FED Friendsgiving: Cam's Kitchen
Chef Cameron Coyle with Sweet Potato Biscuits
FED’s Friendsgiving continues with Cam’s family recipe, a recipe re-worked, he tells me, from someone else’s kitchen—in this case Martha Stewart’s.
It’s pretty standard for recipes to be reworked from someone else’s kitchen. Every time someone pulls one out of a book or off the internet or out of a recipe box, they prepare it in a kitchen particularized by their personal collection of cooking tools, unique hands, experience, and desires, plus groceries procured from the nearby store. These variables transform the recipe so much that Julia Child shipped staples from the Unites States to her kitchen in France so that she’d stand a better shot of creating French recipes for U.S. cooks when she was developing her books.
A dish is so much more than a set of ingredients measured and assembled. Never mind the transformative power of the context in which a dish is served and eaten. Where ingredients are sourced, how they are processed, weather, and the mood and skill of the cook can all transform a list of basic bits into something unique, magical, and personal, something that we cherish as own own.
In a time when copyright and intellectual property create ownership and commodity out of more things than I care to imagine, I find it fascinating, if not surprising for the aforementioned reasons, that recipes remain artifacts that elude copyright. Instead of the recipe, it’s the story we wrap around a list of ingredients, the process we assign to their assembly, and the way we collect recipes that can be copyrighted. It’s as if even our courts intuit that the essence of a recipe is not the list of ingredients but the performance to create a dish and the effort to locate it in particular customs and traditions.
I love that, copyright-able books and blogs aside, we tend to possess recipes not as objects to be commodified and copyrighted, but as personal and family traditions to be shared, just like Cam’s biscuits. These biscuits aren’t Martha’s anymore; they have become an aspect of family—his—and are now offered to become an aspect of your life.
I love that as you cook these biscuits in your kitchen and serve them up in the context of your own traditions, you’ll make them your own. Your biscuits will layer onto Cam’s biscuits, will layer onto Martha’s biscuits, will layer onto all the biscuits ever made to create one great global biscuit palimpsest.
So, with a respectful nod to Cam for his exquisite capacities in the kitchen and a large measure of gratitude for sharing his family recipe with us, I send you off to make your own biscuits to add to the great long biscuit making tradition.
Big love, Ashley
P.S. It’s a FED Friendsgiving & You’re Invited!
This season, FED invites you to participate by sharing your own taste of home. Send us a recipe, an anecdote, just about anything really, plus an image to go with it, and we’ll put it on the table. Don’t overthink it, and don’t delay. We can’t wait to sample the fare. Yum!
Cam’s Sweet Potato Biscuits
My mother used to make Sweet Potato Biscuits for every post-Labor day celebration.
I used to eat the raw dough scraps off the table as she prepped for that night’s meal. Sometimes she was feeding only the household. Often it was for dozens of our family members.
These biscuits act as a reminder of my family and are easily my preferred Thanksgiving dish—even if they aren’t traditional.
Ingredients
1-3/4 cups all purpose flour, plus extra for working the dough
2 tablespoons brown sugar, light or dark
2-1/2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons butter, chilled and cubed plus 1 tablespoon melted butter for greasing the pan
3/4 cup sweet potato puree (from a can or freshmade, roughly 1 whole sweet potato)
1/3 cup buttermilk plus extra (in case dough is dry)
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Whisk until uniformly combined.
Using a stand-mixer, food processor, or your fingers, combine the butter with the dry mix until crumbly. The mix should look like pebbles of wet sand. If using your hands, the butter chunks will be bigger. This is ok. The next folding steps will distribute the butter more evenly.
Gently incorporate the sweet potato and buttermilk into the butter/flour mixture until a shaggy, moist dough forms. The sweet potato puree should be uniformly mixed.
Tightly wrap the dough in plastic wrap and pat into a tight rectangle. The dough may want to leak out the plastic wrap. Gently coerce the dough into the wrapping and rest it in the fridge for 15 minutes.
After 15 minutes, lightly flour the table. Drop the dough onto the floured surface and roll into a 1-inch thick rectangle. Fold 1/3 of the dough over the center of the rectangle. Fold the opposite side of the dough over the initial fold and press firmly with the rolling pin to massage out the seams of the folds.
Repeat this process of wrapping, resting, and folding twice more.
After the final rest, remove the dough from the fridge and lightly re-flour the surface of the table. Roll the rough into 1-inch thickness and, using a 2-inch pastry cutter, cut out clean rounds from the dough. You can re-roll the scrapped dough only once.
Grease a baking sheet (or two) with some of the melted butter. Snugly fit the biscuits into the baking sheet(s) so that the biscuits are firmly pressed against each other (without squishing them). Wipe the top of the biscuits with any remaining melted butter.
Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes or until the biscuits are golden.
FED is a participant-supported publication and community. Free subscriptions are a gift to all from other readers, contributors, and the editor. Paying subscribers both get a gift and give a gift by first, receiving their free subscription from the community and then, passing the gift on to others, via upgrade, in one great circle of giving and receiving.
All are welcome at the table, and together, we co-create and sustain community.
For more goodies…
For more recipes, be sure to check out FED’s Recipes & Free Advice. And, to learn more about FED’s entire global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople check out our Special Guests and the wonderful contributions they added to the FED table in the Spring and Summer seasons.
 | A guest post by
|