Baking Powder Biscuits
When she was a child, my Aunt Judy asker my grandmother to show her how to make the amazing baking powder biscuits that were served in that house every morning.
My grandmother took out some flour and tossed it on the counter. She never measured, she never even paused to think. She tossed some flour down and made a hole in the middle. She worked in some butter and milk and baking powder. With practiced hands, she kneaded the mass together, occasionally stopping to let Aunt Judy feel the batter. “Not yet,” she’d say, kneading it more, “not quite.” Then, finally, she said, “This is right.” Judy stuck her hands it. It didn’t feel any different from the last times she’d felt. Grandmother nodded and turned them batter out. Then she cut them with the lid of an Atlas Mason jar and put them in the oven.
They emerged flat.
Grandmother’s brows rose, and then they lowered. She turned to Judy and said, “How old is that baking powder?” That is how Judy learned to keep her baking powder fresh. Grandmother told her “store it upside down” (and always buy the RED can). Now all my life I’ve just taken it on faith that there was a reason she said to store the can upside down. I’ve always done it. It doesn’t seem to me any harder to put it back that way than right side up and it is certainly easier than storing it on its side. For me it was just enough that my Grandmother – a woman I esteemed very highly – and a damn good cook, said to.
My children are not like that. They don’t listen to me when I tell them how or why to behave. They don’t do things the way I show them. They aren’t following like little lambs in my wake the way I followed my Grandmother. They ask “why” and if they don’t like the answer, they deride it and go do their own thing their own way. It is easy to be disturbed about that. It is easy to be disturbed when they make the easy, freeze dried choices. And it is just as easy to look back and see when I realized that the biscuits I got from the can in five minutes were just not as satisfying.
While this is true in every aspect of my parenting life, it is perhaps most obvious when it comes to church. I am not the brains of the operation around here. My husband is brilliant and his children are brilliant and there is very little I can give them intellectually. But I feed them healthy food, enforce restrictions on all kinds of fun, and make, in their hearts, a “hole in the flour” where I hope their spiritual life will begin.
My children don’t want to go to church. They don’t get anything out of it, they are skeptical about aspects of it. At first, I tried many recipes in an attempt to satisfy my hunger for something I could not name. I ended where I had begun, with unmeasured flour and a “good feeling.” Like any recipe that becomes a staple in your diet, mine was very like the one of my childhood with just a little tweaking. At any rate, I like to think mine is low-fat.
Most of my kids’ friends don’t go to church and those that do dislike it as well. And like my children, a vast majority of my friends “tolerate” my spiritual path. There are many among my friends who know all about the chemistry in the kitchen, there is no mystery in biscuits for them. I can see how my children, for whom other people’s thinking (excluding mine) is increasingly the most important, might not want to know the family recipe.
So I don’t force my children, even to go to church. When they ask me why something is I say, “Do you want me to tell you why I think?” They know this is going to be a Sunday School lesson. Sometimes they roll their eyes and say, “okay.” Usually they wave their hands vigorously at me and say, “No! No!” My eldest goes because the music is compelling and magnetic and she chokes down the Sunday school because she has to. This works for me because it is flour on the counter. She will know her scripture, and when she is talking to herself, she will know, in her heart, it is prayer. Down the line, perhaps long after I am gone, she will toss in some butter and baking soda and find she knows when the batter feels right.
My second does not even go to church. I don’t force him. He is like my father who never in his life accepted any religion as a part of his world and yet came from the fount of faithfulness that was his mother and begat, to his chagrin, a very religious daughter in me. But my son is also very like his father, spiritual but not religious, faithful but not believing. In many ways my son is the most spiritual of all of us. He does not seem to know or care about the biscuits and yet when we sit down to eat, he’s the one who counts them out to be sure he gets his fair share. I await in breathless anticipation the works of God in my son, the atheist.
The last of my children is perhaps the best baker among us. She was a surprise to me, very different from the rest of us, but in some ways, just a great deal more of the same. She loves to bake, to stand in the kitchen with an oversized apron and throw down unmeasured flour. She can tell you now when the dough is right. At five she is already further along the path to my grandmother’s faith than I am with forty years of trying. She can make a very fine biscuit, by the way, though she likes to cut them in the shapes of hearts and bunnies.
Well, the last time I saw her, my Aunt Judy told me she had read an article saying that you should store your baking powder upside down. It seems the CO2 in the baking powder would gradually escape through the plastic lid (of the red can), but it could not escape through the metal base. A brilliant smile spread over her face and I almost laughed out loud. We go through our lives on faith and in the end, the reason becomes clear.
This is my word to other parents struggling with recalcitrant children. Don’t wait for your child to ask to be taught to make biscuits. Serve biscuits every day and wait for the day they want to know how it is done. Show them how easy and instinctive the process is. Tell them the truth as you know it. Science or their own experience will reveal in time the things you took on faith from the beginning. Either way, in the end we all make biscuits. And that is all that matters.
