Tag: breakfast

Drop Biscuits

When Jerri was five or six years old, her family moved from “the farm” into the village of Rosalia, Kansas.  Thirty years earlier, oil had been discovered in Butler county and Rosalia had become a boom town with a bank, hotel, saloons, churches, cafes and all the other amenities of a thriving community.  

The boom ended, the wildcatters left and the population dropped to about 200 people living along tree-lined streets.  When Jerri’s family moved into Rosalia, the school and Methodist church were just down the street from her home.  There were two grocery stores and an ice cream shop just up the street.   On the south end of town where the main street intersected Highway 54 was a bar and cafe with gas pumps and a service station.  The post office shared a brick building with one of the groceries a block north of her home. 

The railroad tracks were two blocks north.  The train slowed to pick up and leave mail every day and still stopped occasionally.  Just like me, Jerri remembers the hooks along the track and on the mail car used to pick up and leave mail.  I was fascinated by the fact that one hook could grab a bag while another could leave a bag while the train kept moving.

New Deal policies and World War II had officially ended the Great Depression, but there were still people struggling to make ends meet.  Some of them were hoboes traveling across the country in search of work, but many were farmers in Kansas.  Droughts, hailstorms and other natural disasters, not to mention unpredictable prices for cattle and crops, meant that farmers trusted in God and the banker to tide them over the bad years.  

Jerri’s father, Knip, was a farmer who respected the principles of the Mennonite Church.  He believed that he should try to live according to the teachings of Christ by helping his neighbors and sharing whatever he had.  One day he gave a hobo who knocked at the door the last dollar in the house.  When Jerri’s mother, Esther, asked why he did it, he said, “Well, I thought he needed it more than we did.”

When Esther told the story, she would always end it by saying, “And we were paying interest on interest.”  It was not that she didn’t believe in helping others, however.  Years later, the Internal Revenue Service audited their income tax return because someone at the IRS couldn’t believe that people with such a limited income would give so much to their church and other charitable causes.  

Fortunately, Esther kept meticulous records.  She and Knip brought along a shoebox filled with receipts.  After an hour or so, the IRS agent sent them home with a thank you and their honesty proven.  I hope that he ended his day with a renewed belief in the goodness of some people.

But though we have shared hundreds of stories like these about our families for nearly fifty years, I still learn new things from Jerri.  For instance, when I asked her whether her family ate drop biscuits, she told me that her father made them all the time.  That was news to me, though it is remotely possible that I was not listening when Jerri shared that information with me a few decades ago.

I don’t remember my father making them, but Mom could get a pan of drop biscuits in the oven in five minutes flat.  I bet that we had them at least a thousand times when I was growing up.  They made a wonderful dessert with jam or jelly.  Mom would slip a pan of biscuits into the oven before sitting down at the table.  By the time we had finished the meat and potatoes or soup or fish, she would bring out a pan of hot biscuits that lasted about two minutes flat.

Sometimes she would make them for shortcake before she cooked supper.  After we had all eaten everything on our plates, she would split the biscuits at the table, spoon on fresh strawberries and top them with whipped cream or (I hate to say it) CW.  Since there was a certain amount of noise generated by my younger siblings, Dad did sometimes help with the toppings to quiet his anxious brood.

Drop biscuits were a staple in most homes when I was growing up.  They used only a few ingredients, were quick to make, and went well with just about anything else you could set on the table.  And if there wasn’t anything else, they filled you up by themselves.

Most of the time they were made with lard, which is what I still prefer to use, but Dad told me that cooks in the lumber camps where he worked sometimes made wonderful biscuits with bacon grease.  Today, people use vegetable shortening or even butter.  Just choose the kind of shortening you prefer and put some warm drop biscuits on your table sometime soon.  

 INGREDIENTS:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 T baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

2 tsp. sugar

1/3 cup shortening (lard or vegetable shortening)

1 cup milk plus a little to brush the tops of the biscuits

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 450º.  

With a fork stir the flour, baking powder and salt together in a medium-sized bowl.  Cut the shortening into the dry ingredients until it has a texture that looks a bit like oatmeal.

Dump in the milk all at once and stir with a fork until the dough clumps up and comes together on the fork.  If there is any dry flour on the bottom of the bowl, you may need to add a little extra milk.  The dough should be soft but firm enough to hold its shape when you drop it on the baking sheet.

Using two tablespoons, drop globs of dough on an ungreased baking sheet.  Each glob should have three or four tablespoons of dough and should be at least an inch away from the other globs.  Don’t worry if your globs are uneven with pointy things on them.  They are supposed to look that way.  Brush them with a little milk.

Put the pan in the oven and bake for 10 to 13 minutes until the biscuits are lightly browned.  The little pointy things will be browner, and make the biscuits look genuine.

Serve them hot from the pan or if you have guests, put the biscuits in in a basket covered with one of your best napkins for a formal presentation.  Be sure to have plenty of butter and jam, jelly or honey on the table.  

NOTES:  You can store leftover biscuits in a plastic bag.  Warm them for a few seconds at reduced power in your microwave for a few seconds before serving.  They will still taste great.

