WRITING PROMPT RESPONSE

A Local Delicacy that Connects Me to My Southern Roots

My family is made of chocolate ’n’ biscuits

If you’re not from the Southern United States, you probably are unfamiliar with the food my family called “chocolate ’n’ biscuits.”

For many years into my adulthood, I had never met anyone outside of my family who had heard of — much less had eaten — a plate of chocolate ’n’ biscuits for breakfast.

I learned as an adult that what I call chocolate and biscuits is nowadays called “Biscuits and Chocolate Gravy,” by celebrity chefs and hipster restaurateurs who think they invented the stuff.

I hate to break it to them, but this dish has been around a lot longer they realize. I know because I ate it when I was in grade school.

What they call “chocolate gravy,” is literally a gravy-like chocolate sauce made from sugar, butter, a bit of flour, milk, and cocoa powder. In my extended family, we simply call this concoction “chocolate,” and we’d pour it over hot, fresh biscuits and eat it for breakfast.

Yes, I ate this dish every morning for breakfast when I was in 2nd grade. No, my teeth did not rot out by age 8.

Where chocolate ’n’ biscuits came from

I am unsure of its origins, but I assume chocolate ’n’ biscuits was created during The Great Depression in the hills of Appalachia when breakfast foods were probably hard to come by. I imagine a weary mother with an apron tied around her waist struggling to hold her household together, looking at a brood of hungry kids and wondering what she could scrape together to feed them. She would have grabbed the few staple items she had on hand: flour, salt, sugar, cocoa, and butter. From these ingredients, she could have made a hot, filling meal to get them through the day.

Back then, no one cared about a food’s nutritional value or the number of carbs they consumed in a meal. They wanted to eat something that would sustain them until they could get their next meal. A feast of biscuits, butter, and a sugary chocolate sauce would have tasted like a luxury to a group of hungry kids.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.

And like so many other dishes from so many other cultures, the concoction was probably passed down to become a regular item in the homes of struggling Southern families. Or, at least, it was a regular part of my Southern family’s menu.

If I had to pick one food as the flavor of my childhood, it would be this meal. Its smell, texture, and taste are tattooed on my senses — so much so that whenever I smell warm biscuits, I’m taken back to when I was 7 years old, in 2nd grade in Ludlow, Kentucky, when my sister and I lived with my maternal grandmother. We called her Mammaw Taylor.

I remember every morning — whether it was a school day or a weekend — I would wake up to the smell of fresh-baked biscuits and gurgling chocolate on the stovetop.

Mammaw Taylor would rise before the rest of the house to mix and roll out flour, shortening, and buttermilk between her hands to shape perfectly uniform, palm-sized balls of raw dough. Then, she would line the balls of dough up in straight lines on a baking sheet to bake.

I remember a standard-sized, stainless steel saucepan that lived on the back left burner of her stove. In that pan, on that burner was where she boiled the mixture of sugar, butter, milk, and cocoa to make the chocolate. That pan was her cauldron where she’d magically transform ingredients into food.

I don’t ever remember her washing the chocolate saucepan. In fact, I don’t remember it ever leaving the burner. When the supply of chocolate got low, she would consistently add more ingredients to the mix and turn up the heat to bring it to a boil.

She never measured anything; she knew instinctively how much of which ingredient to add.

I’m sure none of my aunts, uncles, or cousins can remember when she mixed up the first batch of chocolate in the pot for breakfast; it was long before I was old enough to remember. I like to think that every batch that she made in that pot was part of a continuum that connected my family to its past and each other. Chocolate ’n’ biscuits is part of our lineage. Through the years, we all ate from the same pot of chocolate that Mammaw made.

I wonder where that saucepan is now?

Of course, not washing the pot between uses would be considered dangerous and unsanitary by today’s standards. But 50 years ago, regular folks knew very little about the germs and bacteria we avoid today. Life was much simpler back then.

Her biscuits set the bar

To this day, Mammaw’s biscuits are what I measure all other biscuits by. They were golden brown, crispy on the edges, fluffy on the inside, and a perfect medium for the star of the show, the chocolate gravy.

At breakfast time we would gather round her brown Formica table, grab a couple of biscuits off the sheet pan, crumble them between our fingers onto a plate, and add a couple pats of butter to the top. Then Mammaw would pour steamy chocolate straight from the pot onto our plates.

A ribbon of the dark brown, cloyingly sweet mixture would cover the biscuit crumbles. Some of the chocolate would ooze between the pieces and pool on the plate: a perfect, finger-tip-sized portion for a 7-year-old to scoop up and lick off her fingertip.

But don’t call it gravy

Despite our chocolate having the consistency of gravy, my family never used the word “gravy” to describe it. To us, gravy is savory, peppered, and thicker than our chocolate. It wasn’t the same at all.

It connects my family to our past and each other

Chocolate ’n’ biscuits was like a secret code that our family shared. When we would describe our dish to outsiders, they had no idea what we were talking about. But, within our clan, to connect with each other after spending years apart was for one of us to say the words “chocolate ’n’ biscuits.” That’s all it took. We remembered. We understood.

Nowadays my sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, and I rarely get a chance to reminisce about Mammaw’s chocolate ’n’ biscuits. We live separate lives in faraway places. But, occasionally, one of us will share a memory on Facebook or we will make our own batches and tell the others. When that happens, we are taken back to Mammaw’s kitchen table dusted with white flour, where the smell of hot, fresh biscuits and chocolate reigned. A place where a recipe passed down from our ancestors connects us to our Southern roots and to each other.

#localdelicacies

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