Biscuits and Jam and Truman Capote
We’ll be visiting twice with Capote’s A Christmas Memory, but since the second time concerns fruitcake, I‘ll come back to that in December. Right now we’ll be looking at the biscuits and jam. I chose this as my first entry because soon after I read it, I noticed that biscuits and jam were also mentioned in Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier. So I took it as a sign: also, both biscuits and jam are fairly easy to do, so it seems like a good starting point.
Capote’s younger self is describing the night before the epic task of holiday fruitcake- making, taken on by his elderly cousin, with his help. He described his elderly cousin as his best friend, and she calls him “Buddy”. It is a beautiful short Christmas tale about two eccentric people of different generations who find comfort in each other. The entire story is made up of describing their quest for ingredients, the baking of the fruitcake, and the journey they take around town to deliver them to their friends. It is a quiet but lovely book.
We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the type of work I like best begins: buying.
In “Cold Mountain”, Ada’s father has died, leaving her alone on the sprawling farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the Civil War. Having been raised as a gentlewoman and not very good at household chores, Ada is trying to eke out an existence while she waits for her love, Inman, to return home. She receives a gift of preserves from her neighbor:
“In the kitchen, Sally went to a cupboard and took out a pottery crock of blackberry preserves, the mouth sealed with beeswax. She gave it to Ada and said, This’ll be good on your leftover supper biscuits. Ada said her thanks without mentioning her failure as a biscuit maker.”
Edited to add one more: As we are in week three of covid19 stay- at- home here in NJ, I’ve been able to get a lot of reading done, which is great. I’ve picked up Everyone Brave is Forgiven- I tried Little Bee and was unable to get into it, but this has really held my attention, which is saying a lot right now! On page 31, Tom is making blackberry jam from a hatful of berries he picked while out on a walk. They were “..bursting with the bright sweetness that they gave only in the best years.”
After making the mistake of letting the jam come to a “murderous boil”, Tom rescues it and admires his finished work:
In the bright morning wash from the garret’s single skylight, the jam glowed in the metal spoon. Its center, where it was deepest, was indigo. At its shallow edges the color thinned to a limpid carmine. He closed his eyes and tasted it. By luck he had arrested it on the verge of caramelization, between honeyed and bitter. The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question that he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that tantalized the tongue.
Has a more beautiful paragraph ever been written about jam?
As a lot of you know, it’s easy to fail as a biscuit maker. But it has become a lot easier since I have been able to find White Lily flour here in New Jersey. White Lily is a softer wheat flour so you will get lighter, fluffier biscuits. I found mine at Wegman’s.
If you can find it, White Lily flour will make you a better biscuit maker.
The recipe I have found to be the easiest is from The Joy of Cooking. (If you’re from the south, I know- you don’t need me to tell you how to make biscuits. I know yours are better than mine! )
You can try a lot of different kinds of biscuits- rolled biscuits, drop biscuits, buttermilk, not buttermilk, add oil instead of butter… I’m going to just do a basic drop biscuit here, so you don’t even have to do any rolling or cutting.
Basic Drop Biscuits
Preheat your oven to 450 and position a rack in the middle. You’ll need an ungreased baking sheet, or you can line it with parchment paper, or do what I did —a muffin pan. I feel like these came out the best.
Whisk together in a large bowl:
2 cups flour (preferably White Lily brand), if using regular flour, you can cut it to 1 and 3/4 cups
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 to 1 tsp salt (I prefer more but that’s up to you); it also depends on if you are using salted butter
Drop in 5 to 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, which has been cut into small pieces. (OK, I used 7.) Cut it into the flour with a fork or a pastry cutter. If you want a flaky texture, work until the pieces of butter are the size of peas. If you like a fluffier interior, keep going until the whole thing looks like a pile of breadcrumbs. Don’t allow your butter to melt!
At this point, add 1 cup of milk. Stir until just moistened, don’t over do it. The batter will be sticky and not smooth. Use a teaspoon to scrape the batter onto the sheet, like this:
It helps if you grease your spoons with a little butter or oil. Photo courtesy of my daughter Juliet, since I had no hands free!
Or put them in a muffin tin, which I prefer:
I like putting them in a muffin tin. They seem to rise a little higher and they cook in a bath of the melted butter.
If using a pan, space the biscuits about a 1/2 inch apart. Bake about 12 minutes, or until the bottoms are golden brown. Serve them hot with butter, honey, or blackberry jam, like Ada.
These didn’t last long!
Jam is so easy! You can make this refrigerator jam with whatever you have in the house. It will go straight to your fridge and keep for only about two weeks. Note that blackberries have a lot of seeds, so if that bothers you may want to try a different fruit, or strain the seeds out, (which can be a pain). Although Tom didn’t seem to mind them.
Mash berries and heat in a pan. It’s ok if some of the berries are under-ripe, because they have more pectin than over-ripe fruit, so your jam will set better. Cook them a little bit before you add the sugar to encourage the pectin to form. If not enough juice releases, add a little water so they don’t burn in the pan.
Rule of thumb: one cup of sugar for every pint of blackberries. Of course it’s all to your taste. Cook rapidly until thick, stirring frequently, and not letting it bubble too furiously. One quart of fruit should make about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of jam.
I’ll tell you a secret about this blackberry jam that I made- I had some Earl Gray tea in the pot with it. It gave it a delicious subtle flavor. I’m not a fan of Earl Gray but these two flavors go very well together. I used a tea diffuser and dropped it right into the pot with the fruit.
You can also do the same with strawberries, and for this I had some black vanilla tea and did the same thing. See below for pictures.
If you’d like to try some old fashioned biscuit recipes, here are few:
From the San Francisco Chronicle, March 7, 1920-
Baking Powder Biscuits Two cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 2 tablespoons shortening, 3/4 cup milk or equal parts milk and water.
Note: My suspicions is that “shortening” in those days may have involved some lard, which I didn’t use here. When this covid 19 stay-at-home order is over, I might try these again with lard once the markets are more fully stocked.
-Mix and sift dry ingredients. Work in shortening with knife or fingertips. Gradually add the liquid, mixing it with a knife to a soft dough. Toss on a floured board, pat or roll lightly to one half inch in thickness, cut with a biscuit cutter. Place in pan, brush over the top with either melted shortening or milk. Bake in a hot oven twelve to fifteen minutes. (I did 450 and 425.)
I tried this one, and the biscuits were tasty, but not very high, which surprised me because of the high amount of baking powder. I made them twice just to see and they came out the same both times. I wonder if this is how biscuits used to be before we became used to everything being supersized? Or maybe I should have cut them thicker than the half inch. Or maybe it’s the shortening issue I mentioned above. I also found that I preferred the taste of biscuits with butter instead of shortening.
From the Burbank Evening Review, April 13, 1931:
Biscuit dough is a most versatile friend to the housewife. It becomes English biscuits when one tablespoon caraway seeds is added to the dough. (Note: If this sounds appealing to you, see my post for Hobbit Cakes!)
Scotch Shortcake Scotch Shortcake is the name when one egg, four tablespoons sugar and 1/2 teaspoon each of orange and lemon extracts are added to a standard biscuit recipe. Roll to a quarter inch thick. Cut in rounds and lay on each three thin slices of citron. Sprinkle with a few caraway seeds and bake in a quick oven. Serve hot with butter.
1920s biscuits: These tasted fine but weren’t very high. But they all disappeared with the strawberry jam!
Black vanilla tea gave this strawberry jam a delicious taste.
This was so good and would have lasted for about two weeks in the refrigerator, if the kids hadn’t eaten it all in one breakfast.
