Farewell, Biscuit Pan

My mom loves me unconditionally. I know this because I accidentally threw away her biscuit pan and she didn’t commit filicide (the formal word for offing one’s offspring, which I felt really uncomfortable searching Google for).

As keeper of our family buttermilk biscuit recipe, my mom is the only one capable of wielding the biscuit pan and harnessing its full power, the power to create biscuits that no mortal mouth can resist. 

My mom takes her biscuit-making responsibilities seriously and even travels with her biscuit pan. Her biggest fear, beside snakes, is being caught off-guard with an unfamiliar pan of unknown cooking properties. “Cooking in a strange oven is hard enough,” she says.  

Her biscuit pan is tried and true, or at least it was before I threw it in a trash compactor. It had been passed down from my grandmother to my mom and had a waxy patina from decades of Crisco applications.

Usually, I’m not one to destroy a priceless family heirloom, but my mom and dad came to visit us one weekend and my mom packed the pan in a cardboard box which she set right beside the kitchen door, which also happened to be right beside our kitchen trash can, in the same spot I normally stack overflow trash that needs to be taken to the dump. I just assumed that box was full of overflow trash and put it on the back of the truck, and now our priceless family heirloom resides somewhere in the Cleveland County landfill, with seagulls flying gracefully overhead. 

My mom thought I was kidding when I told her I had thrown that box away. When she realized I wasn’t, a look of panic momentarily washed over her face before she quickly regained control of her facial expression and tried to laugh it off. “Oh, well, it’s only a pan,” she said. 

But I felt terrible. That biscuit pan was a symbol of all that was right and true and honorable in the world. Sure, some of the biscuits produced on it probably contributed to the family’s cholesterol problems, but that’s a small price to pay for having a superhuman mom, one who laughs in the face of adversity and fights the world’s evils with one pan of buttermilk biscuits at a time–even if it’s a new pan without the Crisco patina. 

31 thoughts on “Farewell, Biscuit Pan

    1. That’s probably wise. My wife likes to call me the “Destroyer of Things.” I think I’ve destroyed at least for pairs of her kitchen scissors on projects outside. It’s gotten so bad she now hides her scissors from me so I can’t find them.

  1. Funny and touching and wise.

    Hope Mom likes her new pan. I had to replace an old baking pan recently and have been impressed with how good a modern nonstick coating can be. Nice to know that some gadgets can improve w/o needing batteries, WiFi, and a user’s guide that could ballast a ship.

    1. Well, she pretends to like it at least. I can’t tell the biscuit quality has dropped off, so I’d say the pan is working pretty good.

  2. I was once told that Crisco was a lubricant used in submarines and when the war ended there was another use found for it. That might be an urban legend, I’m not sure, but after hearing that I stuck with butter. 😊

    1. You know, it does have the viscosity of a good heavyweight engine grease, so that wouldn’t surprise me. And it would also explain my family’s affinity for clogged arteries.

  3. Oh, there’s nothing better than a good homemade biscuit. My grandmother was the biscuit maker in our clan and my dad called them manna. And she used the same pan for all the years she patted those bisuits with buttermilk before putting them in the oven. I’m sure she would feel your mom’s pain.
    A fine tribute to the passing of the pan.

  4. I know how your mom feels. Cooking in strange places with other unknown and untested instruments is wrong somehow.

    1. Lol, I have have no cooking ability and thus all cooking feels strange, but I guess it could be kind of like using another man’s tools. No two hammers hammer quite alike.

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