One bite of a golden, flakey and fluffy buttermilk biscuit and you might start humming “Grandma’s Hands,” the 1971 best-selling Bill Withers tune. It could be the theme song for an Atlanta baker’s lifelong celebration of Black bakers and made-from-scratch biscuit lessons from her grandmothers.
“It always brings me joy. The people who impacted my life made biscuits. The fond memories of that and the feeling it gave me stuck with me. I just try to provide the same feelings,” says Erika Council, founder of Bomb Biscuit Co. and chef/owner of Bomb Biscuits Atlanta.
Biscuit-Baking Legacy
Council delivers feelings of love and a warm hug as the owner of Bomb Biscuits Atlanta and author of the newly released cookbook, “Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes.” She decided early on to learn the secrets of biscuit making from her grandmothers and the gifted Black cooks she knew.
“I said when I get older, everybody will want to come to my house and eat. I’m going to have the best food. All the church ladies who cook the best will talk about me like that. I’m going to get it right one way or another,” Council recalls.
The Bomb Biscuit Co. founder is the granddaughter of the legendary southern cook Mildred Council, who opened Mama Dip’s Kitchen in 1976. Erika’s aunties still run the famous restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But her maternal grandmother, Geraldine Dortch, sampled the first biscuits Council tried to make when she was eight or nine.
“It’s another one of those fond memories. The biscuits were terrible. I remember my grandmother eating them and teaching me what I did wrong. All the while, I was thinking, I don’t know how she’s eating these nasty biscuits,” the Atlanta restaurateur recounts.
The “burned pan of dough rocks” had so much butter that they set off the smoke alarm in her grandmother’s kitchen. But Grandma Dortch encouraged her granddaughter to keep trying until she got it right. Council had it down by the time she reached high school.
She shares why she still works on upping her biscuit mastery skills. “I’m always trying to elevate them just because I like biscuits. I’ve been doing that for a while, adding different items and ingredients to make them a little different than your average buttermilk biscuits just to set them apart.”
While biscuit making has been one of the baker’s passions since childhood, she pursued a career outside the kitchen, as her maternal grandmother did. Grandma Dortch held an advanced education degree from New York’s Columbia University. “She was big on teaching you everything about the history of African American experiences,” says the Bomb Biscuits owner.
Council became a computer scientist like her mother and worked in the field for about 15 years. She admits she never intended to get into the food business, not after spending a lot of time in with her family at Mama Dip’s restaurant in North Carolina. “I saw how hard the business was, especially for African Americans. I didn’t want to struggle. I wanted a job where I could make decent money and take care of my family.”
By Phyllis Armstrong
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Cuisine Noir Magazine is the country’s first Black food publication, launched in 2009 and dedicated to connecting the African diaspora through food, drink and travel. To read the rest of this article and more, visit www.cuisinenoirmag.com.
