Bena Mae’s Kitchen: Biscuits and gravy every morning… yum

Heating up the stove was an early morning ritual in the house I lived in the 1930’s and 40’s as it was in the houses up and down the street.
It began about 5:30 a.m. in the living room and kitchen with Daddy stirring up the banked coals in the big warm-morning stove in the living room while Mama did the same in the kitchen, getting the cook stove ready to make breakfast. I never could understand how her meals always turned out so good cooking on a stove with no temperature gauge but I guess housewives back then had the feel for when the stove was ready for cooking.
She started by making biscuits — if I could count the biscuits she made it would be in the thousands because we had them every morning.
She never measured the ingredients. She would put an egg-sized lump of lard into the bread bowl of flour, add buttermilk and baking powder and they came out light and fluffy every time.
We would eat them with gravy made from the drippings of sausage, pork chops, sometimes fried chicken, and if Daddy had a lucky day of hunting, fried quail. I remember Daddy’s hunting dogs which he loved, Maggie and Kate, a red pointer and an Irish setter. We fed them table scraps because there wasn’t such a thing as dog food back then, and every night he made sure they got fed as soon as supper was over. “Sis, did you feed the dogs,” was a common phrase we heard every night as we washed the supper dishes. But I digress.
We lit into Mama’s sumptuous breakfast like pigs every morning, sopping our biscuits into the delicious gravy made from whatever meat she had on hand. This was followed by fried eggs, fried sweet potatoes, fried apples, (people were big on fried foods back then) and oatmeal — I’ve eaten oatmeal every day of my life since then and fed it to my family. Dietitians today would choke on the amount of calories and fat we took in, but back then breakfast was the most important meal of the day making sure that the man of the house and children going off to school were prepared to face the day.
I think about that today when I see the skimpy breakfasts people are eating that have no nutritional value whatsoever. A donut, a bran muffin, a glass of orange juice and out the door.
And I wish, oh, how I wish that my microwave could turn out the wonderful breakfasts Mama cooked up on that big kitchen range that never let her down. I could eat her biscuits and gravy three times a day.

My mother-in-law used to make these biscuits. My father-in-law called them Cat Heads.

Cat Head Biscuits

2 cups self-rising flour
1 cup buttermilk
Lump of solid shortening the size of a walnut (butter,
margarine, lard, or solid vegetable shortening

Place flour in a large mixing bowl.
Push the flour to the sides of the bowl to form a depression in the center.
Place the shortening and a little of the milk in the center and start stirring with a big spoon.
When the shortening is blended, add the rest of the milk, mixing jut until blended and dough forms a ball.
Place wax paper on a flat surface and sprinkle it with flour.
Roll the dough out on the wax paper.
Do not handle the dough any more than you have to as it makes the biscuits tough.
The less you handle it and the more moist the dough, the better the biscuits will be.
Pat dough gently until it is about 1½ inches thick.
Cut out biscuits and place them in a greased pan.
Be sure the pan is small enough so that the biscuits are touching.
Bake in a 400 degree F oven until biscuits.