I was a little girl in my Alabama grandmother’s kitchen as I watched my granddaddy take a bite of my very first homemade biscuit. He bit into it and I watched him smile. He did not say a word. He ate about half of the biscuit – without anything on it – before he stabbed the yolk of his fried egg with the biscuit and sopped up the yellow. Then, he turned to my grandmother and said, “These are the best biscuits you ever made.” To which she replied, after putting her rough, farm hands on my blonde, bushel of hair, “She made them.” The pride I felt swelled inside me. I had made my granddaddy – a man I adored – happy with my cooking. It is a Southern girl’s art form.
Years later, I taught one of my five daughters to cook a biscuit recipe we have held in my family for generations. I taught her how to grate the frozen butter… fold the dough… bake with patience and love. She was the fourth to go through the ritual (the fifth is still too little). My husband goes through the same ritual with each of our girls. He breaks his yolk with one of their biscuits and compliments me on “the finest biscuits he ever had,” and like my grandmother before me, I introduce the newest “Princess of the Kitchen.” Of course, until they are older, I will remain the Queen.
A kitchen is the rightful domain of any true Southern woman. Those Yankee girls get bent out of shape when you tell them so. I do not care. I learned how to be a woman, a mother, a grandma (some day), a wife, and a lady standing by the apron strings of my grandmother in Alabama and my nana in Georgia.
My nana in South Georgia wore red lipstick, Channel Number 5, pearls, and dresses. I never once saw her in pants of any kind. Her aprons had a purpose. One was for breakfast, another was for big Thanksgiving meals, yet another for Christmas… and so forth. She was a wonder. She taught me that a Southern Lady must have some wine with her at all times. She was an Episcopalian, thus, unlike my Alabama Baptist grandmother, wine was acceptable. She also taught me to sing to the turkey while buttering it up before roasting. “Those turkeys love their music,” she would say in her elite, South Georgia accent.
My Georgia nana presented her meals like trophies. She took great pleasure in the “ooos” and “ahhhs” of introducing various dishes on her finery and in her finery. When I was old enough, she taught me how to present a spoon in a certain dish… how to ensure a turkey got a beautiful, crisp golden-brown color… how to whisk the perfect peaks. Eventually, as she got older, she would sit with her wine and watch me do a good amount of the work. One day, when I was thirteen, she let me have a sip of her chardonnay. I turned the glass to avoid the lipstick. “Darling, one day you will leave lip prints on your own glass of wine.” She was right – much to the chagrin of my dishwasher.
My Alabama grandmother was an entirely different type of lady. She was a farm girl. Our family was in Alabama before Alabama was a territory of the United States. We have been on the same farmland for generations. One Baptist church is filled exclusively with the gravestones of my kin. My male descendants all served in the 15th Alabama Infantry Regiment. There is no mistaking our love for the beautiful red St. Andrews Cross that adorns all of our family homes.
She only cooked that which was grown on her farm or baked. She had no problems pulling the head off a chicken or butchering a pig. Her garden was not manicured, it was practical. All kinds of herbs and vegetables were grown around the home. The larger yields were on the hundreds of acres shared by my uncles. When we would arrive to her home for the brutal Alabama summer months, our beds were laden with all kinds of baked goods that she had been preparing for weeks. She had an insatiable sweet tooth.
In the kitchen, her food was incredible – but simple. Unlike my fancy nana, my grandmother cooked to feed the 15th Alabama Infantry. Biscuits, homemade sausage, gravies, fried chicken… she taught me every Southern dish you could imagine. The only time she seemed to leave the kitchen was to go to church, pick something from the garden, or go to bed. Sometimes at night, I would climb in bed with her after my granddaddy died and we would watch Johnny Carson together. She would sneak me a little piece of chocolate (her vice) and when I explained I needed to go brush my teeth, she would say, “Nonsense. You have them perfect, store-bought looking teeth. Don’t tell your mama that we were eating candy in bed.” I loved that woman to my undying core.
My grandmother unfortunately had a series of strokes and found it difficult to walk. She had braces on her legs. As I got older, I did more of the cooking, but she was still in the kitchen. One day, after church, I asked her, “What will you do when you get to heaven?” She replied, “I will no longer have these braces on my legs. I will dance with your grandpa all over the clouds and he will be wearing the same Marine Corps uniform that he wore when I first met him.”
Being a Southern woman is something more than that which you see on silly Facebook or TikTok videos. Girls today seem to equate Southern femininity with Daisy Duke shorts, boots, and tattoos. Everything is a Hollywood fabrication of Dixie culture. I admit, there was a time in my earlier days that I could not wait to run out of the house, hike my skirt up well above my knees, and push up my chest for the boys to admire. But there was always something in me that gnawed at my heart and soul. Many years later, I realized where that gnawing came from: the disapproving eyes of my two grandmas in Heaven.
A few weeks ago, my mother and my two eldest daughters went into the kitchen on an extended holiday weekend. It was four Southern women. It was three Southern generations. The men played cards in a table not far from us. They laughed and drank beer. My daddy teased my husband on his Irish ways. He teased back. It was all in good fun. My eldest daughter (soon to graduate college) commented, “Look at them in there, having fun while we’re in here cooking.” To which the younger daughter (not yet in college) replied, “We are having fun.” She gets it.
A Southern woman’s place is in the kitchen. To tell me otherwise is to tell me you are just another reconstructed female who has lost her Southern identity. I suggest you fix yourself a glass of wine and your man a good meal, before you slip too far into modernity.
God bless all y’all for reading my little piece and God bless my beloved Dixie.
-By Mrs. Dixie O’Hara
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
Great article!
I’m reading this while I watch my wife assemble an ensemble of sweet Southern delight for dinner( lunch for you Yankees) , chicken and waffles. She is one to make things from scratch on most occasions, and usually with one, or both of our daughters helping.
Her instructions are a reinstatement of a lost institution on both sides of our families. Both of our mothers being prone to making things from a box, more then out of a recipe.
But she will labor, passing them going forth, and that is how we win back our culture, at the dinner table.
Thank you for sharing these wonderful traditions.
Beautifully written!
Your words painted a picture I could see in my mind that reminded my of my mother and grandmother here in Mississippi. They are both from the mold of your Alabama grandmother. My mother was the only girl in her household, and didn’t have any daughters of her own. Lucky for me, she loved my girlfriend (now wife of 28 years) as her own and taught her the family biscuit recipe.
Amen!