Project America: Biscuits ‘n gravy
Posted by Ruth on August 25th, 2010
Welcome to another instalment of Project America: my ongoing quest to finally experience first-hand all the quintessentially American pastimes I grew up watching on TV in Australia.
Portland loves brunch. Melbourne loves brunch. I love brunch.
When I first came to Portland, I was very excited to hear that brunch was a Big Deal in this city. Being a foodie town, I presumed that brunch here would be the wanky middle class tradition it is in Melbourne: long leisurely meals full of artisan bread, fancy cheese, espresso and the weekend papers.
So when I first “did brunch” here, I was a bit disappointed. Brunch in Portland is about three things: cheese, starch and meat. Bacon, sausage, waffles, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, pancakes (sometimes all on the one plate). Oh, and granola. This is a hippy town at heart, and they still love a bit of granola.
photo by ario_
But the most popular breakfast dish here is called “biscuits and gravy” and Portlanders cannot get enough of it. The first time I saw it, I was sitting in a diner and the big, trucker-looking guy next to me ordered it. My ears pricked up at such an odd request, but the plate he received looked nothing like biscuits nor gravy to me. It looked like scones covered in bechamel sauce and it looked utterly repulsive.
photo by Ron Diggity. This was taken at the same diner I first saw this dish at, so it would have looked almost identical. Even now it looks gross.
I figured this was just one of those American things — like chicken and waffles — that I’d never understand. But the more I saw the dish (and it is everywhere), the more intrigued I became. Apart from anything else, it is definitely not traditional pacific northwest cuisine. This comes straight outta the South, along with cheese grits and fried okra.
After a bit more investigation, I discovered that the “biscuit” is indeed similar to a scone, made with buttermilk and without eggs or sugar. And the “gravy” is indeed similar to a bechamel sauce, but it usually has meat in it. Knowing these things did not make this dish any more appealing to me.
But last week, I went to the Stepping Stone cafe, a diner famous for serving stacks of 13-inch “mancakes” (motto: “you eat here because we let you”) with some workmates. It’s the kind of place that I would’ve found repulsive only a few months ago, but I happily sat down and polished off a plate of fried potatoes, eggs and cheese (with a generous splonk of hot sauce, because everything tastes better with hot sauce, dontchyaknow), banana bread and a peanut butter milkshake (yes, they exist; yes, they’re amazing) without batting an eye-lid.
I knew it was time. I had finally embraced the fundamentals of American breakfast, but I knew I could not fully understand it until I attempted biscuits and gravy.
photo by MookieLuv
You can get this dish just about everywhere here, but there is an eatery dedicated entirely to biscuits and gravy, so of course this is where I went.
Pine State Biscuits started selling their biscuits at farmers’ markets a few years ago, but became so popular, they now have expanded into two bricks and mortar shops serving up nothing but breakfast all day long (the farmers’ market stall is still there, and the line on a Saturday morning is just epic).
So the other morning, I skipped my regular bowl of oats and cycled over to their Alberta district store to face the challenge. I chose this location for two reasons: one is that it was the furthest away from my apartment, and I figured it was worth building an appetite for with a good half-hour uphill ride. The second is because I watched this doco on PBS about breakfast in America a few weeks back (it’s excellent, but I’m not sure if you can watch it outside of the States. If you can, check out the bit about this pancake house in New York state which is only open eight weeks a year and taps its own maple syrup. Watching the woman pour pancake batter is hypnotic), which profiles two Alberta brunch spots and claims the entire district was pretty much built around its brunch spots, taking it from a low-income, high-crime ‘burb to the bustling hub of young middle class families pushing designer prams and taking long organic lunches that it is today.
I figured if I was eating the quintessential Portland brunch food, from a quintessential Portland brunch spot, I was going to do it on the quintessential Portland brunch street.
One of the reasons Pine State in particular is so popular, is that, apart from apparently making some of the best biscuits around, they also sell “biscuit sandwiches” — biscuits filled with eggs, bacon, cheese, fried chicken and steak. The proposition is so ridiculous that it’s almost impossible to resist.
photo ripped off the Pine State website. The real thing is a bit less melty, but still pretty impressive.
