Grandma’s sweet tea was legendarily sweet, she put two cups of sugar she always measured with the same old cracked coffee mug whose handle had broken off long ago.Īs I pondered all the fat, sugar and calories previous generations consumed, I wondered how they survived. Grandma was also famous for her angel food cake with white sugar icing, so sugary, it crusted over when it cooled and crunched with each bite. There was so much sugar, they hardened as they cooled down. She baked them in the oven until they began to brown, shedumped them into a bowl, scraping the thickened sugar, butter and juice mixture on top of them. She greased a cooking pan with butter, spread out the cooked slices, slathered butter over them, poured the juice from the frying pan and covered them with sugar. Speaking of sweet treats, Grandma sliced up apples, pears or sweet potatoes, cooked them on the stove top until they were done. When Grandma fried jowl meat (we called it hog jaw), she poured the drippin’s into a bowl on the stove and Papa used that grease in his molasses instead of butter. Butter was also stirred into sorghum molasses to make a sweet treat to spread on biscuits for dessert. Of course, we slathered butter on those hot biscuits right out of the oven. She put butter and sugar in the home-grown corn, as well as green peas. Grandma made her own butter from the cream Papa skimmed off the milk from their dairy cows. All these were handmade by my Great Uncle Jimmy Powell, Papa’s baby brother. Grandma’s bread bowl, rolling pin and flour/bread board she rolled out her biscuits on. Whenever she fried up some of Papa’s home cured country ham, she made red eye gravy by adding coffee into the skillet with the leftover ham drippings. If she made milk gravy, she used sausage or bacon grease as the base. Anytime she cooked biscuits, she made gravy to go with them. She used an old tin snuff can to cut out the biscuits. Many times, I watched as she rolled out the biscuit dough on the handmade bread board that sat atop the storage compartments of the bin. There were no sleeves of “store bought” biscuits, Grandma made them from scratch, working in a dab of lard as she kneaded the dough. In the old days, they took their homegrown corn and wheat to the local grist mill to have them ground into flour and cornmeal, which was stored in bulk in her flour bin. Grandma had a flour bin in the kitchen where she kept her flour and corn meal. The pinto beans were cooked in a pot that fit down in the “deep well” burner on Grandma’s stove and slow cooked, simmering all day. Drippin’s weren’t just used to grease skillets or muffin pans, it was used to season foods, such as green beans and pinto beans, if no ham hock was available. Anytime she fried bacon, shsaved the “drippin’s” in a metal container which had a removable strainer that captured any crumbs or particles, so there was only pure bacon grease left. There was no low calorie, low fat cooking spray in her kitchen, she used lard, bacon grease or possibly Crisco. She used lard to grease her pans as well as to cook with. Of course, the lard was made right there on the farm on hog killing day. As a matter of fact, lard was a critical component of Grandma’s cooking. There was very little about Grandma’s cooking that was low calorie, low fat or low carbohydrate. L to r, Mom, Aunt Neoma Elmore, Grandma (Sally Wheeler Powell), Aunt Delsie Powell.īy today’s “health conscious” standards, those “healthy” cooking and eating gurus would be appalled. In 1928 he bought larger premises just outside Haworth and this remained the family bakery until the millennium, then moving on to larger premises in Steeton, West Yorkshire.įrom these humble beginnings the business has grown in size, however today’s business holds true to the traditional family values and commitment of its founder Grandma Annie Wild all those years ago.My Mom, Dorathean, rolling out dumplings on the bread board of Grandma’s flour bin. It is here they started to build the heritage of Grandma Wild’s special baking recipes. Her eldest son John Wild decided to move back to his Yorkshire roots in the 1920’s, away from the seasonal summer trade, where he and Annie opened a shop in Haworth. Annie Wild ran the bakery shop and boarding house (today’s Bed & Breakfast) whilst being a full-time mother to three boys. The original Wild’s Bakery was established circa 1899 in the Victorian seaside resort of Morecambe, in Lancashire. Our family business, now in its fourth generation, carries on the tradition of baking biscuits with many of the same recipes created by our great Grandmother Annie Wild over 100 years ago. At Grandma Wild’s Biscuits, our heritage is in the detail
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