The sun’s setting earlier and the nights are getting chilly. Most afternoons I start a fire in the cookstove, and last night it was beef stew and biscuits for supper. And that reminded me of a piece I wrote several years ago – Making Biscuit. Here it is again, just as we bring in the last of the garden: the cabbages, leeks, beets, rutabagas, and, if I don’t wait too long, the nicely-ripened grapes for juice. They like a touch of frost.

I’m not sure when I wrote this, but at least five years ago as Wally was still in the story. Actually, he’s in all the stories that I write, whether he knew it or not, knows it or not. Still, things change. For instance, he’s no longer the man sitting in my mother’s wingback chair. And age with its apparent wisdom has drawn me closer to my mother.

The edits to the story are evident.

It’s an old-time phrase, making biscuit, one you rarely hear anymore. Still, it went around and around in my mind the other morning as I mixed and rolled, cut and baked five dozen biscuits for the Strawberry Festival. I thought about my mother, as I cut butter into the flour mixture with her pastry blender.  

I have a number of her things scattered throughout our house – a couple of wingback chairs, a little sewing chair with her needlepoint seat, a single pickle fork, her collection of Royal Doulton figurines. And the glass sugar bowl from my childhood. Wally and I sit in the chairs every day, watching a ball game (him), reading the paper out loud to each other, knitting (me). The pickle fork makes an appearance only rarely, and I always feel a little jolt seeing the familiar pattern of my mother’s “good” silver.

The sugar bowl, however, sits on the side of my woodstove and sees use every day. Whenever I pick it up or wash it, I’m aware of its vulnerability – one day it will break, and one more connection to my mother will be gone.

It’s the pastry blender that has a special place in the story that I tell myself about my mother. Because I lost her at an early age, (my early age that is: I was barely 21, on the cusp of adulthood, finally able to get outside of myself and see who she was) I’ve had to reconstruct her from scraps of memory. Though she wouldn’t die for another 25 years, she was beginning the long slide into dementia that would steal her will, her personality, our relationship. 

We had such different takes on life, Ruth Roesing and I. She was a worrier, anxious about everything. I was fearless in a certain way – not physically fearless, but unafraid of what people thought of me. It was a contentious brew between us. Moving far away to a place she’d never understand (“whatever you do,” she said to me one time, “don’t bury me here!”) was a pretty harsh way to make a point, assert myself.

It’s only now, myself on the cusp of the long slide into old age, that I can see how it was her way of loving me. Mothers and their daughters. Endlessly complex.

So, making biscuits on a rainy summer morning, using the one actual tool that might connect me to the mother I never really got to know, I found myself thinking of the women I have known. Ruth Pottle, Hope-born, lived most of her life in Lincolnville, on Youngtown Road when we moved here. It was Ruth who called two weeks after we arrived to ask me to bake a pie for a public supper. Three months a bride, brand new to town, daughter of a Chicago suburban upbringing, it was a terrifying request. Of course, I said yes.

Nobody had made pies in my world, not the kind with a pastry crust and a fruit filling. My mother, who was actually a very good cook, made Angel Pie  with a meringue crust, a lemon filling that was mostly whipped cream and more whipped cream piled on top. It was almost five inches high! I’m not even sure if she ever used the pastry blender I so lovingly rescued from her kitchen drawers when she left her home for good. 

Ruth Pottle taught me to make biscuit. Well, she made biscuits, and I watched. It was probably a Grange supper or a Hunters Breakfast, and I was either helping her or furtively watching her as I set the tables or whatever job I was given. What I remember is she used a soup can with both ends removed to cut out the biscuits. Stamp, stamp, stamp she went, hands flying as she turned the huge expanse of dough into dozens of little circles, tucked cheek by jowl into the pans. 

Janet Richards was another master biscuit maker; I see her tucking a pinch of butter into the top of each biscuit before sliding the pan into the oven. Janet would come to the Grange kitchen, or the school kitchen, all prepared with the dry flour and shortening mixture in big plastic bags. Dump it into a bowl and add the milk – or water. Sometimes powdered milk would be in the mix, and all it took was water. And maybe Janet remembers a time when we were making biscuits in the school kitchen (the old school’s kitchen) and couldn’t get the oven hot enough to bake the large pans full of cold dough. 

Both Janet Richards and Ruth Pottle are gone. I know I’m not alone in realizing we, who were the youngsters when these women reigned in Lincolnville, are now the elders.

