The line between the North and the South runs through the breakfast table.

Traveling Interstate 55 from Memphis to St. Louis, I received few clues that my family and I had crossed that imaginary border where the South ends and the North begins. The Arkansas Delta looks no different from Louisiana Delta from behind the steering wheel, especially when the four lane, divided highway in Hazlehurst looks remarkably similar to the one in Blytheville, Ark.

My family and I were making a quick trip north for a family funeral and had little time to take the back roads we enjoy driving when we are on vacation. This trip would be interstate and quick-stop restaurants the entire way.

Thankfully, a comfortable bed was waiting for us in a beautiful downtown St. Louis hotel. Even still, the room looked and felt like almost any hotel room in America. With the curtains drawn, there were no clues that I was far away from home.

In many ways, the lines between regions are blurring as commercialization and corporate America make the country more and more homogenous.

The breakfast table is not one of those places. After a relatively peaceful night in the city, my family sat down in a local diner to order breakfast.

Pancakes, French toast, omelets and waffles were the highlights of the menu. You could order your eggs any way you liked them. You even had the choice of bacon or sausage.

Then there were the biscuits.

Maybe I have become too spoiled by the fluffy, buttermilk biscuits my wife and her mother make, but I am particular about my biscuits.

Cheddar drop biscuits were what the waitress called them. A family member who had eaten earlier warned us to not expect much. Filled with cheddar cheese and green onions, the biscuits were on the savory side.

Normally an adventurous eater, I passed them up for something else on the menu.

Another member of our party decided to give the cheddar drop biscuits a try.

Several minutes after ordering, our waitress informed us that the restaurant had run out of biscuits.

“Run out of biscuits?” a member of our party exclaimed jokingly.

The waitress grimaced.

As the young lady returned to the kitchen, I looked at my wife and said, “A restaurant in the South wouldn’t be caught running out of biscuits.”

“They would be run out of business,”I said.

Easy to make and oh, so delicious, the buttery pillows of heaven are the staple of any Southern breakfast.

Any waiter who had to return to their customers and announce that the kitchen ran out of biscuits, risked a revolt.

And if one of his or her customers just happened to be a mother or grandmother — well, she might just get out of her chair, march into the kitchen and show the chef how to make a batch.

But we weren’t in Mississippi, and we enjoyed our St. Louis diner breakfast with English muffins instead.

Thankfully, we will be headed back to the South tomorrow where a good homemade breakfast will be waiting.

 

Ben Hillyer is the news editor of The Natchez Democrat. He can be contacted at 601-445-3540 or by e-mail at ben.hillyer@natchezdemocrat.com.