My Grandmother’s Genius Biscuits & Gravy (Starring Pork Belly, Eggs)

May 06, 20169:32 AM

This post originally appeared on Food52.

Are you ready for this, gravy lovers? The best biscuits and gravy are not made from sausage, despite what every diner menu and blog peddling comfort food will tell you.

But you, you’re in luck: Today is the day you learn about a much finer gravy to pour over biscuits—a rich, milky, Oklahoma-bred gravy with a few genius curveballs.

Grandmother, Billy, and me. Outfits courtesy 1987.

You can thank my grandmother—a fierce, funny, beautiful, 94-year-old hell-raiser named Grace Cowan. Or I can thank her for you, because she’s probably at bingo right now.

Of course I’m biased. I grew up eating my grandmother’s biscuits and gravy just about every weekend, as if the meal were as commonplace as blueberry pancakes or oatmeal. But after being disappointed for years, every time I tried to get my fix in a restaurant, eventually I realized how special her way was.

The first secret to her success was fresh side, which is also called “side pork” (or “side meat” if you’re in The Grapes of Wrath) and it’s really just slices of uncured bacon.

Since the mid-aughts, you probably also know fresh side as pork belly. Technically, fresh side might (?) come from the meatier area higher up on the side of the pig than the belly (and the real deal comes with the skin, or “rind,” still attached). But anything uncured and in the vicinity of the side or belly will do the job, which is helpful because finding anything labeled “fresh side” is increasingly challenging—probably because it’s usually snatched up to become bacon, its less perishable, much more popular cured alter ego.

To turn fresh side (or pork belly) into gravy, Grandmother would salt, pepper, and dredge the slices in flour, then shallow-fry them in vegetable oil (this was how she cooked pretty much everything). Both the browned bits of flour and the oil itself take on that familiar, happy flavor of crispy carnitas or a handsomely seared pork chop.

And, unlike with sausage gravy, you get a side dish out of it: Those crunchy strips of fresh side get fished out and served on the side, the salty crackle to balance against all the soft.

There’s one more surprising trick in her gravy, which she credits to my late grandpa: scrambled eggs. These bits give the gravy more substance and sweetness and don’t overcook like you’d think eggs simmered in gravy would. (Apparently the solution to tough scrambled eggs was a cushion of flour, porky oil, and milk—who knew?)

My brother has instead tried slow-scrambling eggs and folding them into the gravy at the end, but—and I say this with love—he’s got it all wrong. A little contrast in texture here is a good thing.

I have to give you one caveat. This isn’t exactly Grandmother’s recipe—because she didn’t really use them. This recipe is based on what she told me over several phone calls in 2009 and 2010, as I got ready to write about her in a compilation called Storied Dishes. I’ve tested it over the years, confirming that it tastes almost like the real thing.

But I wish—all the time—that I’d taken videos of her cooking this herself, before she lost the ability to walk on her own and to get around the kitchen. I wish I could watch her make this meal again through muscle memory, the way that I roast potatoes or squeeze a lemon over a salad. Because when I make it, it’s never perfect.

Grandmother served this breakfast flawlessly every time, the way I remember. Her biscuits—which she made by mixing Bisquick and milk without measuring, then dunking the cut biscuits in oil—always came out hot and evenly golden, never dry or flat. Her gravy was never too thick or too thin. It was always served hot and never ran out. Her fresh side was never tough or burnt.

She was a fearless cook—maybe because she’d been making the same things for decades, or because she knew what she liked, or just because she couldn’t be bothered to worry about it. I want to be just like her in the kitchen when I grow up, and I hope that will mean the biscuits and gravy will be as they should.

Grace Cowan’s Biscuits and Egg Gravy with Fresh Side
Serves 6 to 8

Milk (whole or 2-percent), about a quart
Flour, about a cup
Vegetable oil
Salt and pepper
24 slices of fresh side, or thinly sliced pork belly (if fresh side is unavailable)
4 eggs
Your favorite biscuit recipe (Grandmother liked Bisquick, I like Shirley Corriher’s Touch-of-Grace Biscuits or King Arthur Flour’s 2-Ingredient Never-Fail Biscuits, both Genius Recipes on Food52)

See the full recipe at Food52.