These tender biscuits are kind of a hot mess

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

There are biscuits and then there are biscuits. You know the ones. Buttery, flaky, tender and sweet, these are the hand-held breads you dream about for weeks to come. These biscuits seem made from magic, or at least a very skilled baker, out of reach for the average home cook. But trust me, they’re not.

Chef, cookbook author and biochemist Shirley Corrhier is famous for many things, but one of her biggest claims to fame is her version of her grandmother’s Touch of Grace biscuits.

They’re kind of like drop biscuits and kind of like, well, a hot mess. If you carefully follow her recipe, you’ll end up with a gloppy bowl of dough that somehow manages to barely hold its shape when plopped into a bowl of flour. Rounds of flour-coated dough are then squished up next to each other in a cake pan and shuttled off to a hot oven to bake until golden brown.

They’re also a far cry from the first biscuits made in the South. These quick breads came to the Americas from England, where they were drier and more practical for traveling and storage. Over time, variations became popular, and as ingredients like butter and sugar became more affordable, they made their way into recipes as well.

Southern biscuits have always been more tender and lighter than their Northern counterparts because they are made from lowerprotein, soft winter wheat flour. These flours, the most famous of which is White Lily, do not form gluten strands as strong as their hard winter wheat counterparts, and they are called out by name in truly Southern recipes, like Corrhier’s.

I’ve fiddled just a bit with her recipe to streamline your shopping and reflect my preference for all-purpose over self-rising flour. If you’d like to continue to fiddle, go ahead; just don’t forget to shape the dough with a “touch of grace.”