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—Southern Cookin’ with Ron Williams, www.gritz.net

Southerners do eat bagels but they’re not about to forsake their beloved biscuits, most of all those featherweight Angel Biscuits. These, I’ve heard (but can’t prove), were created at White Lily headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee—sometime in the mid twentieth century.

For nearly 125 years this company has been milling the light baking flour Southerners insist upon for flaky biscuits and cakes so light they nearly levitate. It all began back in 1882 when young Georgian J. Allen Smith settled in Knoxville (“the soft wheat belt”), then, with the aid of four local businessmen, incorporated and reactivated the derelict Knoxville City Mills.

From the outset, Smith’s goal was to produce the finest flour available, and to achieve it, he built modern facilities and replaced the old grindstones with steel rollers. Seven times he rolled his wheat, and southern cooks were impressed. Not so Smith, who added multiple siftings and by 1896 had produced a flour so fine, so soft he named it White Lily (after his wife, Lillie).

Within six years, White Lily sales had zoomed past the million-dollar mark. Bulk-shipped in wooden barrels, the flour was now sold from Virginia to Florida. Soon flour sacks replaced the barrels, to the delight of frugal housewives, who could turn them into shirts and dresses (never mind that all of them were stamped with the White Lily logo).

Over time White Lily introduced self-rising flour and cornmeal, then an array of time-saving mixes. But none better than the light baking flour that had made White Lily an icon.

* * *

CATHEAD BISCUITS

MAKES 4 LARGE BISCUITS

“What you see there, Joe, is what we call the Cathead Biscuit, the gift of an all-knowing and benevolent God.” Thus writes Joseph E. Dabney in the bread chapter of his delightful book, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine (1998). Until he sank his teeth into a cathead biscuit at Berry College near Rome, Georgia, Dabney thought that no one baked better biscuits than his Scotch-Irish South Carolina mother. They were, he writes, “so satisfyingly stout and yet so fluffy and down-home delicious—particularly when she showed me how to dip them into breakfast coffee for what she called ‘coffee soakee’.” According to Dabney, southern mountain folk are particularly partial to Cathead Biscuits smothered with Sawmill Gravy. As for their unusual name, some long-ago someone said that these biscuits were as big as a cat’s head—“a medium-size female,” southern radio humorist Ludlow Porch later joked to a listener who’d called in to ask about them. “They’re soft and fluffy and almost fall out of your hands into your mouth,” Porch added. I now realize that the giant biscuits our round-the-corner neighbor, Mrs. Franklin, made were Cathead Biscuits, although she didn’t call them that. Most afternoons after school, I’d race over to Mrs. Franklin’s hoping that she had at least one left from lunch that I could smother with gravy or dip into “pot likker” from the greens she’d cooked earlier. Even cold, they were wonderful. Mrs. Franklin made them with bacon drippings and that’s the way I like them because of their meaty flavor. Note: With three ingredients only, these biscuits couldn’t be easier to make. Still, if they’re to be light and fluffy, you must use a good, soft southern flour like White Lily or Martha White and handle the dough as little as possible. Because of their size, Cathead Biscuits bake at a lower-than-usual temperature and never brown like conventional biscuits. Tip: If self-rising flour is unavailable, substitute all-purpose flour and add 1 teaspoon baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt.

5 tablespoons melted bacon drippings or lard, plus more for the pan

1½ cups unsifted self-rising flour (see Note and Tip above)

2/3 cup buttermilk, at room temperature

1. Preheat the oven to 375° F. Grease a well-seasoned 8-inch iron skillet with bacon drippings or lard and set aside.

2. Place the flour