The actor Keith David gave a memorable line in the 1980’s Vietnam movie Platoon. A young Charlie Sheen is fretting over the situation they are in and the heaviness of war. David’s character, KIng, tells him, “All you got to do is make it out of here, and it's all gravy. Every day, the rest of your life, gravy.”
Gravy. Get a handle on whatever less than favorable situation you find yourself in and everything else is gravy. Easy enough. But first you better know how to make it.
Let me say gravy, like many offerings coming out of southern kitchens, can get personal. This version is what I grew up with, a milk gravy. Some folks like to add sausage, but for this recipe, I went without. My parents would make this gravy usually on Christmas morning. They’d break out an electric skillet and we’d eat a basket full of biscuits in no time. Of course, I’ve seen my fair share of other gravies. Sawmill, red-eye, chocolate…yeah you heard me, chocolate gravy. Outside of my parent’s electric skillet gravy, one of my fondest memories from my childhood was my father coming home from his 3rd shift job with a gravy and biscuit tray from southern fast-food chain Hardeez. I smashed those trays until I “graduated” to bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits later on. Still, nothing reminds me more of breakfast than biscuits smothered in gravy. From small local diners to the gravy served with the “Country Boy Breakfast” at Cracker Barrel, gravy is my preferred biscuit topping choice. And for those establishments that sling biscuits and gravy orders where’s there so much gravy, you can’t see the biscuits…there’s a special place in God’s Kingdom for y’all.
Ingredients
2 Tbsps of butter, 1/4 cup of all-purpose flour, 2 cups of whole milk, 3/4 tsp of kosher salt, 1/4 tsp of black pepper, 1/8 tsp of cayenne pepper.
I like to use a large cast-iron skillet for making this gravy. On medium/low heat, melt the butter and then add the flour. You’re gonna want to use a wooden spoon or a whisk (I prefer the latter). Get use to stirring, cause once you start this process you’re stirring constantly. The butter and flour will start to “clump” together, and you need to keep it from burning, so keep stirring! It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two for the two ingredients to combine. Once they do, add one cup of the milk, stirring the entire time.
Keep stirring and slowly add in the other cup. Go ahead and bump your temp up a bit to medium (maybe even medium-high depending on your oven). Now just whisk/stir. After a few minutes, you’ll start to notice the “gravy” forming, as in things start “thicken’ up.”
Now add your salt, black, and cayenne pepper. Combine this with a few good stirs and remove from heat. From here you can tweak the taste to your liking, adding more of whatever you feel is missing.
Now I didn’t mention biscuits, but you ought to be smart enough to know you should have been making some this whole time! Gravy works on all kinds of biscuits, but I’m partial to my grandmother’s recipe, Dood’s Table Biscuits. This recipe can cover, or better yet smother, 5 large biscuits with ease.
Chewing the Fat…
Not long ago, I posted on social media a short video of a hot plate of biscuits and gravy, the heat rising up off the plate emulating a visibly pleasant smell worthy of being labeled a prayer. One of my neighbors saw this video and decided to share a tune with me. The subject matter is the same as what filled my breakfast plate. The song and particularly the lyrics resonated with me,
Nobody's perfect, we've all lost and we've all lied
Most of us have cheated the rest of us have tried
The holiest of the holy even slip from time to time
We've all got dirty laundry hanging on the lineSo hoe your own row and raise your own babies
Smoke your own smoke and grow your own daisies
Mend your own fences and own your own crazy
Mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy.
You can listen to the “hymn” below.
I heard these lyrics and I felt an invitation for reflection. Part of this reflection included the words of scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel in his work God in Search of Man said this,
“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.”
Many know that I currently serve a Christian faith community. That community could be included in the broad label of mainline Protestantism. This distinction means that I as a pastor serve the “institutional” church. I openly admit that I have an ongoing tension with any and all forms of institutionalism. The universal or small “c” catholic church fits this category. The “steeples” be they in big downtowns settings or in small rural communities are part of this large institution. A structure I honestly feel the radical Galilean, known as Jesus, never really had any interest in establishing. Yet, here we are…
For years I’ve heard accusations coming out of the institutional church. The “world” is going to hell in a handbasket. The moral decay in our society is to be blamed on the love of changing cultures. If we’d just get back to the way things were! If we’d just realize that “old-time” religion was the answer we’d all be in better shape. Church leaders have called for flocks and communities to forsake the world and all in it.
I just don’t know if the problems one sees in the world from the perspective of a church pew can be written off as the result of others. I dare say the problems faith communities are seeing, at least within the context of the United States and the rest of the West, might be the result of their/our own making. The world hasn’t made us meaningless; we’ve done it to ourselves. Be it through abdication and silence, or maybe from not owning our own shortcomings and failures. The church has some “fence-mending” to address. It has many past and present situations where confession and repentance would do it well. Only then might the life of the church be in the words of Keith David be “gravy.”
So let us own the slips. Let us deal with the dirty laundry on the line.
The month of June offers a reconciling opportunity. We can start by engaging those celebrating PRIDE that we’ve hurt. We can start by seeing the significance of Juneteenth. We can start by minding our own “biscuits” and helping churn out a gravy worthy of sharing.
As you were,
~tBSB