The Subject Was Biscuits

     What began as reflections on my mother's cooking has turned to ferreting out the identity of cook book author, copywriter, editor and family friend, Alice Wilson Richardson.  The subject was biscuits.  In my experience, the taste for biscuits at every meal runs deepest in the South.  My Texas-born-South-Carolina -bred grandmother's approval of Alice's friend chicken and Alice's tendency to include biscuits in her menus hinted at shared roots.
     Internet sleuthing turned up the next clue, in a New York Times obituary. It was a connection I'd never made. Turns out that Harriet Sappington, a movie actress and one of my grandmother's dearest New York pals, was Alice Wilson Richardson's sister.  Factoids like that are key to successful Ancestry.com research, and sure enough, I found Alice and her family. She was born in Florida and grew up in Baltimore!  (To put the icing on the cake in a surreal fashion, her baby book, with locks of hair and baby pictures intact,  turned up for sale on Alibris. )
     This explains her comment "The more proficient you become, the more you will be able to measure to taste in the Southern Mammy tradition." My grandmother was so reliant on "The Help" that she could barely boil water.  Alice, moving to a northern city,  pioneered working women's cooking as entertainment.
     I'm still puzzled about the biscuits.  She doesn't offer a recipe for them. "Make biscuits from prepared mix, following instructions of box." Biscuit recipes are simple, consisting of flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, shortening and milk or water.  So why a mix?   Necessity! Turns out, according to The Williamsburg Cookbook, from that venerable Virginia city, that homemade biscuit mixes were born before boxed biscuit mix. Mrs. Booth's Biscuit Mix produces 4 1/2 cups of mix, which you keep in the refrigerator. To make 6 biscuits, you measure out a cup of the mix and add enough milk or water to moisten. (Mrs. Booth's mix uses 3 cups self rising flour: 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder: 1 Tablespoon sugar: 1 cup shortening combined with pastry blender.)
     The biscuit mysteries solved, I'll next turn to Alice's most famous undertaking, and how she brought me my 15 minutes of fame at an early age.

The Real Woman of Mad Men Cook Fried Chicken

     Mad Men transmits a dreary view of the working women of Madison Avenue and the wives at home in the suburbs.  In the forty years my father spent in the world of  New York print, he met some very accomplished women.  Alice Wilson Richardson was one of these.  Writer, copywriter and editor, her flair was visible in her home and her cooking as well.

     Here is her recipe for Oven Friend Chicken, from The Just A Minute Cookbook:


3 or 4 lb. Chichen
1 lemon
flour with salt and pepper
2 eggs
bread crumbs
paprika
1/4 lb. butter

Have butcher cut chicken into pieces.  Remove pin feathers with tweezers, and squeeze the juice from one lemon over chicken, letting it stand for 10 minutes or mor.  Then dry with paper towels. Shake pieces in flour bag. (Leave 2 cupfuls of flour in the heavy paper bag it comes in, season with salt, pepper and paprika and shake chicken in it before frying.) Dip each piece in beaten egg, then in bread crumbs, and sprinkle with paprika.  Melt butter in flat baking pan and add chicken. Be sure pan is large enough so that chicken pieces do not touch. Cook in medium oven (375 degrees F.) for 30 minutes. If it is not brown enough by then, turn oven up full for 5 minutes.

     This is so not the low calorie recipe I learned from Oprah's chef Rosie!  It is very rich, and especially delicious cold, at a picnic. 

     Which got me to reading and thinking about what has changed in the kitchen in the last 50 or 60 years a and what has not.  Farewell butchers, farewell pin-feathers.  Richardson's words on entertaining in the 1950's diagram the transition from formal dining room to a entertaining n a room which combines previous generations' parlors, drawing rooms and music rooms.  To accomplish this Richardson proposes you cook in a chafing dish, or in your fireplace. Instead of waiting on your guests, "Your guests can work and like it, too."

    Richardson reserves canned and frozen vegetables for the most extreme, "the very last minute."

     Biscuits appear on many of her menus.  At first I was puzzled that she didn't provide a recipe, but rather included Biscuit Mix in her list of supplies to be kept handy.   The solution to the "Why biscuits? Why biscuit mix?" mystery took some sleuthing.

 
 

What Mama Was Cooking

     Everyone is ethnic, right?  Everyone, except Native Americans, is an immigrant.
     Which is why in fourth grade my children were asked to bring to class a food that their grandparents had brought from “the old country.”  The “old country” of their grandparents was the United States.  With one exception, their ancestors have been from America since the 17th Century.  One set of great-great-grandparents immigrated from Ireland to New Orleans in the 1850s. So I opted for soda bread and lamb stew, just about the first time I’d ever made either of them.
     So what did my own mother cook? More important to me, ex-anthropologist that I am, is why she cooked what she cooked: Bolognese sauce for spaghetti and lasagna; welsh rarebit, creamed chipped beef and creamed, sliced, hard-boiled eggs on toast.  She grew and served her own vegetables, and made sweet zucchini pickles.  Her mother,  born in Kansas City, but from a long line of New England farmers and sheep herders, gardened and put up jams and jellies, but all the meals I remember from that grand-mother's house were made by a Maryland-born Black cook.
     So where did these dishes come from?  Were they the product of the modernization of the family; no servants;  a working woman feeding her family quickly and economically? The creamed-on-toast dishes pleased childish palates. Maybe expediency was the mother of tradition. Maybe the home gardening and canning were products of the Depression and New England tightness.
     But the Bolognese?  Some gene occurs in me that craves that tomato sauce as though there were a phantom Italian on the family tree.  Was the secret of her Bolognese the long cooking time? Once in the course of its long simmering, I sampled it so many times the pot was almost empty at the end of the day.  Now when I make it, I make too much and freeze it the extra. As would she if I hadn't eaten it all. I don’t re-use my plastic containers, as she did, because after a while, her cooking tasted of all the other things she’d cooked and frozen.
     The basis for all the other creamed dishes should be roux: flour cooked in butter as a thickener, milk and cream added, and then the grated cheese, potted beef or hard-boiled eggs. I should have cooked one of these dishes for my children’s fourth grade class. Childhood is my “old country.”

     Then again, my mother was a literate cook, which is to say a collector of cookbooks.  Among those she collected was The Just A Minute Cookbook by Alice Wilson Richardson.  Alice Richardson was a pre World War II friend of my father, his brother and my grandmother. Alice was a “full-fledged career girl” who worked in copy-writing, editing and television. Just a Minute included the recipes for rarebit and creamed chipped beef.  Her rarebit involves melting a pound of grated cheddar in a can of cream of tomato soup, lots of Worcestershire sauce, and stirring in an egg. The chipped beef uses a can of chipped beef “frizzled” in butter and the addition of a can of cream of mushroom soup.
  Alice Wilson Richardson was far from mid-century Sandra Lee. In those days, Hudson River shad was readily available, as witnessed by her menu for shad-roe and bacon.   Alice’s recipe for fried chicken was good enough to be mentioned in my grandmother’s diary.  My Texas born, South Carolina bred grandmother knew her fried chicken.  More on that in the next installment!