Garden & Gun

Time, Memory, and the Art of Beaten Biscuits

I will allow that my method of making beaten biscuits is peculiar and circuitous—one might say independent—and subject to the outright suspension of the so-called process to allow for musings mythic and legendary, and for the occasional metaphysical poke in the ether, but if you don’t mind taking the long way around the barn, as they say, I’ll tell you how. First you need a deceased father who had the occasional good idea, though few came to fruition. And almost inexplicably, because ordinary food preparation of any extent ever remained shrouded in mystery to him, he needs to have squirreled away among his meager belongings a biscuit brake. Though as is fitting for this particular squirreler-away, it’s only a partial biscuit brake, glimpsed solemnly on a shelf, like a lonely set of upper dentures.

A proper biscuit brake, as it was designed in the nineteenth century, consists of the sometimes dangerous rolling apparatus of a wringer

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