Versions of butter roll vary practically cook by cook

In Saving Southern Recipes, Southern Kitchen’s Kate Williams explores the deep heritage of Southern cooking through the lens of passeddown, old family recipes.

Count me among the ignorant, but I had never heard of the Southern butter roll until a few weeks ago. Hear the name and you may assume that this dish is a dinner roll or a twist on a croissant, but you’d be wrong. A butter roll is, actually, many things, depending on who you ask and where that person grew up.

Reader Ruth Sorrells introduced me to the butter roll; she told me her grandmother used to make the dish and she’s struggled to find the right recipe for it. This query sent me down a spiraling rabbit hole of recipes, videos and Pinterest boards, but despite hours of research, I couldn’t find a definitive recipe.

From what I can tell, the butter roll is a dish of the north and northwestern portion of the South; most cooks I found making it are in Memphis, Tennessee; Arkansas; Kentucky and Virginia. Some make it from shortcut ingredients, such as premade pie crust or Pillsbury Crescent Roll dough, while others start out with homemade biscuits. Either way, the dough gets smeared with butter and sprinkled with lots of sugar (and perhaps a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg) before being rolled up, sliced, then drenched and baked in a sauce that’s either milky and custardy, or sweet and caramely.

For my version, I decided to use a basic buttermilk biscuit dough as my building block, which was rich and buttery in all the right ways, especially when baked in a milk and sugar sauce. As the rolls bake, some of the flour from the dough makes its way into the milk, transforming it into a kind of custard that can be spooned, with as much generosity as you’d like, all over the warm rolls. It’ll soften their crackling crust, but it’s worth it.