Not just a biscuit

I am not going to lie. Sometimes, it’s really hard to come up with ideas for my column. I would love to hear from my readers. If you have suggestions, please let me know. Call the office at 918-756-3600 or come by and see me. This week, I went with canned biscuits. I love a good shortcut and using something halfway already made is definitely a shortcut. But, obviously, I couldn’t just make biscuits. I had to use them in other ways. That is how this week’s column came about.

Lively Willoughby is credited with creating canned biscuits. He owned a wholesale bakery and had dreams of a ready to bake, refrigerated biscuit. However, he lost his bakery in the Great Depression and he was forced to move to Louisville. He began experiment in earnest using his dough, cardboard and tin foil. Stories say there were many failed attempts (and much dough on the ceiling!), but he finally figured it out. In 1931, he applied for a patent which included using Fleishmann’s baking powder and an Epson salt lined cardboard tube. He sold the popular “Ye Olde Kentuckie Buttermilk Biscuits” until joining forces with Ballard & Ballard Flour in the 1940’s. Soon after, Pillsbury purchased Ballard & Ballard Flour and piloted a whole new era for refrigerated dough. That refrigerated dough in a tube was marketed with the original, iconic Doughboy, which we all know and love today.

Fun Facts: Beer was made from biscuits! Ancient Sumerians dried slices of barley bread into hard, dry rusks to store the malted barley they needed for brewing. To make beer, all they had to do was soak the rusks in warm water to make a mash, sweeten it with honey or date juice and leave it to ferment. Then, beer!

Who knew?!

British biscuits were basically breath mints. The biscuits were hard sponge fingers flavored with musk or aniseed and eaten at the end of a meal to sweeten the breath and suppress vapors rising from the stomach.

17th Century biscuits were designed to dunk in wine! What?! Gentlefolk dunked their hard sponge fingers in sweet wine served at the end of a meal. This is why sponge fingers and biscotti are long and thin: so they could fit into narrow glasses.

Feel free to adjust the recipes this week to your tastes. If you don’t like apples, use cherry or whatever your favorite pie filling (or even just berry) is. Season the pretzels as you wish. I didn’t want just plain salt so I created a variety pack of pretzels. My favorite was the Cajun! Everyone absolutely loved the Monkey Bread though. Give it a try, but if you don’t want stuffed, leave it out. One more thing, I used Pillsbury Grands for all these recipes except the monkey bread. That recipe is just regular biscuits. If you do want to use Grands, you will need to cut them into quarters instead of halves. Make your grocery list this weekend and meet me in the kitchen for recipes using biscuits in a whole new way!