Forty Biscuits Every Morning

My Mother's breadboard

Handholds are cared underneath on each end.

We don't know how old this breadboard is, but we think it dates to at least the late 1800s.

The following is from a Facebook post in 2016:

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My mother married very young. She and Daddy lived for a very short period in 1938 with Daddy’s parents and then into their own little mill village house in Milstead, home of a Callaway Mills plant. Mother says she learned most of her cooking after she married. She bought a round wooden dough bowl so she could make biscuits daily like her mother always had in her childhood. 

Later as children came along, my grandmother Baird suggested my mother should take her dough bowl since her family was now larger. Mama Baird took mother's smaller round bowl. That’s how the larger hand carved wooden bowl you see here came into the home I grew up in. 

I can remember my mother sifting flour into that bowl, punching a depression into the center then dropping a lump of lard (or later shortening) into it while gradually pouring in buttermilk and working up a big ball of dough with her bare hands— she would say: “Tie back your hair. Roll up your sleeves. Clean your fingernails. Wash your hands as if you were scrubbing for surgery.” — pinching off individual biscuits onto greased baking sheet. A few minutes later she would pull golden brown flaky biscuits from that 375 degree oven. I love my Mama’s biscuits. 

Mama says Joan has dibs on the inheritance of this beautiful prize. 

I wonder how old it is. I suspect it is very old. Who knows its history before Mama Baird gave it to my mother. My great grandmother Baird (Mary Marks Baird) lived with Ieula and BW Baird after she was widowed. I can imagine it coming from some previous family member like that to Mama Baird at some point as she was raising nine children (and burying two others) from 1902 through the forties. But its origin is lost to us.

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Below is a video made by my nephew Jonathan Lewis of my Mother making biscuits in this breadboard in 2009.