By Request: Biscuits

Hello, readers. Reader. You know who you are.

I am, to be honest, a little surprised that I've been asked to provide a recipe for biscuits, but what the hell; maybe you know you don't like the one you've got in that big fat cookbook collecting dust on the shelf. Or maybe you just don't own a cookbook. Maybe you know you could look it up online, but are worried that the recipe wouldn't be up to Miss Edith's exacting standards.

Have no fear.

Now, this biscuit recipe is posted to go with the previously posted Tomato Pie recipe, which is from Laurie Colwin's More Home Cooking. In that essay, she actually gives a biscuit recipe, but I'm going to admit something sad: there's another recipe I prefer. And so that is what I will share with you.

The following is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, which is really the best basic cookbook from the last twenty years at least -- The New Joy of Cooking is also excellent, but I count that as being in a different category, really. JoC is required. Bittman isn't required, but it would be a really, really, really good investment, and I cannot recommend a cookbook more, with this one caveat, which is that the desserts never seem to work out for me. But every other chapter is BRILLIANT.

Anyhow: biscuits.

2 cups all purpose or cake flour, plus more as needed
1 scant tsp. salt
3 tsps. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2-5 tbs. cold sweet butter
7/8 cup plain yogurt or buttermilk

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl or food processor. Cut the butter into bits and either pulse it in the processor or, if working by hand, cut it into the dry ingredients. You can do this by using two table knives, cutting the butter into tiny pieces and coating them with flour, acting as if you're somehow scimitaring the stuff, or you can use a pastry knife thingy, which is fine but a pain to use, or you can do it by hand, which is easiest and probably fastest, but you have to watch out that your hands' warmth doesn't just melt the butter. What you want is for the butter to lightly coat the dry ingredients -- you want a final product that looks like very coarse bread crumbs, say. The fat is what's gonna make for flakiness here, so the slightly uneven distribution of butter is key -- if you wanted uniform distribution, you'd melt the butter, and then mix, but just don't do it, ok?

Thank you.

Now: with a large spoon mix in your yogurt or buttermilk and stir until you've got a ball of dough. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead ten times. You may add a little flour if the dough seems unbearably sticky but don't let it get too dry.

For tomato pie, divide into two parts -- I generally have the bottom layer slightly thicker than the top layer, so halving the dough wouldn't be quite my routine -- and then continue on with your tomato pie recipe.
For biscuits, cut into shapes as your heart desires. Bake at least 7 minutes in a hot oven (450 deg.) for a pale biscuit; longer baking time will make for a darker crust.

These are excellent Sunday morning biscuits, by the way. And you can do things to them to make them snazzy for parties or something -- put in some cheese, or herbs, or little bits of pimento, or whatever floats your boat. Tasty.

Irony: 9:30, Sunday morning. New York Times Readers: RU Believing This Shit?

Miss Edith slept late this morning, but she is so moved by an article in the front section of today's New York Times that she's sat down here to share a little outrage.

Today's Times has an article about literacy online ("Literacy Debate: Online, RU Really Reading?") versus what I think of as, you know, actual fucking literacy. The article interviews a young woman named Nadia Konyk, who lives in Berea, Ohio, and who I'm sure is a lovely young woman. She is, however, seriously missing some points when it comes to think about her reading habits and her future.

Ms. Konyk feels that her habit of reading fanfiction online (a category of writing that Miss Edith admits she has generally little respect for, even though friends of hers engage in it; she also has friends who go to Ren Faires, an activity she has pretty much nothing but scorn for, because she is a snobby bitch) counts as real reading. She isn't particularly interested in reading real, printed, bound, typeset books, for reasons that seem weak to me. "You could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be," she explains about reading fanfiction online. "So like in the book somebody could die, but you could make it so that the person doesn't die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don't like."

How true. And if we all rewrote The Great Gatsby so that Gatsby wound up with, say, a budding Hollywood actress named Norma Jean, the world would be a better place. Right.

"Nadia also writes her own stories," the article says, and tells us that she's posted one called "Dieing Isn't Always Bad."

This was where Miss Edith began to choke slightly on her iced coffee.

Even as I typed that title into Blogger, here, the word "dieing" got one of those squiggles of red underneath it indicating that something isn't spelled correctly. We all know -- don't we? -- that often those squiggles are really wrong, and that the computer program just doesn't recognize a perfectly real word (such as a proper noun or a term from a foreign language) but I'm distressed that Ms. Konyk didn't have the ability to correct her story so that the title read "Dying Isn't Always Bad." I would lose some respect for Ms. Konyk on this point alone, but the next paragraph in the article left Miss Edith's head spinning (bracketed text is mine):

"Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college [!!!!!] and someday hopes to be published [join the club, sweetie; even real published writers, even people who know how to spell, keep hoping that they'll be published]. She does not see a problem with reading few books. "No one's ever said you should read more books to get into college." "

That last sentence is enough to make Miss Edith want to hang herself. Ms. Konyk is young and doubtless has no idea of just how stupid her statement makes her sound, and I will try to cut her some slack, but.... heavens to mercy, people. College is supposed to be just precisely about reading books, and, yes, my darling, the more books you read -- good books in particular, by which I do not necessarily mean Faulkner or Melville, because "good" covers a wide, wide range of material -- the more likely it is that you will get into college. And by "college" I mean a respectable liberal arts institution where the professors encourage reading real books so as to encourage the students to engage in lucid critical thinking.

Ms. Konyk may end up going to Harvard or Yale, for all I know -- she's fifteen years old and anything is possible for her, after all -- but if she does go to a good liberal arts college where she majors in English, I suspect she will be shocked by how many of her peers there already know that "dying" is spelled with a "y" and that books are not to be pooh-poohed just because the author of the text has already determined for the reader who dies, who marries, and what happens in the end.

I would say that this was an appalling article, but it wasn't. What was appalling was the attitude of many of the article's subjects. Please read this piece and then try very hard to not bash your head against the nearest brick wall.