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 wing back 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, 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 wood stove and sees use every day. Every time 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.

But the pastry blender 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.

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.

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.

From what I’ve learned talking with these and other women of my mother’s era, is that baking powder biscuits were 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, 10 or 15 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 “as smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

One last biscuit story (which I may have written of before, but I can’t reisist): 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 in the bowl.

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 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 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

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.

Tuesday July 12 is Needlwork afternoon at the Library, 4-6 p.m. Bring along your favorite project – knitting, crocheting, embroidery, whatever – to work on and stay for all or part of the time. All needleworkers welcome. There’s plenty of help available too, if you’re stuck on something.

It doesn’t seem possible, but Crossroads Community Baptist Church is celebrating ten years of ministry in mid-coast Maine. They invite members of the church, friends of the church, and those interesting in learning more about the church, to their service on Sunday, July 17 at 11 a.m. According to Eileen McDermott, “It will be a fun time of: thanking God for planting the church in Lincolville, remembering (the joys and the struggles),.... and then looking ahead to the next 10yrs.”

Following the service all are invited to a baptism and potluck meal in Owls Head at 13 Treasure Island Lane. Contact Marian Pouchot for more information, 763-3551.

I was sad to hear that two Lincolnville women who, each in her own way, was a big part of our town’s vitality, passed away in the past few days.

Betty Lowell was owner, with her late husband Maynard Heal, of the Center General Store when we first moved here, and one of the first people we got to know. She was born in Hope, I believe, but raised her family in Lincolnville and was involved in town activities for most of her life.

Jeannette Wootton moved here from Maryland with her husband, Dawson “Moose”, around the same time we did, 1970. Among her many activities was as a volunteer in the school library and a Bell Ringer at Camden’s Congregational Church. Many might remember her assisting in Rosey Gerry’s auctions in later years. 

Both women were part of the backbone of our community, making it a better place to live. They’ll be remembered fondly.