Biscuits

Tuesday, December 20: The phone’s ringing for GW Fins. “It’s encouraging that people are making reservations New Year’s Eve at 8 in the morning on December 20th,” Tenney says. We’re carving brisket at ZydeQue. I'm cutting too thick, and I’ve got my fingers splayed fixing to slice them off. My knuckles should be crooked; they should be my guide. I have a butterfly Band-Aid wrapped around my ring finger. I should’ve learned the hard way yesterday. Tenney pulls links from a package. “I do kinda miss my sausage guy,” he says. The guy’s gone post-storm AWOL. “But it does say ‘a true Cajun product’, so it must be good.”

Demaris Davis is mopping floors. “I had a month and a half’s vacation in San Antonio,” he says. “I was living swell off FEMA.” He came back to “a new skylight, my sofa at one end of the block, my TV at the other.” With ZydeQue so short-staffed, Tenney is opening six days a week. He’s worked 21 days straight, 16 hours a day. At 52 years old, it’s hard on the knees. He’s commuting 50 miles a day from a rented trailer. “FEMA teased me along and finally offered me a trailer, but I didn’t want to be a guy with two trailers.” A job applicant walks in and helps himself to a bag of chip. “Did he look promising?” Tenney says, “No. But I can’t afford to turn anybody away right now.” A paper hangs on a corkboard by the office with a sparse list scribbled beneath a declarative sandwiched between pleas: “Please put your current available number on the phone list please.”

Tenney works at ZydeQue until 2 then goes to Fins. At 5 o’clock, Virginia Biddle stresses over Christmas Eve. “We can max out the reservations, but I can’t cover the floor.” I pipe whitefish mousseline, chopped lobster, green onion into wonton wrappers and squeeze them into ruffled half-moons in a crimping press. Tenney unapologetically slices Chilean sea bass. He cleans snapper, scales flying. “See how live this fish looks?” He’s got the snapper fileted. It’s technicolor. It’s shimmering. “Tomorrow we’ll have pompano fresh out of the water. That guy’s still out fishing today.”

Mike Nelson is making biscuit mix. White Lily flour, sugar and a whole lot of lard. He used to be an executive chef in Chicago. “But I was under the impression that as a sous-chef here, I wouldn’t be working 70 hours a week.” He unwraps blocks of lard. “We used to have a company that used Tenney’s recipe and made the biscuit mix for us. Fifty 16-pound bags at a time.” He cuts the lard in cubes. “They got flooded.” The kitchen equipment company flooded. Mike’s house flooded via the roof. Last night at the Christmas party he was wearing a two-dollar thrift-shop suit. “Definitely,” says Bobby Boots, “circa 1978.” Bobby Boots works the pans. He summers in Fire Island. In the winter, he comes here. This season, Bobby arrived twice in New Orleans. The first time, he stayed six hours. “It didn’t feel the same, it didn’t sound the same, it didn’t smell the same. I had a drink and went back on the Amtrak train.”

I mash milk into the larded mix, making dough, two bowls at a time. I scoop it onto baking pans, three globs across. I shove it in the oven, two pans at once. My arm aches. My face is burning. The runners hover, asking, “How much time?” It takes seven minutes and 59 seconds to bake a pan of these biscuits. People love them real hot, with plenty of butter. The title for my station tonight, I’m told in far fewer words, is an alliterative phrase that pairs “biscuit” with a term for a female dog. Bobby Boots whispers to me with his gravely voice. “They beat us when you’re not here,” he says. “They keep us in the basement.”

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[adam]

What is the biscuit recipe? I saw it on tv awhile back but can't find it anywhere.