Buttermilk Biscuits with White Sausage Gravy

I’ve spent more than a week thinking about where to start on this tour through Appalachian food. There are so many foods that are thought of as Appalachian or “mountain”, that simply “beginning at the beginning” is almost impossible. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? What is most important, bacon, biscuits and breakfast gravy, chicken and dumplings, cornbread, fried potatoes, green beans, soup beans, stack cakes, or vegetable soup? In addition, meals are seldom made from just one dish; the whole menu is important. Menus can be classified in many ways. They can be arranged by time of day (breakfast, lunch, or dinner), season of the year (spring or winter), main ingredient (seasonal vegetables, pork, or venison), or seasonal celebrations (Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas).

A typical Appalachian menu can be truly daunting. In continental Europe, breakfast might consist of a pastry and a cup of coffee. In Ireland or Appalachia, breakfast is a much more involved proposition. In her book, An Irish Farmhouse Cookbook, Mary Kinsella says that an Irish breakfast consists of bacon, sausages, eggs, porridge, and grilled tomatoes. A typical Appalachian breakfast may consist of scrambled eggs, biscuits, pork chops, bacon, sliced tomatoes, fried potatoes, fried apples and gravy.

There is, obviously, no best way to work your way through Appalachian foods. I have decided to combine a couple of methods. First, I’m going to start with the meal, and the first one of the day is breakfast. Then, I’m not going to deal with the whole meal at once. I’ll pick out a couple of items that might make a typical meal for me and deal with them as a unit. The first item on the agenda, then, is a breakfast of buttermilk biscuits with white sausage gravy.

The recipe first (the way I make it) and then some comments and observations. Get everything together and laid out  before you start.

Ingredients (Mise en Place)

Tools and ingredients laid out and ready for work

For the sausage gravy

·         12 to 16 ounces bulk sausage (a typical tube of sausage contains 16 ounces)

·         2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

·         2 cups whole milk

·         Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

For the buttermilk biscuits

·         2 cups all-purpose flour, plus a little more for dusting the work surface

·         1 tablespoon baking powder

·         1 teaspoon sugar

·         1 teaspoon salt

·         7 tablespoons very cold, unsalted butter, cut into approximately 1/2 tablespoon pieces, plus up to another 2 ounces in case you need more fat for the gravy (depends on how much fat is in the sausage), or 1/4 cup lard (see notes)

·         3/4 cup buttermilk

For the glaze

·         1 tablespoon heavy cream

·         1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

Directions

In order to get everything ready to serve at approximately the same time, prepare the food in the following order.

Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat it to 450 degrees F. Heat a heavy 10 to 12 inch skillet over medium heat. Add the sausage, break it up with a spoon, and cook, stirring occasionally, until it’s browned and thoroughly cooked, approximately 7 or 8 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the sausage to a bowl and reserve, leaving the rendered fat in the skillet. Turn off the heat under the skillet.

Dough folded the first time

Lightly grease a 12 inch cake pan or spray it sparingly with a neutral flavored cooking spray like Canola oil. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Drop the cut pieces of butter into the flour and cut them into the mixture using a pastry blender or a couple of forks, until the whole mixture is about the texture of very coarse cornmeal. Stir in the buttermilk a little bit at a time, using just enough that the dough forms a ball and leaves the sides of the bowl. If you have a food processor, making the dough in it works beautifully. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and press it out or roll it into a 1/2 inch thick rectangle. Fold the dough in thirds like folding a letter. For flakier biscuits, press or roll the dough into another 1/2 inch thick rectangle and fold in thirds again. To really gild the lily, repeat this operation one more time. Finally, press or roll the dough into a rectangle about 6 inches by 8 inches by 3/4 inch thick. Use a 3 inch round cutter to make 6 or 7 biscuits and place them in the cake pan, with one in the center and the rest around the outside of the pan. Press the scraps of dough together and cut 2 or 3 more biscuits. You should be able to get 9 biscuits, one in the center of the pan and the rest distributed evenly around it.

Biscuits ready for the oven

To make the glaze, mix the cream and the melted butter together in a small bowl and lightly brush the tops of the biscuits with the glaze. Use it all; don’t pour any unused glaze down the sink. Place the biscuits in the oven and bake until nicely browned, about 15 minutes. Cool on a rack for about 5 minutes before serving.

While the biscuits are baking and cooling, turn the heat back on under the skillet to medium. If you don’t have about 2 tablespoons of rendered fat in the pan, add enough butter to make 2 tablespoons of fat altogether. Whisk the flour into the fat and cook, continuing to whisk, for about a minute: just long enough to cook the raw taste out of the flour. Constantly whisking, stir the milk into the skillet and bring it just to a simmer. Turn the heat down and continue to simmer the gravy for about 2 minutes, not letting it come to a boil. Stir in the reserved sausage and season to taste with the pepper.

Gravy ready to eat

Split the biscuits in half and divide among plates. Spoon some of the gravy over each biscuit and serve immediately. Enjoy!

Cooking notes

The kind of sausage you use will make a big difference in the flavor of the gravy. Use whatever sausage you like. It can be anything from a typical breakfast sausage to a spicy or sage sausage, or even Italian sausage, sweet or hot. How much fat is in the sausage will determine whether or not you need to add more fat to the skillet (or even pour some out) when you prepare the gravy.

Coming out of the oven

Although I specify all-purpose flour, you can play around with the flour mixture you use. You could use a mix of half flour and half yellow corn meal. If you do that, try using whole wheat flour or white bread flour instead of all-purpose. You might need the extra gluten in whole wheat or bread flour to keep the biscuits flaky instead of being crumbly like cornbread.

