-revitalized ghost town, twice abandoned.
A movement is comprised of ordinary people doing small things. On Farish Street, Hugh pointed out the building that used to be the YWCA and told us about how when there’d been a children’s march and the police were rounding them up, a few of the kids ran into the building to hide. When the police tried to go in after them, the woman in charge, a large Black woman refused them entry — This building is for women, she said. Men aren’t allowed, and the police listened. “I’ve heard that story many times,” Hugh said, “and you know what? No one knows that woman’s name.”
The rest of our country needs a Mississippi to make it feel better about itself. We circled an enormous mall that was the hub of consumerism back in the 80s and is now completely abandoned, except for one little corner that, rather ironically, houses the Jackson City Water Offices. (The mall bore such an uncanny resemblance to parts of Station Eleven that I actually googled it to see if they’d filmed there — they hadn’t.) We drove through the fancy part of town and through a food desert. Twenty-five percent of Jackson’s population has an annual income of fifteen thousand dollars.
At one point, after a series of questions about what Jackson’s future might hold, the strain of living surrounded by such poverty and racial tensions, Hugh said, “Hang on a sec. Aren’t y’all from Virginia?”
And then my older daughter pointed out that we hadn’t seen hardly any Confederate flags on this trip but they’re everywhere in Virginia.
Goodness and evil, side-by-side At the home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist who was murdered in 1963, Hugh told us how Medgar had had the house built to his specification: a gravel roof so it’d be easier to put out the fires in case it’d be fire-bomed (which it was). A brick wall that rose a certain number of inches above the height of children’s beds so they’d be protected from gun fire while they were sleeping. A side door instead of a front door. A fridge on wheels positioned beside the kitchen door so it could double as a barricade.
Hugh pointed to the spot where the gunman had been standing when he shot Evers as he was unloading some things from the trunk of his car. The next door neighbor had come to Evers’ rescue, loaded him into the car, and rushed him to the hospital. But it was against hospital rules for Blacks to be treated by white staff. Evers’s wife had called their family doctor, a Black man, but when he arrived, he wasn’t allowed to use the hospital equipment. Eventually, the head doctor arrived and said he’d take responsibility for breaking the rules, but by then it was too late.
“And here’s the thing,” Hugh said. “Twenty-four hours earlier in that very same hospital, doctors had just successfully performed the first lung transplant. That evil and goodness coexisting side-by-side pretty much sums up Jackson.”
Broken bodies, breaking bread That evening we met back at the Open Door church for a catered feast of potato salad, pasta and chicken, green beans, cornbread, three kinds of cake, and sweet tea made by a 15-year-old girl, and then Hugh led us in a closing reflection.
He told us that when the protestors were caged in the cattle pens at the fairgrounds, the officers made the white and Black protestors sit on opposite sides of the pens. The guards fed the white protestors first, but the most amazing thing happened: Each person, without speaking, took their cup of milk and set it on the ground in front of them, placed their bologna sandwich on top, and waited. Then the Blacks were served, and they did the same. The two groups sat there silently, facing each other, and when everyone had been served, the whites and Blacks quietly, and as one body, ate together.
“This might be heretical,” Hugh said, “but I believe Jesus has already returned — and his body has been lynched and burned and broken again and again and again.”
And then he served us communion with sweet tea and cornbread left over from our dinner.