If you wish, you can turn the dough out on a floured surface, knead the dough gently for eight to ten strokes, pat or roll the dough to a half-inch thickness and cut out biscuits with a small glass or doughnut cutter.

Wild Raspberry Jam

When I got back to the cabin from trimming one of the trails, I found a note on the table from Jerri that said simply, “11:20 Gone a-berrying.”

Whenever I see that expression I am reminded of Walden. Thoreau wrote in the chapter on “Visitors” that they included “Children come a-berrying.” And in the chapter on “Brute Neighbors” he described an incident when he was a-berrying: “Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me.”

I am not as good a writer or philosopher as Thoreau, but I can top that story. Once when I was a-berrying I came face to face with a black bear who was picking from the same patch as I. He did not, however, spit at me but rather said “Oof” and ran away. At least he was not to be seen when I looked over my shoulder a few minutes later.

Determined that we would make at least one batch of wild raspberry jam this year, Jerri had begun her berrying scarcely two hours after we arrived at the cabin. The next day she persuaded me to help pick for the project, and now she was off again. We ended up with more than enough wild raspberries to make eleven jars of jam.

Wild raspberries are smaller than the tame varieties and do not grow in nice neat rows. The best raspberries at the cabin grow in tangles of dead branches and old tree trunks left by the logger who salvaged logs from the “big blowdown” of 2005. Balancing on piles of tree limbs while holding a plastic container half full of berries can be a nerve-wracking experience. Deer flies can make it even more exciting.

Perhaps the challenge of picking them makes the berries taste more flavorful, but whatever the reason, people tell us that our wild raspberry jam tastes a lot better than the stuff you can buy in the supermarket. For one thing we do not use any high fructose corn syrup or any other artificial ingredients. And for another, every berry is lovingly picked, washed and crushed by people who are going to enjoy some of that jam this winter–namely us.

You can buy some pretty good tasting raspberry jam in specialty stores, but nearly all of it is made with tame raspberries and still costs a fortune. You can make even better jam by spending a few hours enjoying the outdoors in a county or national forest while you harvest those beautiful delicate red berries and end up with jam that costs a lot less. That’s if you do not count your time, gas money, sugar and pectin. But it is more than worth it, and you too might meet a bear.

Making the jam is easy and foolproof if you follow the directions.

INGREDIENTS:

4 cups crushed raspberries
6 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp. butter
1 pouch CERTO liquid pectin
paraffin

PROCEDURE:

First, wash and sterilize enough jelly jars to hold eight cups of jam. You can sterilize the washed jars by standing them upside down in a 9 x 13 inch cake pan on the the range. Pour about an inch of hot water into the pan, turn on the heat and bring the water to a boil. Boil for five minutes, then turn off the heat and leave the jars in the water while the jam is coming to a boil.

Put a slab of paraffin into a small sauce pan and set it aside.

Open the Certo pouch and stand it in a cup or glass where you can reach it easily when the time comes to add the pectin.

Be sure that all the berries have been picked over carefully and washed. Crush the raspberries with a potato masher and measure four cups of fruit into a three or four quart heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Measure the sugar into a mixing bowl, then stir the sugar into the crushed berries. Add a half teaspoon of butter to reduce foaming. Turn the heat on low and stir occasionally. As liquid is released, raise the heat to medium high and stir frequently.

When the jam nears a boil, put the sauce pan with the paraffin on a burner under very low heat to begin melting. Be careful not to heat the paraffin more than just to melt it. Using canning tongs or a potholder, lift the jars from the pan of hot water and allow them to drain on a rack.

Keep stirring and bring the jam to a full rolling boil (a boil that keeps bubbling when you stir it). Stir in the pectin and return the jam to a full rolling boil. Boil for one minute, stirring constantly.

Remove the jam from the heat and skim off any foam. A gravy ladle works great for this. Stand the jars upright on waxed paper. Using a dipper and a funnel, fill the hot jars, leaving 1/3 to 1/2 inch head space. If necessary, use a piece of moistened paper towel to remove any dribbled jam from the inside of the tops of the jars.

Using a tablespoon, put a thin layer of melted paraffin on top of the jam in each jar and allow the jam to cool without moving it. You can use a toothpick to pop any bubbles that may form in the wax before it has begun to harden. After the jam is well cooled, add a second thin layer of paraffin. Pour any remaining paraffin into a small plastic container, cover and cool. You can pop it loose and use it for your next batch of jelly or jam.

Let the jam cool thoroughly for several hours. Then cover the tops of the jars with screw caps or plastic wrap tied in place.

NOTES: We use different plastic funnels for filling jars with jams or jellies. For jellies we use an ordinary plastic kitchen funnel with a stem about 1/3 inch inside diameter. For jams we use a funnel with the stem cut off the bottom of the mouth so that the opening is about 3/4 inch.

You can make good raspberry jam with tame raspberries too. A friend let me pick enough from his bushes to make two batches of jam last year. Because tame raspberries are sweeter than the wild ones, I added a tablespoon of lemon juice to each batch and the result was very tasty.