How My Family Cookbook Brought Me Back Home

We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.

On a sweaty day during an Alabama September, I was loading the shrapnel of my childhood home into the back of my mom’s Honda CR-V. She was downsizing to a smaller house, one that was yellow like butter and sandwiched between my old elementary school and the graveyard where my grandmother is buried. That meant my brother and I were flown in from New York City to serve as the movers’ reinforcements.

As he carted out a box full of casserole dishes, one mover asked us, “I bet y’all came home for the cooking, huh?” He was partly right; I was already eating my way through my favorite hometown restaurants. But all our home cooking components were already packed up.

In our house, cooking is an act of taking what is already provided, from cans and powders and shrink-wrapped foam trays, and turning it into something greater than the sum of its parts. Fancy techniques like chopping or dicing or emulsifying were best left to parents with time to kill.

Take biscuits, for example. The biscuits I remember from my childhood were Pillsbury’s—frozen, baked in the oven, and then doused in a combination of butter and Karo corn syrup that we heated in the microwave until it glistened. We didn’t bother dirtying bowls with flour and butter. My mom and I would meet at night, when dinner was over and the dishwasher was loaded, and watch our frozen biscuits thaw and rise by the oven light.

Now, after two years of living in New York, I’ve gotten good at finding ways to satisfy my more Southern cravings. I regularly make the trek to MeMe’s in Prospect Park for their cathead biscuits, and I’ve dragged my parents to the best greens that I’ve found in a three-mile radius of my apartment.

However, like everyone else my age, I watch Bon Appétit videos for fun. I’ve overfilled my hallway-size kitchen with OXO brand cooking utensils. I felt like I had everything I needed to cook. So when I wanted biscuits, I wanted to make them myself. After all, I figured biscuit-making was in my blood. Never mind the fact that my only experience with biscuit prep involved digging through a freezer. I had the craving and a scrap of counter space in Ridgewood; all I needed was a recipe.

So, two drinks in and feeling homesick, I texted my mom one night with a question: “Seeing as I’m not getting married any time soon, could I get a copy of the family cookbook now?”

In my family, it’s tradition to bless a newlywed couple’s kitchen with a copy of each: the family cookbook and “The Kitchen Prayer,” a cross-stitched blessing hung in every family kitchen on my mother’s side. It’s considered a gift for the home, one part practical and one spiritual.

In my childhood, I’d only seen my mom reference her recipe box, full of index cards and magazine clippings. There were recipes inside ranging from Christmas cookies to chicken tetrazzini. I never saw the cookbook as a child. I only knew it existed because of how much I envied my brother’s copy.

My brother’s wedding was a sweaty scene that took place over a pond in South Carolina, in the budding heat of May. When we left the next day, my mom and I were stuck together in our family minivan for the seven-hour drive home. Meanwhile, my brother and his new wife were working their way up the east coast with a rental car full of wedding gifts and home goods.

Naturally, as the gay younger brother, I envied the attention. I wanted that same acceptance, the trunk crammed full of appliances and dishes and family heirlooms, rattling its way up to freedom, stamped with our family’s collective approval.

“What if I were to get married, just for the registry?” I joked to my mom. “I bet one of my friends would be up for it.”

There was a pause. My mom leaned forward a little bit towards the steering wheel. She looked over at me, with a faint glimmer of hope, and asked, “Do you think you could really do that?”

I wanted that same acceptance, stamped with our family’s collective approval.

In my mind, I was a Gay Man, living my Gay Adult life. Hearing the enthusiasm and hope behind my mom’s voice, wondering if it was possible that I, too, might marry a woman over a body of water in a state that used to be part of the Confederacy, crushed me. While we were watching our world change around us, we were still Southern, which meant we had to cling to our traditions as much as possible.

As a kid, our extended family seemed to revolve around routines, and those revolved around the food we served. Every Thanksgiving, we’d meet at my great-grandparents’ farm in Selmer, Tennessee, over barbecue from Pappy John’s and three different types of pie. On Mondays, we’d meet for concerts in our town park, bringing Quizno’s subs and Tupperware full of fruit salad. Christmas meant waking up early to make sausage balls and Sister Schubert’s sweet rolls before going over to my aunt’s house for honeybaked ham and sugar cookies. We traveled in a tight-knit orbit around each other, crossing paths regularly, and always over a meal.

More recently though, we’ve had Thanksgiving at Cracker Barrel, halfway between our hometown and my aunt’s house in Tennessee. We still make orange rolls and sausage balls on Christmas morning, but only after my dad makes his way over from his new house fifteen minutes away, where he lives alone.

Children have moved states, parents have divorced and started dating again. Our family traditions aren’t as fixed as they were in my childhood. I still savor the bittersweet victory when, nine years after I came out, my mom told me I could “tell her about gay stuff,” with the caveat that she “doesn’t need to know about my personal life.” In other words, I could love who I wanted, but I didn’t need to go into too much detail about it.

When I texted my mom asking for the cookbook, I didn’t know if I could have one without first getting hitched, or even if a copy existed for me. So when she said that there was a cookbook on its way to me in the mail, the marriage requirement waived, I felt vindicated. We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.

