Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes

"I chose this book. It is a baking book, so it’s right up my alley. It’s about biscuits, which I adore. For your readers in the UK, I just want to clarify that these are not what you would call biscuits, which are what we Americans call cookies; these are more akin to bread or rolls. They are a Southern specialty, although people eat them all over. They’re what you’d have with something else or on their own. They’re fluffy, they’re flaky. I talked to Council for a piece I did on biscuits several years ago, and I was very happy to see that she released this book. It is possibly one of my favorite single-topic books. I was so excited when I saw this book, and it didn’t disappoint. Even today, the contribution of Black cooks and Black women is seriously underappreciated and underrepresented. It’s never been given the same platform or praise as European fine cuisines. People don’t give it the respect it deserves. They think, oh, it’s just home cooking, whatever. It shouldn’t be that way. These are supremely talented cooks. What I appreciate about Council’s book is that she also takes a historical perspective. She weaves in stories from her family, and older cookbooks that were published by Black women and groundbreaking at the time. In a small way, it’s starting to do what these types of authors haven’t been able to do in the past. Again, I like that it’s a fairly narrow-topic cookbook. It lets you dive into a single type of food without feeling overwhelmed, and it makes you feel in awe of how many ways you can eat and make a biscuit. There are sweet biscuits; there are savory biscuits; there are ones that you fold almost like pastry, so you get layers; there are scoop biscuits, where you just stir and drop. At the Post, I ran a recipe called Butter Swim Biscuits from this book. It was one of our most popular recipes of the year. It’s a dough that’s simply stirred together. You melt butter in a dish in a really hot oven, and then you pour the batter over and you bake them. You get these fluffy, tall, salty, buttery, crispy-edged biscuits. I think this is my new favorite way to make biscuits. They can feel intimidating sometimes, and this recipe is not intimidating. She just has all different types of recipes and ways to make biscuits that I would never have thought of. She has options for people who are gluten-free or who prefer whole-wheat, so she’s trying to be really inclusive. I think it’s a fun book and I look forward to making all kinds of biscuits from it in the future."