At this point in my life, comfortably settled in to middle age, I'm beginning to develop a somewhat lengthy list of "lasts," things I know I won't be doing again.
Some of them are somewhat poignant. For instance, I used to be at a stadium every Friday night, but I haven't been to a high school football game in five years, and chances are good I may not ever be again. Some, on the other hand, are more of a coincidence and will barely leave a mark. For example, I doubt I'll ever go back to Monroe, La. I don't think anyone is too upset by that.
How I'll handle some of the bigger "lasts" remains to be seen. For support with that, I may have to recall my grandmother and her biscuits.
My grandmother was not an amazing cook in the classical sense. Hers was hearty fare designed to nourish in the moment and linger for most of the day with someone working a stubborn piece of red dirt or out on an oil rig or driving a delivery truck.
It was typically fried, always substantial and richly textured and flavored. Solid stuff for solid people. And if we know now that it probably contributed to the coronary issues that felled many of them, well, that wasn't really her fault. Medical science hadn't quite connected those dots yet.
Standing out and apart in all this fried chicken or chicken fried steak or fried pork chops or fried okra or whatever else she could flour and dip in hot grease were her biscuits. They were my grandmother's go-to pitch, and as such were the culinary equivalent of a Nolan Ryan fastball -- high heat you couldn't touch with a tennis racket.
And they were as versatile as a Swiss Army Knife. With some preserves, they were breakfast. Slip a slice of ham between two halves and wrap them in wax paper and they were lunch. They were a blaze of doughy whiteness in an otherwise brown evening meal, and with a little honey they were dessert.
They were all the more amazing when you consider they came from an oven that virtually pre-dated fire and off a baking sheet the color of the original darkness. Cave dwellers would consider the tools my grandmother used to produce meals a step up, but that was about it.
My grandmother started early and stayed late, both in the kitchen and in her life, so the idea that she was still cranking out meals featuring those biscuits late into her 80s was actually sort of a given.
So it was no surprise that on the last trip of any significant distance she ever took in her life, a monthlong vacation of sorts from Lawton to our base housing in central Arkansas, my grandmother promised to make us her famous biscuits.
My mother and father both went on about the biscuits Grannie was going to make, how no one could make them like her, how they were just going to stay out of the kitchen and out of her way (as I was also admonished to do) while she happily spent the day mixing and rolling and pounding and whatever else she did to produce her signature delicacy, because we were in for a treat.
She burned them, is basically what she did. Not badly, which probably would have been better, since she could have just chalked it up to a tough day and moved on. No, just ... enough. Enough that she knew, and we knew, too.
My grandmother was always a "sight and smell" cook, so being in a strange kitchen in a strange house with strange equipment would certainly have been excuse enough. But when you go by feel, and that feel starts to desert you, well, you just know.
When the visit was over, we took my grandmother back to her home where she still rose every morning, put on her apron and made breakfast, lunch and dinner for her and my aunt, who lived with her. She did this until she was in her late 90s and could barely get out of bed, and passed away at 101.
And she never again made biscuits again after that visit to our house.
I have no idea if there was psychological toll on my grandmother from the end of her biscuit-making. She had lived what can best be described, at least in the early part, as a hardscrabble life, had buried all of her sons and one grandson and had come to Oklahoma in an covered wagon and later watched a man walk on the moon on the same black and white TV she used to watch Lawrence Welk.
So maybe at a certain point, you do as she did and accept when something is the last of a thing. And appreciate that it was a good run.
I still do miss those biscuits, though.
Commentary on 04/27/2018