When I first unpacked my copy of the family cookbook, I thought I had been sent the wrong one. The title on the front read “The Bradley Family Cookbook.” But I wasn’t a Bradley. I was a Patton. My mother had been a Barnes, and her mother a Chiles. However, once I flipped open the faded plastic cover, the pieces of my ancestry started pointing themselves out to me.

There was a family history authored by Thelma, a great-aunt of mine. The first recipe had a picture of my young grandfather, the same one that was framed in my mom’s kitchen. And right in the front of the book was a memorial section with my maternal grandmother’s name listed third from the bottom.

I dusted it off and marveled at how long it must have been sitting around, waiting for me to get married, move home, and put it to use. Then I realized the “dust” was just flour, leaking out of the box of Pioneer biscuit mix that my mom had included in her care package. She’d always sung Pioneer’s praises because it already had shortening in it, meaning the traditional three-ingredient biscuit recipe was reduced to two: biscuit mix and milk.

The Pioneer mix felt right. The dough was shaggy and wet and stuck to the lines of my palms, reminiscent of our Christmas sausage balls made with Bisquick. Adding liquid to powder was familiar territory for me; I spent every Saturday of my childhood eating pancakes that came from an Aunt Jemima box. Safe to say I had faith in packaged baking mixes.

I put the dough in the oven, expecting the flaky, fluffy biscuits of my daydreams. Instead, after twelve minutes in the oven, I got pucks. Hard, dense circles that tasted like chalk. The sort of bread that they would serve at a Cracker Barrel Thanksgiving. I had made what were essentially glorified crackers.

My bruised, Bon-Appétit-bred baking ego kicked in. I knew I needed to do this the right way, the authentic way. So I tried again, this time using a from-scratch recipe from the pages of the family cookbook.

It was simple enough: flour mixed with baking powder and salt, cut with shortening, and mixed with milk. The sidebar to the recipe, written by my great-aunt Vivian, promised “really good biscuits,” courtesy of the recipe she had obtained from the Betty Crocker cookbook.

I cooked with renewed confidence, sure that a recipe that worked for my ancestors would come through for me. I sifted ingredients, cut Crisco with a pair of forks, floured my wineglass-slash-biscuit cutter, and set to work.

Like the last time, I emerged with a dough both familiar and foreign. I popped the biscuits in the oven and spent ten agonizing minutes running back and forth from couch to cooking utensil, flicking the oven light off and on again like I was working the lights at a haunted house. In the end, I was left with ten more pucks, resigned to a fate of sitting untouched on my countertop until I threw them out.

I don’t know what I did wrong, but I imagined that I did everything wrong. Maybe I added too much milk, or I overworked the dough, or added too much flour in the final stages. Maybe I had “hot hands” and would never be able to make biscuits or pastry or any other flaky, impermanent dessert. Maybe Amanda Mull was right, that I would never be able to make biscuits without calling in the reserves of White Lily, as if I needed to pay penance to the part of the country that raised me.

I read essays on flour varietals and watched hours of YouTube videos to study technique. I tried self-rising flour and failed again, this time scraping the biscuits straight from the pan into the trash. I was actively backsliding with every attempt, as I furiously mashed my newly acquired King Arthur flour with my newly acquired pastry blender, only to add to the pile of busted biscuits in my trash can.

We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.

It’s important to note that in my family, we skirt around potential conflict. When I came out to my parents, I left a note on their dresser and ran, hiding in the woods with a friend until they came calling. My mom didn’t speak to me for a week after.

When my parents decided they couldn’t live together anymore, they didn’t tell me until I found the stash of furniture for my father’s new house in our basement. I responded by turning around and driving an hour and a half away to sleep on the floor of my friend’s apartment.

My mom cried only once when we were moving her out of the house where she had spent the last twenty-nine years of her life. That show of emotion lasted all of ten seconds. Then we finished packing up her garden shed and left my old home for the final time.

So when I found myself failing at what I considered to be the time-honored Southern tradition of biscuit making, I took a page from my childhood. I walked away.

In fact, I walked straight down to my Food Bazaar and bought a bag of Pillsbury Southern Style Biscuits and a bottle of Karo corn syrup. I watched those biscuits perfectly bake from frozen to fluffy. I mixed together a heart-clogging amount of butter and Karo, and ate them on my bed, watching the street outside my apartment get taken over by dusk.

They weren’t as good as the biscuits I remembered eating with my mom, but that’s the risk of nostalgia. Sometimes bedtime biscuits taste better when they’ve aged in your mind for twenty years or so, as opposed to those fresh out of the oven.

I don’t regret taking the easy way out. I regret the time I spent frustrated, trying to force myself into a history that wasn’t really mine. For some reason, I felt that the memories of my childhood could be improved upon. In reality, I was chasing down those memories and attempting to recreate them in my kitchen.

At first, the delight I felt in those familiar frozen biscuits felt shameful, as if I were disappointing the ghost of my great-aunt in my failure to follow her sworn-by biscuit recipe. I’ve butted heads with my heritage a lot in my lifetime, and my failure to bake felt like another slap in the face to my Southern raising.

But those Pillsbury biscuits were mine and my mother’s tradition: food from the freezer, cooked for a craving, and shared with a smile, as if we were getting away with cheating the system that we were supposed to be following.