One time I got to make biscuits with Isabel Maresh in the Grange kitchen. We had a great time, trying to keep the pans filled and slid into the ovens, as the diners kept filing in past the dishes of beans and pasta and salads, looking for the fresh, hot biscuits piled in bowls. 

Is anyone up for doing this with me sometime, that is, when we can have public suppers again? Isabel? Keep it in mind. 

From what I’ve learned, talking with these and other women of my mother’s era, is that baking powder biscuits was the bread they all grew up on. Maine farm wives didn’t generally make yeast breads, but rather the quick biscuits that accompanied nearly every meal. One of the mysterious purchases you find listed in the old account books kept by Lincolnville merchants is “saleratus”, an old name for sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. 

Biscuits have their own mythology. A “biscuit fire” is a quick, hot fire built in a wood stove, often using a fast-burning wood like alder or poplar – aka “biscuit wood”. Biscuit dough should only be kneaded for a few quick turns – ten or fifteen times tops. A young girl can knead the dough equal to her age, but any girl over 20 would end up with tough biscuits, unlike the directions for kneading yeast bread, until it’s “smooth as a baby’s bottom”.

One last biscuit story (which I’ve told before, but I can’t resist). Wally’s great-grandfather, Beriah, whom no one living ever knew, was a curmudgeonly old fellow, and he lived with his son’s family after his wife divorced him. Warmed over biscuits from the night before were always on the breakfast table, and everyone – the children and their parents – was expected to wait for the grandfather to have the first pick of them. 

He’d come in from the garden, fresh from his morning potato bug patrol, and go straight to the table. There, with his potato bug-stained fingers, he’d sort through the biscuits, finding the best one, as the rest of the family watched in horror. It’s safe to say that nowhere in my own family lore – certainly not in my mother’s lore – is there a story remotely like this one.  

I always use the Bakewell Cream recipe for biscuits; it’s on the can. You’ll find Bakewell Cream, a real Maine product, with the baking powder and flour, etc. at Hannafords.

4 C flour

4 t Bakewell Cream

2 t baking soda

1 t salt

1 stick butter, cut up into 1/2” cubes

1 1/2 C milk

Mix dry ingredients together. Cut in butter to make a coarse mixture. Add milk. Gather dough together in your hands. Knead no more than 10-15 turns. Pat or roll out about 3/4” thick. Cut with a 2” cutter or soup can. This recipe fills a 9” x 13” pan snugly. Bake at 475º for about 10 minutes or until the bottoms are nicely browned. Eat promptly with lots of butter and jam, with baked beans or for strawberry shortcake.

I often make only half the recipe or, if it’s only Wally and me (or now, that other guy sitting at the head of the table), a fourth of it – four biscuits, just right

Town

Election day is next Tuesday, Nov. 2, an election with only three referendum questions to decide. These are:

1. The CMP transmission line where “yes” means defeat it and “no” means go ahead. Figure it out for yourself!
2. A $100,000,000 infrastructure bond issue to improve roads, bridges, railroads, airports, transit facilities and ports.
3. A constitutional amendment saying that everyone can grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume food of their own choosing.

See the ballot here.

Request an absentee ballot here.

School

The fall sports season is over with the Lynx Busline League Coed Soccer team “saving their best game of the season for the last one, but [falling] just short against the Hope Hawks, 3-1 at Hope. The two cross country teams, girls and boys, came in as runners up behind Camden-Rockport Middle School. As grandma to two Lynx cross-country runners (as well as two on the CHRHS team) it really is all about the play. Sure, winning’s fun, but so is being on a team, getting out and running around every afternoon, and those popsicles waiting at the end of the course. Next up, basketball!

The PTO is once again selling wreaths. For full information on ordering see the Lynx

Halloween

The Lincolnville General Store is again holding its costume contest and Trunk or Treating. The festivities start at 4:30 p.m. Halloween night with photos taken across Main Street in Grampa Hall’s. There are three categories: Best Individual, Best Group, Best Baby. The photos will be posted on the store’s Facebook page; those with the most “likes” will win with winners announced the next evening.

Lincolnville Historical Society

Check out the LHS Facebook page to see what treasures we’re discovering each week. As part of the Beach Schoolhouse Renovation Project a group of volunteers are diligently sorting through the collection, the work that started in 1975 when Jackie Watts started the Lincolnville Historical Society. And if you’re looking for a project to work on this winter, give me a call (789-5987). I can set you up with one!