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