The Friday Biscuit

As one ages, there is a tendency to more closely watch what one eats. I can be included in this category, at least on the average weekday. I tend to eat a light lunch and supper. Usually a relatively small portion of meat (poultry or fish) with one meal a day. I have been increasingly filling the void with plenty of fruits and vegetables. Preferably, those in season and as much of it as I can grow from my own garden. I try not to eat past about 8:30 pm. By accident, I have found myself using the trendy tactic of intermittent fasting. This, of course, is purely accidental. I skip breakfast during the week largely because I’m too busy. But, I tend to eat a little more freely on the weekends because, well, you have to find the joy somewhere, right? I allow myself a bowl of ice cream on the weekends. I may grill a hamburger, some ribs, or even a steak. Maybe I’ll have some barbeque (preferably chopped pork). I may fry up some country fried steak or wrap some cubed deer meat in bacon and throw it on the grill. But, of all my weekend gastronomic splurging, the one I eagerly look forward to the entire week long, is my Friday morning ham biscuit from Hardee’s.

               You may be thinking, HARDEE’S!?!?!?!?!? But, hear me out. There simply is no food as comforting to me as a country ham biscuit. It combines all things that make southern cooking so heavenly. It is salty, buttery, and floury. When done right, the biscuits are hot and light, just a hint of buttery crust on the outside and soft as a feather pillow on the inside. I hear other people praise Bojangles biscuits, Chik-Fil-A biscuits, or any number of biscuits. And granted, you can find excellent biscuits outside Hardee’s. But, to date, I haven’t found one, even at local establishments in various towns across this country, properly suited to complement country ham. Most places don’t even serve country ham. My grandmother made the best biscuits known to man but they were a certain kind of biscuit, small—about the size of a silver dollar, and perfect for filling with jelly, sopping up honey or gravy, but they had a certain purpose and that was not to serve as a delivery vessel for country ham. I don’t know what other kinds of biscuits Hardee’s serves, but their biscuits are made for this purpose.

               Let’s talk about country ham for a moment. “City” hams are soaked in a brine or wet cured and are typically smoked, not aged. “Country” ham is not boiled or baked. Country ham is dry cured, primarily in salt, then hung to dry for several months to a year or more. This gives it a stronger, salty flavor, and a bit of a dry texture. When properly cured and ready to be consumed, country ham is sliced very thin and fried in its own grease or a little oil in a skillet, or most likely in Hardees’ case, on a griddle.

               Country ham biscuits harken back to an older time. The whole curing process was developed before there was any such thing as refrigeration, or for that matter, electricity. If you were to eat meat through the year, you cured it when the time was right and hung it in the smokehouse. Food was scarce back then, and no part of the animal was wasted. Therefore, great care was given to its preparation. Even the flour that made the biscuits on which the ham would ride into one’s mouth, was precious.

               In the Deep South, hogs were killed when the cold weather set in during January and February so that the meat was less likely to spoil before it could be preserved. Hog-Killing time was a community event. The operations shifted from farm to farm throughout a given community as people gathered to work together, help one another, visit, and catch up on the latest gossip.

The hogs themselves, didn’t enjoy this time all that much and the process would turn the stomachs of most sensitive people today. But, hog-killing was a part of the culture of the times. Everyone understood that dying was a part of life and that killing an animal was something to be taken seriously. There were no misunderstandings about where food came from. Hogs were fattened on corn, peanuts, pecans, acorns, and hickory nuts through the year. At the hog-killing they were slaughtered, bled, the hair singed or boiled off, scraped clean, and hung by the hind feet. Then came the removal of the organs, tending of the head (which was not wasted), and processing of the animal into meat—hams, bacon, belly, ribs, shoulders, side meat, feet, etc. The fat was used for lard. People ate the small intestines and called them chitterlings (pronounced chit-lins), along with the backbones, neckbones, tails, and brains. Head cheese was made from the meat of the chopped and boiled head and may also contain pieces of the feet, tongue, and heart. It was set in aspic, gelled, and chilled. My grandfather called it souse meat and considered it a true delicacy, though he never convinced me to try it.

While the men did much of the killing and butchering, the women did the chopping, grinding, sausage making, rendered the cracklings from the lard, and cooked stews out of the leftover bits and pieces. The point is nothing was left to waste. If you ask me, this way of life had it’s rewards. A hard way, to be sure. An unpleasant way by our standards today. I’m not sure how much I would enjoy it all myself. It was a lot of work. But, it was authentic and value-adding. Not just in the products it provided, but in the relationships and sense of community it developed and in the recognition of our place in the world.

The curing of ham goes back even further than this. Some say the Chinese were the first to record the curing of raw ham. Others say the Gauls, in parts of modern-day France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, were the first. Around 160 B.C., Rome’s stoic statesman, Cato the Elder wrote extensively about salt curing of hams in De Agri Cultura.

Curing meat requires conditions that are not so cold as to cause the meat to freeze but not so warm that it spoils. Thus, the Ham belt can be found along a latitude that includes Italy, Spain, and the Southern U.S., all renowned for their various hams.

It is the link to the old, lost, rural way of life that gives the country ham biscuit a little charm in my book, to go with my weekly anticipation of its flavor. There’s soul in a country ham biscuit that you won’t find in a sausage biscuit, bacon and cheese biscuit, or an Egg McMuffin.

It is not lost on me that it sounds somewhat ridiculous to link anything from a fast food chain to old, lost, rural ways of life. But the flavor of country ham is a portal to the past and not many places still serve country ham biscuits these days. Fewer still, serve a good one. I don’t eat anything else from Hardee’s. I’m not sure where their hams come from, nor do I expect that wherever they come from, they are cured in the old way.  But somehow, Hardee’s has mastered the country ham biscuit.

So, imagine my despair when I pulled into the local Hardee’s one fateful Friday morning to discover the parking lot bare. There was a sign on the drive through speaker stating the restaurant was “currently closed due to fire damage”. I assume they will renovate, repair, and re-open but there are no guarantees. Fortunately, there is another Hardee’s on my way to the farm, where I can find a country ham biscuit and scratch this weekly itch.

It doesn’t appear that many people are as attached to the country ham biscuit as I am. There are even a few Hardee’s restaurants I have encountered that have stopped serving it. Not a good omen for a delicacy so delicious and  steeped in such lore. But then, there’s not much cultural memory left to go around. Homogenization is erasing most things that have meaning.  I expect one day, I’ll pull up to one long-reliable Hardee’s after another, order my ham biscuit, and will be told, “I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve the ham biscuit anymore.” Such is life. Until then, Bon -Appetit!