But my mission was to try traditional biscuits ‘n gravy, so I fought the pull of an egg and cheese biscuit sandwich and ordered “the moneyball” — biscuits with shitake mushroom gravy and an over-easy egg (I figured it was worth adding some protein to the meal).
I poured a mug of coffee and sat at the counter next to trendy young couples with their sprogs, and watched the cooks fry eggs, hash browns (and I should mention: you know how hash browns in Australia look like this? In America, they look like this. You’re being badly, badly ripped off, Aussies) and green tomatoes (yes, fried green tomatoes are real. They’re good), and serve up huge sloppy biscuit burgers.
My own plate arrived quickly, and came with two giant biscuits smothered in a thick gravy (plus the egg, which was superfluous to my taste test, but I must mention was perfectly cooked with the yolk still runny).
I fully expected biscuits to taste like scones. They look like scones, they sound like scones, but they are not scones. They are actually very savoury and sour (in a sour-dough kind of way, not a lemon juice kind of way) and reminded me far more of Irish soda bread than the little cakes served up in the CWA tent at the agricultural shows. Given American bread is usually super-sweet and pumped full of sugar, this really surprised — and delighted — me.
The gravy was largely as I’d anticipated it — a rich, creamy, buttery roux, studded with shitake mushrooms — but the addition of rosemary, paprika and parsley added some welcome variation in flavour. And once the true nature of the biscuit was revealed, I finally understood why this white sauce has become such a popular breakfast condiment, as it’s a really great contrast to the dense and tangy dough underneath.
Although delicious (I easily cleaned my plate) the gravy was probably too rich for my tastes at this time of day. But biscuits could (and likely will) be an excellent savoury addition to my brunch repertoire.
Still, I did not learn exactly why this dish is so popular specifically in Portland. If I were to take a stab at it, I’d say that, although it’s summery and beautiful here at the moment, it’s cold and grey most of the year, and this makes for a great warm, filling comfort food. One thing I didn’t mention about Portland brunch is that it also usually involves a whole heap of lining up. The most popular spots can command a very long wait on a Sunday morning, so after standing around for a good hour in the cold, this could really hit the spot. Plus, it provides good bang for your buck — biscuits are bigger and denser than toast, the gravy will warm and fill your tum for hours, and the whole plate will only set you back $4 at Pine State, which is pretty consistent with most other places around town. And finally, despite being super filling and cheap, it’s a difficult dish to make at home (all the baking, plus ages tending to the sauce; rouxs are tricky), so it’s worth going out for.
But instead of just offering you half-baked (boom, tish) theories I pulled out of my arse, I thought I’d get an actual expert opinion on this. So I asked Willamette Week‘s food editor, Ben Waterhouse — a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge about dining in this city — to give his take on the phenomenon. Over to you, Ben:
I’m no expert on biscuits and gravy, and I’m not even sure it’s an exclusively southern dish, but if it is, I imagine it was likely brought to Oregon during the Great Depression, when huge numbers of white southerners and plains folk emigrated to the west coast in search of work. California got the majority, but they came here too. Then, during WWII, Portland got a huge influx of workers from the impoverished south, many of them black, to work at Kaiser Shipyards. Kaiser built most of the ships that fought in the Pacific, and employed so many people that the company basically invented corporate health insurance to take care of them all. An entire town, Vanport, was built in the Columbia slough to house the workers. It was destroyed in a horrific flood in 1948.
Portland’s breakfast scene has been further influenced by contemporary migration of left-leaning Southerners out of the increasingly radicalized southern states. Gay Carolinians move here, can’t find jobs, and so make biscuits.
On a macro level, southern comfort food has been increasingly popular all over the country since the 90s. I don’t know why that is. Maybe we all got sick of the low-fat salads we’ve been expected to consume since the cholesterol scare of the 80s.
Why have fried chicken and biscuits caught on in town and not, say, okra and grits? Dunno. Maybe because okra is awful, and grits are really hard to get right.
Consider yourselves educated.
So chalk up another win to cross-cultural culinary harmony. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it may look gross, but give it a go. Here‘s a recipe.
photo by Ateupamateur
