Gustatory Priapism

When I was fading in and out of consciousness the other day on the sofa with the TV on, I chanced on some food porn that has given me a kind of gustatory priapism. This Georgian woman was making biscuits and gravy and chicken fried steak. She baked the biscuits in a cast iron pan, so they came out really uniformly scrumptious looking. She took some cubed round steak, seasoned it with what she called “house seasoning”, dunked the pieces in buttermilk and flour, and fried them in some grease. I didn’t hear what kind of grease she was using, but pretty much all grease is good. Then she took a couple of tablespoons of the grease, added a couple of tablespoons of flour, and then added some sweet milk (what we southrons call whole milk) to make white gravy, the food of the gods. She poured some of this on a couple of broken biscuits and a couple of pieces of steak and started eating it right in front of me (and any other viewer).

Since then, I have not been able to get that meal out of my mind, and I aim to make me some chicken fried steak this Saturday. If I don’t, I think I will go mad.

I’m pretty sure that between me and Mrs Vache Folle, who is an able cook, we will be able to handle the steak. We will also be able to make some pretty good biscuits. Mrs Vache Folle gets lazy sometimes and just makes drop biscuits, but we’re going to roll them out and cut them into proper biscuits this time, as God is my witness.

My big fear is that we will not get the gravy right. I have never mastered gravy making. I was never meant to cook and was kept out of the kitchen as a young’un. Males did not belong in the kitchen. Mrs VF has failed to master gravy making despite instruction from my mother, whose gravy is as good as anyone’s in the whole southland except for the Goddess of Gravy. My mother did send me a bunch of gravy mix one time that produced an acceptable and palatable gravy-like substance, but I can’t find that up here in the heart of Yankee country.

My problem is that I have tasted the best gravy in the world, made by my sainted Aunt Jewell (the aforementioned deity) on a wood stove. I have been looking for that gravy everywhere ever since, and all gravy falls short of the glory of Aunt Jewell’s ambrosia. I’m not saying that there are not some gravies that are edible. My mother’s gravy is wonderful, about 80% as good as her sister-in-law’s. Cracker Barrel serves up a pretty good gravy, about 50% of the quality of the good stuff I am craving. There was a place in Blue Ridge that had some excellent gravy, as good as 70%. Shipway’s Truck Stop in Flintstone, Maryland had remarkable gravy, almost as good as Mom’s.

We should perhaps practice the gravy making art and work on our technique, experiment with greases, until we come up with something worthy of my heritage.