Of Cathead

Preamble: For my friends in Great Britain, consult your English to American Dictionary and note that the term “biscuit,” as referred to in this post, conforms to the American definition. A terrapin is a yeast (dinner) roll in geezer-speak.

Due to a chronically issued directive from the powers that be, I started cooking at a very young age. I interpreted the statement, “If you don’t like what’s on the table, go make your own dinner” as a loophole in the contract of my indentured servitude. I don’t recall my age but I do remember pulling the kitchen drawers out for use as a stairway to access the upper level cabinets. That’s where the Folgers Coffee cans were kept, the ones filled with home rendered lard. Frying is always a good place to start. You can fry almost anything in lard and it will always be good.


My next target was the sourdough starter that my mother kept on the kitchen countertop. It was a thick broth of flour and water with an unmistakable sour twang. It was also a veritable bottomless pit of self-replicating yeast cells. The kitchen became a laboratory where I subjected those one-celled life forms to all manner of experimentation.


For me, the mysteries of piecrusts, terrapins and biscuits, were solved decades ago after an encounter with a sympathetic granny at a holiday get-together. I had previously attempted to squeeze the baking secrets out of a few grannies but had consistently come away with recipes that you could find on the back of any sack of flour. My inquiries were met with skepticism. Why did I want to know? This was when I became aware of one of the most well kept secrets in all of grannydom. At large gatherings, grannies do not cook for you, they cook “against” other grannies. Only after the suspicious matriarch was convinced of my sincerity would she break the code of silence. She complained that the younger generation could not care less for the wealth of kitchen expertise that had been passed down by their ancestors. I suggested that I could serve as a surrogate in the absence of the more traditional beneficiaries, the daughters and granddaughters.


I swore a blood oath not to divulge the information that I was about to receive to her competitors, those uppity in-laws and know-it-all upstarts in the “other” families. The few family members who were privy to her secrets were already well informed. Their successes and failures would be evident in the bowls and pans scraped clean by the hungry masses versus those that would be picked over and, in some cases, left relatively intact. Nothing could be more embarrassing at a family reunion than a basket of rolls left unmolested among a jumble of empty containers, a humiliation duly noted by those that mattered.


Now convinced of my commitment to the craft, she gave me a glimpse into a world enshrouded in mystery from ancient times. She took me to an unoccupied corner of the living room and spoke in a low voice. The grey haired woman kept a wary eye on the room as she handed over the keys to the kingdom. One by one, secrets were revealed, too many for me to remember. She agreed to provide more forbidden information at the upcoming holiday festivities in December. She didn't show up at the Christmas feast, I was told she was not well enough to attend. She did recover but my connection to her family abruptly ended with the demise of my relationship with her granddaughter. Nevertheless, the damage was done.

One by one, grannies, aunts, and other random kitchen queens felt the wrath of my newfound baking powers. I destroyed the mythical status of their rolls, biscuits and pies. I lorded my powers over them at reunions and holiday feasts. I conquered kitchen after kitchen until no granny in the land would risk sharing a countertop with me! Yeah right, in my dreams. Nobody but a granny can best another granny in the kitchen. I have successfully competed with an occasional apple pie or batch of terrapins, but no man is capable of matching the depth of knowledge held in the smallest forgotten corner of a typical granny’s head.

The granny factor notwithstanding, I have a handle on this bread thing with one glaring exception. My nemesis is, and always has been, the notoriously difficult to control “buttermilk cathead biscuit.” For those unfamiliar with the term “cathead biscuit,” consult your nearest geezer or google it. What you will find from geezers and google alike are endless opinions of what a cathead biscuit is. Everybody thinks their cathead is the quintessential cathead and all others are pretenders to the throne. That is what makes this elusive little jewel the touchstone of baking prowess. The objective is to reproduce the size, shape, texture, taste, heart, and soul of a cathead based entirely on a geezer’s romanticized recollections of a long lost mother’s home cooking. A smile or a compliment is the sign of failure. The only acceptable evidence of success is a tear in the eye of your dinner guest. If you see this happen, then you can righteously claim to have mastered cathead theory at least once in your life.

There is perhaps no other kitchen product that is subjected to such an outrageously diverse and uncompromising set of standards. They range from thin and tough as a hockey puck to tall and fluffy as a cloud. They are spooned onto a hot stone or they are meticulously rolled, cut and pitched into a cold glass pan. They contain lard, butter, bacon fat, or shortening and they are raised with either yeast, sourdough, baking powder, baking soda or a combination thereof. The ratios of salt, sugar, campfire ash, gunpowder and/or dust from the bones of their ancestors must be handled with utmost consideration for fragile sensitivities. Yeast rolls, aka terrapins, are easy. Catheads will take your pants down in public and whip your ass like a red-headed stepchild. Of the hundreds of batches that I’ve made over the years, I recall only one time where my guest geezer got all swampy over the biscuits. He said it was something in his eye but we both knew better.

Unfortunately, the age of the cathead is coming to a close. Each day, more of our old folks leave this world and they take their demanding specifications with them. For most people born subsequent to the rise of the Fast Food Industrial Complex, the biscuit tube is not only adequate, it is preferred. Just reach into the fridge, retrieve the cardboard cylinder of pre-mixed, machine excreted dough, slap that baby on the countertop and you are instantly rewarded with a satisfying micro-explosion of shiny white pre-formed and cross-sectioned biscuit food nodules. I’ll probably go to hell for saying it, but those Pillsbury Buttermilk Flaky Biscuits do kick some ass. I imagine the ghosts of a million grannies are not too happy with me right now.