Anyone who needs proof that biscuits are the South’s quintessential foodstuff need only crack a book. You’ll find them, “brownhued,” in the work of Thomas Wolfe as well as tucked into a paper sack with a tin of sardines in that of Flannery O’Connor. The hot buttered biscuit that Jem shares with Scout, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, tastes to the latter “like cotton.” Their baking occurs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as Sethe makes biscuits for Paul D, and supplies a hearth-warmed interlude in William Faulkner’s The Sound, when Dilsey prepares for kneading by grinding “a faint, steady snowing of flour onto the bread board.”
