Strictly speaking, a biscuit is not a bread. Lou Bertillon will concede this if pressed. But it is leavened, it is baked, it goes with butter, and on a Saturday morning at half past nine, in a Brooklyn kitchen with a clean cast iron pan and a half-quart of cold buttermilk in the fridge, the distinction does not matter.
The recipe she uses was taught to her in the summer of 2011 by a line cook named Hollis Brewer, who had grown up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and was working the brunch shift at the restaurant where Lou was sous chef at the time.
Hollis was thirty-four. He had been making biscuits since he was eleven. He was suspicious of any biscuit recipe that involved a food processor, an egg, or sugar in any quantity beyond a pinch.
His recipe, as he wrote it on the back of a guest check on a slow Tuesday: two cups self-rising flour, four tablespoons cold butter, three-quarters cup cold buttermilk, a pinch of sugar, a small pinch of salt. Cut the butter in by hand. Stir in the buttermilk with a fork. Turn out, fold three times, pat half an inch thick. Cut. Bake at 450 until golden.
Lou copied it into the small black notebook she still carries around, and she has been making it ever since.
She does not own self-rising flour. She approximates it with all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt — for two cups of flour, two and a quarter teaspoons of baking powder and three-quarters of a teaspoon of fine salt. The biscuits, after a comparison test in 2014 that involved both versions side by side and an irritated brunch guest who was made to taste both, are indistinguishable.
She uses White Lily flour when she can find it. White Lily is a softer wheat than King Arthur all-purpose, and biscuits made with it have a finer, more cottony crumb. When she cannot find it, she uses King Arthur, and the biscuits are still better than most biscuits anyone has ever eaten.
The buttermilk is from Ronnybrook Farm in the Hudson Valley, in a half-gallon glass bottle she returns to the bodega around the corner for the deposit. It is cultured and thick. She keeps it for biscuits, for the occasional pancake, and for the cold-soup season of late August.
She grates the cold butter on the large holes of a box grater directly into the flour. This is a cheat Hollis disapproved of, in 2011, when she first tried it on him. He has since come around.
She stirs the buttermilk in with a fork until the dough just barely comes together, then turns it out onto a floured counter and folds it three times, gently. Folding is what gives the biscuit its layers. It is also what most novices skip, in their hurry, which is why their biscuits are dense.
She pats the dough to about three-quarters of an inch thick and cuts the biscuits with a three-inch metal ring she has owned since 2009. She does not twist the cutter. Twisting seals the edges and prevents the rise. She presses straight down and pulls straight up.
She places the biscuits on a parchment-lined sheet pan with their sides touching. They will help each other rise. She brushes the tops with a little melted butter.
Into a 450-degree oven they go, on the upper rack, for fourteen to sixteen minutes. She knows they are done when the tops are deeply golden and the kitchen has the particular smell of butter and hot baking powder that she has come to associate with Saturday mornings.
She makes a batch of eight biscuits. She and her partner eat three each at breakfast, with butter and a jam she made in February from clementines and Cara Cara oranges. The remaining two are for Margie upstairs, who comes down at ten if she sees the steam on the kitchen window.
Margie eats hers standing in the kitchen, with butter and black pepper, the way her mother used to serve them in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is sixty-four. She has known Lou for fourteen years. She does not stay long.
The cast iron pan that the biscuits did not bake in is on the stove getting hot, because the second part of the Saturday morning ritual is the egg fried in good olive oil, which gets eaten on the split biscuit, with a smear of hot sauce, between the second and third cup of coffee.
There is no biscuit on Sunday. Sunday is for the no-knead loaf, which is what Lou's neighbour Adrian, who lives two blocks over, bakes on Sundays and sometimes brings by. He gets a biscuit on Saturdays, in trade.
Hollis Brewer, the line cook from Tennessee, is now executive chef at a restaurant in Nashville. Lou saw him in March when she was down for a conference. He made her a biscuit that was better than hers. She was not surprised. He has been at it longer.
