Memories

Originally appeared on my old blog in July of 2008 back when we were living in Turkey.

Tonight for dinner I made biscuits and gravy. Not the most healthful thing we could have had, but it was the requested meal. When we lived in the states I never made biscuits from scratch. Oh there was a time I used Bisquick and called them homemade, but now I know that they really weren’t. There is no such thing as a can of biscuits here. You can’t find them frozen or premade in any shape or fashion. In fact biscuits aren’t something Turks even eat. I mean they would if they had them, but it isn’t a normal bread form here.

So the biscuit recipe I usually use is this…2 cups of self-rising flour and 1 cup of heavy cream. That is it. Mix it together roll or press them to about 1/2 inch thickness and cut out with a glass. Now they don’t have self-rising flour here so I add 2 1/2 tsp baking powder and 3/4 tsp salt to the flour and mix before I add the cream. The biscuits are to die for in my opinion. So easy and so yummy. If you want you can add some sugar…maybe 1/4 cup to the dry ingredients if you like your biscuits sweeter.

But tonight I had to use a different recipe. I was out of cream, and I had already started mixing up the other ingredients. I quickly found a recipe for buttermilk biscuits and since I had ayran which is a yogurt drink similiar to buttermilk I decided to go that route. After mixing the dry ingredients I started to cut in the butter. Wow…memories flooded over me. Then I added the buttermilk and almost started to cry. My grandmother made buttermilk biscuits every time I went to visit her. She mixed them with her hands…exactly like I was doing. The smell of the buttermilk as I mixed it in was like stepping back in time. The movement of my hands as I slowly formed a ball of dough in the middle of the bowl…picking up more and more flour from the sides as I moved my hand around transported me back to her kitchen in the tiny town of Emerson, Arkansas.

I’ll never forget that place. That house. That kitchen. Where so many memories were cooked up. Memories of homemade sweet pickles…juicy and sticky. Memories of fried fish. Memories of chicken and dumplings, turnip greens, purple hull peas, cornbread, and chocolate pie. There were lots of other memories made there, but tonight it was the thought of the food that overwhelmed me. And even though I have learned to make many of those things they still don’t taste quite like hers did.