Back in the Kitchen
I call that counting the money,” Scott Peacock says, his hands deep in a vintage yellowware bowl and in constant motion. Four women, who have driven hours to the small town of Marion, in his home state of Alabama, to join him in the sunny kitchen of a historic mansion called Reverie, crane their necks. They look confused. Inside the bowl are two varieties of heirloom flour, homemade baking powder, kosher salt, and fat chunks of butter. Peacock takes a hand out of the bowl, rolls his eyes, and begins riffling imaginary bills in the air to demonstrate the technique. Everyone laughs (he’s a funny mime), and his hands dive back into the bowl to push the floury butter into shards.
Once he’s worked the butter into the dry ingredients, Peacock dumps in cold buttermilk and gives the dough a vigorous stir. “Look what it’s starting to do,” he says, inviting the women to come peer at the lumpy blob. “You are trying to develop some structure—see?”
“It looks like a brain,” one of them ventures.
The women are here for what he calls a Biscuit Experience, which results in so much more than a pan of glorious, inimitable Scott Peacock biscuits. It is actually three pans of biscuits, some to eat with butter and local wildflower honey, some with mayhaw jelly, some with fried country ham. But it is also a deep-dive history lesson, a hands-on session with a master, and a moment of Alabama Zen, the objects and the actions, the cook and the dish, part of a whole.
Once Atlanta’s most visible chef, Peacock had seemingly retired from cooking when he bought a house in Marion—a town of three thousand in Alabama’s Black Belt region—nine years ago.
