I have been a regular subscriber of several different cooking magazines for many years. When we moved I let a couple of subscriptions go and I have had a lot of fun going through the older issues to discover recipes I never even tried because there were simply too many to get to in a month’s time. One of those recipes was for Two Fat Biscuits. As you might suspect, the biscuits use two different shortenings—both butter and lard. Finding the lard eventually required an Amazon order, but finally I was able to give this recipe a whirl.
I looked through the ingredients a little more carefully and immediately had misgivings. What was said to make 9 biscuits required 4 1/2 cups of flour! I have made biscuits for well over 50 years now and my usual recipe that produces about 8 biscuits, uses only 2 cups of flour! What was up with these biscuits? Must be something about the two fats, I thought, or something in the procedure that changes things somehow, so I kept on going.
First, you chop both the butter and lard into half inch cubes and freeze them. Well, that’s a nuisance, but I worked on the rest of the meal while the cubes sat in the freezer for the requisite 30 minutes. Then you put them in the food processor with the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar (I never put sugar in my biscuits, but I was being very careful with this recipe). When I turned on the food processor, it only took a couple of spins for the cubes to get caught under the blade and stop the whole thing! I unplugged it, fixed the problem and tried again—only to have the same problem. After a good dozen tries, I gave up and dumped it all into a large bowl and went at it with a pastry blender. Nope, the cubes were too frozen. Usually a recipe like this will tell you to keep cutting the flour into the fat(s) until it “looks like peas.” Well, mine looked like overripe lima beans, but it was the best I could do.
Next came the buttermilk and I experienced another “are you kidding me?” moment. One and a quarter cups, the recipe said, for four cups of flour? I ended up just as I thought I would—with a pile of dry crumbs. By this point I was going on instinct. I kept adding buttermilk—at least another half cup—until the crumbs became a dough I could pat out and cut.
But wait! We have another problem. The picture showed the nine biscuits on an 11 x 7 sheet pan. I looked at the mound of dough and thought, “unh, unh—cannot possibly fit.” Yet I got out my pan, cut the dough exactly as told to and put the resulting biscuit behemoths on it. 25 minutes the recipe said, but I no longer questioned my intuition—I knew it would be longer. I also thought the biscuits would grow completely together. That was the only thing I was wrong about, though they did get within an eighth inch of each other. At the 32 minute mark, they were done enough, but I did worry about the one in the middle.
What I learned from that experience was to “trust my gut.” After nearly 60 years of cooking and baking I have a pretty good idea of what will and won’t work. Knowledge and experience will do that for you.
May I suggest that the same is true of the Bible? Read it. Over and over, again and again, every day of your life. When you know something that well, false doctrine will not be so likely to fool you, in fact; it will jump right out at you. Something inside you will say, “This isn’t right. This isn’t the God I have learned through His Word. Let’s check this out before believing it and certainly before sharing it.” God told His people that if a prophet told them something other than His Word, or lived a life contrary to His Word, that he was a false prophet and they should not listen to him (Deut 13 and 18). That means the obligation is upon us to know His Word and through it to know Him. Falling for false doctrine is simply inexcusable.
Those biscuits tasted pretty good once I fixed all the problems with the recipe, but I will never follow that recipe again without considerable adjustment, adjustment that experience has taught me. Now is the time to get that experience with God and His Word before someone hands you a recipe that will lead you to disaster.
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness Eph 4:17-24
Dene Ward
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