Damon Lee Fowler

When Southerners begin to talk of the foods that most comfort us in times of grief, joy, or homesickness, biscuits almost always come into the conversation. So it's no surprise that when the Covid pandemic forced us into lockdown, soft-wheat flour, shortening, and buttermilk disappeared from grocers' shelves and were hard to come by for months.

Luckily, I had just restocked those things, and we're a small household, so I never felt the pinch of the shortage. And I probably made more biscuits during that first month than I'd made in the previous couple of years combined.

Most of them were cream biscuits, a simple formula of flour, baking powder, salt, and heavy cream. They're disgracefully easy, practically foolproof, and I'm lazy. The dough is simply stirred together, folded a few times, then cut and baked.

But they do have one big drawback: Read More 

We’re finally at Labor Day weekend and, at least where our somewhat quixotic late-summer weather is cooperating, many of us will be marking summer’s last official hurrah by packing a picnic hamper and blanket and heading for the beach, local park, some picturesque country landscape, or at the very least the back yard. Mind, here in the South, we’ll be able to picnic until well into October, but there’s just something about marking the end of summer by symbolically eating outdoors “one the last time.”

Magazines, newspapers, food web sites, and the air waves are full of helpful ideas for crowd-pleasing picnic and cookout fare, which is all very nice. But every good Southern cook already knows the real way please the crowd, and that’s to make sure that the picnic hamper contains an ample supply of three things: fried chicken, old-fashioned potato salad, and ham biscuits. Read More 

A simple way to dress up and stretch a family meal for unexpected company during the holidays, or just make it seem a little more special for the home folks, is a bread basket filled with piping hot, freshly baked biscuits. They never fail to impress, and make everyone think you’ve gone to a lot more trouble than you really have.  Read More 

The other key ingredient in my family’s cornbread dressing is actually another kind of bread altogether: biscuits. They give the dressing body and help bind it together without having to add eggs, which can sometimes make dressing a bit heavy.

Unfortunately, few home cooks seem to make biscuits very often, which is too bad. Because once one gets the knack, they’re drop-dead easy, and serving forth a basket of delicate, piping hot biscuits never fails to impress company. They always think you’ve gone to a lot more trouble than you actually have. Read More