Finished biscuits

You can use other fats besides butter in the biscuit dough. One really great fat is lard. Fix biscuits or fry chicken with lard and you may never go back. Lard has taken a bad rap in the modern cooking world, being accused of being unhealthy. While lard that’s been hydrogenated into trans-fats isn’t good, pure lard is actually considerably better for you than butter. Butter is mostly saturated fat (over 60 percent). Pure lard, by contrast, is about 40 percent saturated fat, and 45 percent monounsaturated fat (the same “good” fat found in olive oil). Furthermore, compared to butter, lard has a higher smoking point (the temperature at which the substance starts to break down). Studies show that the higher a fat’s smoking point, the less of it is absorbed into any food it happens to be cooking.

Time to eat!

If you are one of those folks who cringe when you hear the word “lard”, you need to examine your culinary and social prejudices. Lard is considered a poor people’s food, while many people don’t even think of butter as fat. They think of doe-eyed cows and milkmaids, and the pure creaminess of it. In Appalachia until recently, lard was far more common than butter. Pigs were more common than cattle. Cattle need more space and care, whereas pigs are compact and fend for themselves. Also, pig fat is dense with calories and preserves very well. In the times before refrigeration, this was one of the only ways to feed people cheaply all year. Lard is, in fact, still one of the main fats used in Europe. But in the United States, there’s a socio-cultural hierarchy of animals and animal fats. Cows precede pigs; butter precedes lard. Moderation in quantity is more important than the kind of fat used. If you’re leery of cholesterol, you can also use vegetable shortening. But be careful with vegetable shortening; the trans-fats it contains are probably worse for you than cholesterol.

Although buttermilk gives these biscuits a particularly savory flavor, regular milk can be used too. Just be aware that the final product will taste different. You may like it; you may not.

If you don’t have, or don’t want to use, heavy cream in the glaze, try using half and half or plain olive oil (not extra virgin) instead.

Why Another Food Blog?

Apple stack cake

I love Appalachian food! Buttermilk biscuits smothered in white sausage gravy or just served with butter and wild honey, macaroni and local farmer's cheese, cornbread salad, soupbeans with hamhocks or salt pork, potatoes fixed a myriad of ways, Irish stew, beef stew, seasonal vegetables from your own garden: these foods aren't solely Appalachian, but they have their own Appalachian translations and they are delicious!

Deer crossing a stream near my home

Appalachia is that part of the United States that goes down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, including West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and western Virginia and North Carolina. It was originally settled by what were called Scotch-Irish. These were folks who lived in the Plantation of Ulster in northern Ireland, many of whom had been moved there from the Lowlands of Scotland by James I of England in order to get them out of his hair. From about 1710 to 1775, an estimated 250,000 of these people emigrated to colonial America. Many of them had no Scottish ancestry, but enough of them did that the term Scotch-Irish has been used to describe them ever since they got here.

Fall in Shawnee Forest less than 10 miles from my home

When they arrived, land around most of the coastal settlements was already owned or too expensive to buy. So they headed inland and settled on both sides of the Appalachian mountains. Land was cheaper and more available in the mountains, but life could be a real struggle because of the isolation and the rugged, heavily forested terrain. Poverty and hardship were common but they were familiar from life in Ulster. As a result, the immigrants hunkered down and developed the same kind of self-reliant and clannish culture they had in the old world. The term "hillbilly" is often applied to people who live in the mountainous areas of Appalachia, usually connoting poverty, ignorance, backwardness and violence. But the term is not an American invention; the word came with them from Scotland and Ireland. Until after World War II, much of Appalachian language, music, religion, art, architecture, dress, and food had changed very little since the 18th century. When I was studying Shakespeare in college in the mid 1960s, our professor remarked that if one wanted to hear Shakespeare's poetry spoken much the way it was originally, one only had to attend a performance deep in West Virginia.

My own ancestors came to colonial America in 1740 from Belfast in northern Ireland and eventually settled in Louisa, Kentucky. Whether the two brothers had any Scottish ancestry is unknown. I haven't been able to trace them any further back than Ulster. In the early 1900s, several of their descendants moved just across the Ohio River to Portsmouth, Ohio, to take jobs with the Norfolk & Western Railroad, the steel mill, and the shoe factories that were here then. Although our hills here are dwarfed by the main Appalachian Mountains, those of us who live here are still hillbillies and "briars", no matter how much we may try to deny it. My grandmother was born and raised near Huntington, West Virginia, and was an accomplished Appalachian cook. Thanksgiving in her home was something to behold. And enjoy. My mother was a wonderful cook too. She tended to have a little intellectual snobbery when it came to "country cooking", as she called it, but she just couldn't avoid putting some Appalachian touches on her classical French cooking. You can take the girl out of the country, but ...

Part of my herb garden along the back of our house

It is the food I'm particularly interested in and which will be the main subject of this blog. I plan to take a tour through Appalachian food from breakfast through supper, from spring through winter, and from ordinary through extraordinary. Along the way, we'll learn about what gives Appalachian food its character and what makes it different from the same dish prepared in another tradition. We'll learn about the history of the traditional tools and ingredients and how they affect the finished dish. There will be a liberal helping of recipes and techniques. Who knows, we may gain an appreciation for other things Appalachian as well.

In the meantime, I'm going to have some "kilt" autumn green salad, mountain country cornbread smothered with white sausage gravy and some apple stack cake for dessert.

Let there be a blog!

Fresh pasta at the Culinary Institute of America