You Can Go Home Again When There Is Ham
You Can Go Home Again When There Is Ham
Flat Biscuits in Virginia
Most people visit Williamsburg, Virginia, to see men in tri-corner hats and women in long skirts and corsets explaining a particular chapter of American colonial history. When I visit, however, I’m interested in breakfast.
In the late 1960s, when my mother was attending Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, she befriended a young woman whose mother owned a restaurant—Old Chickahominy House—in Williamsburg. Her friend had an apartment above the place, and the two would retreat there on weekends, sneaking into the kitchen to pilfer ham biscuits.
The biscuits at Old Chickahominy House are strangely flat and are square, instead of the iconic towering rounds. They are denser than some biscuits, but in a good way, with just the right amount of chew and a distinct flavor, possibly thanks to the fact that they are made with lard. If you’re ever eating a Southern baked good and wondering why it tastes particularly good, the answer is often lard. Served hot out of the oven, accompanied by the salty tang of Virginia ham, they have no equal.
My mother and I never miss an opportunity to sit around the old wooden tables in the dining room and stuff ourselves. There are various other menu items available: creamed ham, eggs, of course, and toast, among others, but we would never consider any of these. Mimosas and the “Special Rebel Cocktail”—basically a Bloody Mary made with beer, like the very distant cousin of a michelada—are on offer, but my mother and I get there too early to partake. (You’re competing with tables full of elderly patrons who rise so early that they’ve essentially been up since the night before, so arriving first thing is key to avoiding a wait.) However, coffee is refilled frequently, almost aggressively so, and a glass of plain tomato juice takes the meal’s sodium content to a delightfully deadly place.
Some family members forgo ham and biscuits when dragged to this breakfast, favoring some abomination like grits and sausage. And despite my best efforts to hide it from him, my vegetarian fiancé pieced together the special ingredient and makes do with the lard-free pancakes. I don’t really mind, however: these ham biscuits belong to my mother and me alone.
Having not been born and raised in Virginia but in neighboring Maryland, I am cut off from much of the culture that is her Blue Ridge birthright; due to the logic of the place, I can never truly understand the Commonwealth. It reminds me of the old Southern joke about a young couple who moves to a new town. The wife is heavily pregnant and almost immediately, her son is born. The child grows up to become a pillar in the community but has no family of his own. When he dies, the town comes together and raises money to honor him with a headstone. It reads, “We loved him dearly, though he was a stranger to us.”
However, my mom gave me the story of this breakfast herself: the ghostly sounds in the upstairs apartment, stories of Miss Melinda and her family, the smell of fresh biscuits baking, the changing landscape surrounding the restaurant, which is now more suburb than country retreat. Through a familial cultural osmosis, she included me in her own history of the place, stepping out of time, like the guides in the colonial district, to show me how things were, how they smelled and looked, until I could taste it for myself in every salty bite.