Cats Head Biscuits!!

Cathead biscuits
Huge as a cat’s head, served up hot with with Sawmill Gravy. An Appalchian down-home favorite!

“There, in the Blackstone kitchen, Berry’s grand chefs, Vernie and Floyd Nabors, turned out Sunday morning biscuits that melted in one’s mouth. Particularly if you opened one up and added fresh butter along with the generous portion of the Berry-made apple butter…One of my classmates put it for me in hushed tones: “What you see there, Joe, is what we call the Cathead Bsicuit, the gift of an all-knowing and benevolent God.” Mountain people, he explained, were particularly partial to the giant-size biscuits, which were destined by the Almighty to go with milk-enhanced sawmill gravy, another mountain favorite…Indeed the “cathead”–an Applachian phenomenon–was the precursor to the even larger size biscuits offered today by chains such as Hardee’s and Mrs. Winner’s. The big difference between regular-size buttermilk biscuits and the catheads was that with most “cats,” the cook pinched off handfuls of dough rather than rolling it out and using a biscuit cutter…

Bryson City Cathead Biscuits
2 1/4 cups flour
1/3 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
5 tablespoons lard
1 cup buttermilk.
Sift and mix dry ingredients then blend with lard. Add buttermilk. For each biscuit, pinch off a portion of dough about the shape of a large egg and pat out with your hands. Bake in 350 degree F. oven in wood stove about 10 minutes. In a modern electric or gas oven, bake at 475 to 500 degrees.”
—Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine, Joseph E. Dabney [Cumberland House:Nashville TN] 1999 (p. 114-5)