Best of Waffles & Pancakes Book

James Villas knows his biscuits. He is a Southerner and Southerners know their biscuits. His 27 years as food and wine editor for Town and Country magazine did not deprive him of his love for and appreciation of down-home biscuits. In a brief introduction, he traces the lineage of the modern biscuit back to a simple First Century Roman bread, through English bysquytes of the Middle Ages, down to the Pillsbury "popping" biscuit dough in the exploding cardboard can of 1953. The recipes in this book include sweet and savoury, plain biscuits and biscuits with interesting things in them, Southern biscuits and New England biscuits. He is something of an evangel for the use of Southern soft-wheat flour but concedes how to mix other flowers to approximate it. In addition to recipes for biscuits, Villas offers recipes for scones, for how to use biscuit dough a topping (e.g. in cobblers and meat pies), and even how to make true shortbread instead of using those angelfood drain-stoppers sold next to the strawberries at the grocer's. Reading this book is like taking an intense class in everything there is to know about biscuitmaking.