Buttermilk Biscuits & Civilization, A True Story

Mythical Buttermilk Biscuit Cow

Just as pancakes are merely a vehicle for maple syrup, biscuits provide the perfect vehicle for blackberry, strawberry, raspberry, peach, or apricot jam. And just as I've always made jam, I've always made biscuits and scones. I also count myself among those who have sought in vain to differentiate scone from biscuit and biscuit from scone. So it was with eager anticipation that I read:

Biscuits and Scones Share Tender Secrets, in the New York Times: Dining & Wine, Feb 25, 2014.

In which Julia Moskin tells us that American biscuits originated in the British Isles as scones, first mentioned in print in the 16th century. Her source authority, Elisabeth Luard, a director of The Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery and the author of The Old World Kitchen.

The proto-scone is believed to come from Scottish kitchens, where rounds of oat and barley dough were cooked on large griddles, then cut into wedges. They were a simple combination of fat, flour and liquid, which became softer and lighter as wheat, butter and leaveners like baking soda and baking powder became widely available.

Not exactly breaking news, but good journalism with source clearly attributed. But what is it about the New York Times food writers? So often they choose to state opinion as fact. For instance:

Height is paramount to a good biscuit or scone.

I like a tall biscuit, too, but an acquaintance from Mobile, Alabama makes a traditional New Year's biscuit that is flat and nearly as crispy as a cracker. With a breakfast pork chop and gravy, it's delicious. That's opinion, because deliciousness is a matter of taste, not fact.

To be fair, opinions stated authoritatively can easily be taken as fact, but we want to trust the New York Times to at least get the facts right. To wit:

Buttermilk is a traditional liquid for biscuits and used to contain more butterfat, but today it is a lean and sour product.

This is not only wrong, it's gratuitous. Are we supposed to think that old-fashioned buttermilk made better biscuits? Let's set the record straight, which isn't too hard, because the name says it all (and there are plenty of sources, like this one from a cheese-making professor of biology and chemistry).

Traditional buttermilk was the liquid left behind after churning cream into butter. The fat solidifies into butter leaving a liquid byproduct, buttermilk. You can't buy traditional buttermilk, at least not in these parts, but you can make it yourself.

Try the recipe for Home-churned butter and buttermilk: the sweet-cream type, on page 245 of Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, by Anne Mendelson. She also goes into the differences between "true" buttermilk and the modern-day product. She finds both, delicious.

Commercially-available buttermilk is generally a "cultured" product, i.e. bacteria is added to milk and allowed to ferment. Like yoghurt, you can ferment any kind of milk with any amount of fat you choose. Most grocery store buttermilk appears to be a cultured, low-fat product. It's thicker than milk, thinner than yoghurt, and both pourable and drinkable. More importantly for our biscuits, it's more acidic than unfermented milk.

Cooking Chemistry 101: Acid + Baking Soda = Gaseous Lift

The chemical reaction creates carbon dioxide and gives baked goods a quick rise, which is why buttermilk is a traditional addition to biscuits, scones, and Irish soda bread, too. (It's almost St. Patrick's Day.)

Milk begets cream, sour cream, butter, buttermilk, yoghurt, kefir, and a long list of other fermented, cultured, and ripened products, including countless varieties of cheese.

Goats, sheep, or cow's milk, plus some milled grain, like wheat, oats, or corn, and you've got the dough of civilization. Let it sit around to collect yeasts, and you've got bread. If you're in a hurry to leave town, you've got matzo. Or you can move civilization forward to 1846, when Messrs Dwight & Church, two New York bakers, built the first baking soda factory (now Arm & Hammer), and matzos magically became biscuits. (Though a high-fat cream certainly makes a richer-tasting biscuit).

Leave out the double-acting baking powder and stick to buttermilk and baking soda, plus butter for richness and flavor. I'm going to have to try the crowding tip of "huddling" unbaked biscuits close together on the baking sheet so they've got no place to expand but up! But then again, nice flat crackers have their devotees, as well.

Good for You: People Purple Eaters

Everyone else is wrong and I'm right, but for the sake of world peace (whirled peas?), let's just say it's my problem.
Purple eggplant skin is not an especially healthy food!

“The darker the eggplant’s skin, the more it has to offer in terms of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.”

I gagged on this sentence when I read it in the New York Times, Recipes for Health: Easing Into Fall, Taking Eggplant With You. It's a recipe for Eggplant and Tomato Pie by Martha Rose Shulman, but not just any recipe. It's a Recipe for Health.

We have tomatoes, we have eggplants, and we like eating them together, especially as pizza pie. But that line about the antioxidant-rich anthocyanins sticks in my throat, and I will not make this recipe; I don't care how healthy it purports to be!

I'm reminded of an early episode of Julia Childs's, The French Chef. As I recall, she was making a classic ratatouille and explained that eggplants with innies tended to be bitter, while those with outies were not. This was wisdom she had gleaned from her green grocer referring to the flower end of the fruits.

What?! So much for the wisdom and bitter nonsense of experts. And now back to anthocyanins or anthocyans (the cyan root should give you a hint of color). Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

from Greek: ἀνθός (anthos) = flower + κυανός (kyanos) = blue) are water-soluble vacuolar pigments that may appear red, purple, or blue depending on the pH.

Not surprisingly, the purpler the eggplant, the greater the concentration of anthocyanin, at least in the skin. It's also true that anthocyanins act as powerful antioxidants, which many people want to believe provides untold health benefits (the keyword is untold). Here's an authoritatively well-footnoted quote from Wikipedia addressing the consumption of anthocyanin-rich foods (click here if you need to verify the footnotes):

“Although anthocyanins are powerful antioxidants in vitro,[34] this antioxidant property is unlikely to be conserved after the plant is consumed. As interpreted by the Linus Pauling Institute and European Food Safety Authority, dietary anthocyanins and other flavonoids have little or no direct antioxidant food value following digestion.[35][36][37]”

What are the health/nutrition/science editors at The Times thinking? Eat more eggplant skin, it's good for you? And don't bother eating white eggplants (they're called eggplants for a reason!), which have no detectable anthocyanins. That's according to The Handbook of Vegetable Science and Technology, in table 6 on page 234. Though the same table shows that white eggplants have a higher fiber content than most of the others tested.

Time for a radical conclusion: We may have to decide on the basis of flavor or seasonal availability which eggplants to put on our pies.

Business application: Sell dried purple eggplant-skin flakes, packaged in shakers like red pepper flakes, as a flavor enhancer and healthy addition to tofu and other favorite foods in need of enhancement. Call them AnthoFlakes and sell them in red, purple, and blue varieties—the world will beat (not beet) a path to your door!