IN LAWS AND BLACK SKILLETS

Back about 34 years ago I married into a family that was southern born and southern bred as the old saying goes.  From the deep south. Where there is no “Sweet corn bread” made from a Jiffy mix, but rather the old-fashioned kind of cornbread that you make from scratch with real yellow cornmeal, buttermilk, flour, etc, and you pour it all into a hot cast-iron skillet. And when you eat it you crunch the cornmeal. 

Biscuits are the same way. They are made from scratch and flipped into a hot iron skillet. It has been this way for 5 generations and back. His Great Great Grandmother, Great Grandmother, granny, mom, and now me. I confess that it took me about four years to learn how to make them, and there are days when I still feel that I don’t get the texture or height just right, despite having made them regularly for twenty-something years.

I remember one day when Granny ( in law) Marie decided to give me a cast-iron skillet. It was like passing the baton at the Olympics. It was a right of passage, like finally being accepted into the family, heritage in motion.She gave me a skillet and told me to be sure that I did not cook meat in my biscuit skillet. That you need one skillet for meats and one for breads to keep the correct conditioning factors.

Well, things went along for about four years or so, and Saturday afternoon, Granny was 79,   called me up and said rather sternly, “Did I give you Pops #7 Skillet”? 

 I told her no. She talked a little further about not being able to find it and was SURE  that she had  given it to me quite a while back.   Here comes the funny part.

When she and her pop back in the 40’s were migrant fruit harvesters, they moved from one state to another as the crops ripened, and would stay in little white cabins, sometimes a barn, they had to share with other families, with only blankets between them. This one particular cabin was so small, she said, “You had to go outside to change your mind”. The oven in that cabin was so small that her skillet would not fit in the oven, so Pop had taken the skillet outside and broke the handle off about halfway down, leaving barely enough of a stub to hold on to it, but it fit in the tiny oven….biscuits every morning on schedule. All was right with the world.

Now she couldn’t find her #7 broken-handled skillet, and she was sure she had given it to me. In the meantime, I had started collecting skillets at sales and using them a lot more. Skillets that are a #7 and made by Griswald or Wagner are SCARCE as hens teeth. I assure you , and just as valuable.   I started to worry …”did she really give me that skillet….did I misplace it…did I get rid of it in a fit of cleaning one day?

 I wouldn’t put it past me. When I commence to cleaning, things start to fly.  A couple days later she called again and ask about the skillet again and said she would be coming over that Sunday morning for breakfast, and she was sure now after contemplating on it awhile that she had given it to me. Her words were “I know I did. “  Now I was in an outright panic.

When my husband got home at the end of his long 14 hour day, I handed him MY ONLY ,  PRIZED,  #7 Wagner skillet and told him “GO BREAK THE HANDLE OFF THIS”.

He looked at me with disbelief and asked the obvious question. I explained the whole ordeal to him and apologized all over the place and told him if HIS Granny had in fact given me the historical skillet from when her and pop first “set up housekeeping” as she put it I have lost it, misplaced it, and surely will be excommunicated from the family if I don’t cough one up. I also told him that she was coming for biscuits the next morning and to please not tell her.

So he ceremoniously stepped off the back deck and, using a hammer and a cement brick, he broke the handle off my #7 skillet.  Granny came for breakfast that sunday….I made biscuits in the #7 skillet much to her delight and she was thrilled.  And I believe I heard a “I told you So” scrambled in with the eggs.  

NOW CUT to about 6 months later. Hubby and I and the children were all over at her place cutting her grass one summer afternoon and she was in her tiny mobile home kitchen cleaning. When we came inside and were all siting around the table eating a sandwich Granny said “Hey look what I found underneath the sink”. She showed me her broken-handled #7 skillet.  Well I guess you know my mouth dropped!!!! 

“I guess you never had it after all hon”. She said to me and she was laughing.

I laughed right along with her and said     “Marie,…..I had your Grandson break the handle off  MY #7 skillet because you were so sure you gave it to me and I was afraid that I had lost it”.   It was a good laugh and I was able to share this same story at her funeral in August of  2007., and being that her entire family was from the south….it resonated with them all and they loved the story.

And Yes…I now have the FIRST REAL BROKEN # 7 skillet that belonged to Annie Marie (Granny)…..along with the #7 skillet that my husband broke the handle off of.  Hers has a CC molded into the bottom of the skillet, and mine does not.  I suspect that when I am no longer in need of the skillets, each of our girls will receive a PRIZED BROKEN HANDLED SKILLET. Or perhaps our son, as he is a biscuit maker. I write these stories so that if I am not here to explain….my words will.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE August 2025. My brother delivered to me this month a beautiful #7 Griswald skillet with the deeper, wider sides that was picked up at a flea market for me in Kentucky. I couldn’t wait to make a biscuit in a number seven skillet WITH a handle still intact. Love GOD moments like these.