Biscuit-whisperer Erika Council honors the women who taught her to bake a perfect biscuit.
Words by Jasmin Pittman Morrell | Photos by Melissa Alexander
January 6, 2022
Erika Council — the “biscuit Jedi” — darts into the Irwin Street Market, a quirky little building burrowed in Atlanta’s historic Old Fourth Ward. You can’t miss the market’s sign for Jake’s Ice Cream, which sounds especially appealing on a humid day in late summer. Council’s keys jingle and she pushes open the door to Bomb Biscuits’ new kitchen, dropping her bags on the tall counter topped with blond wood. As I settle on a stool at the countertop, Council zips like a hummingbird between the kitchen’s gleaming industrial ovens and sinks, checking to ensure everything is as she left it the day before. It’s relatively early on a Wednesday morning, and the market isn’t open to the public yet. But the space feels pregnant with possibility in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. An easel in the common space between Bomb Biscuits and Glide Pizza showcases “love and art in the time of Covid.” The painting of a man with an Afro and raised fist catches my eye, reminding me of how challenging it’s been for small, independent restaurants to rise in current conditions.
Council hails from a long line of restaurateurs, caterers, and home cooks: women who knew their way around a kitchen. Her paternal grandmother, Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, reigned as an institution in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she opened Mama Dip’s Kitchen in 1976.
Irwin Street Market houses several incubators, community kitchens for innovative artisans and food-based businesses primed for growth. Over the past six years, Council’s Bomb Biscuit Company, a biscuit pop-up, catering, and delivery service, garnered an ardent following with crowd-pleasing favorites like “glori-fried” and hot honey chicken biscuits. As a baker, recipe developer, and food writer, Council powered the engine behind Bomb Biscuits’ recent expansion. She’s poised to open, but before she can welcome customers to sidle up to the counter for brunch, the kitchen equipment must be perfectly calibrated. The health inspector is due to visit soon. Council grabs a broom and sweeps the black-and-white checkered floor because she’s a stickler for cleanliness, but also because she doesn’t like to stay still for long.
“What’s that saying about idle hands?” she laughs.
Council may have heard the phrase, idle hands are the devil’s playthings, from one of the women in her North Carolina family, or the church ladies who fed their community in Goldsboro through the soup kitchen, or over suppers in the church fellowship hall. Council’s great-aunt Rene (short for Irene) kept busy by knocking on neighbors’ doors and collecting heels of bread, later to be transformed in muffin tins into bread pudding and served for everybody to enjoy. The mantra is familiar to me, too, and we soon discover we share eastern North Carolina roots.
“We’re probably related,” Council muses. “Probably, somehow,” I agree.
That’s the thing about being Black in the South. We’re always on the lookout for family.
Council hails from a long line of restaurateurs, caterers, and home cooks: women who knew their way around a kitchen. Her paternal grandmother, Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, reigned as an institution in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she opened Mama Dip’s Kitchen in 1976. The mythos around Mama Dip’s heart-centered soul food lives on through Council, who describes her relationship with biscuits as nothing short of a love affair.
For as long as she can remember, Council turned to cooking to help her unwind, her hands learning the alchemical power of mixing plain white flour from Piggly Wiggly, buttermilk, and butter. She began collecting cookbooks by Black chefs, scouring their pages, absorbing the ingredients of genius. When Council graduated from high school, her maternal grandmother, Geraldine Dortch, gifted her with Cleora Butler’s cookbook. Council’s eyes are luminous as her mind kneads the familiar memory.
Cleora’s Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook & Eight Decades of Great American Food compiles the recipes and stories of Cleora Butler, a treasured chef who crafted her legacy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Born in Waco, Texas, in 1901, Butler migrated with her parents to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and eventually found work as a chef in Tulsa. Council remembers the shock of realizing there’s no mention of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Butler’s cookbook, which chronicles, alongside the recipes, the often overlooked history of African Americans settling in the Midwest.
I wonder if Tulsa glimmered with the promise of opportunity even in the face of the violence and destruction perpetrated by white people against the Black community of the Greenwood district. Or perhaps there simply was no place for such stories, and Butler instead chose to amplify the threads of love and belonging. The first recipe in Butler’s cookbook remains woven into Council’s heart — the story of young Butler cooking biscuits to impress her mother. Butler’s reminiscence echoed Council’s early attempts to bake biscuits for her grandma.
“They were terrible, but she sat there and ate them,” Council tells me. “I don’t think she realized what giving me that book spurred me into. The older I got, I kept referring back to it because the story was so fascinating.”
Geraldine Dortch was a pioneer herself. Council tells me how her grandmother obtained an advanced degree in education from Columbia University in New York. Dortch chose to return to the South to support education and the Civil Rights Movement as much as she could. Whenever they baked together, Council recalls her grandmother always teaching, always imparting the significance of the family history into the cooking lesson. I recognize the subtext, the way Council’s grandmother nourished her on both physical and spiritual levels, making sure she knew exactly what Black women were capable of accomplishing.
“I always loved to cook and bake,” Council explains. “It’s just in my genes, I guess ... and all of my cooking experience is tied back to her.”
Council can rattle off a long list of Black Southern chefs she considers guides standing with her in the kitchen: Sallie Ann Robinson, Norma Jean and Carole Darden, Lena Richard, and Freda DeKnight. Pamela Strobel, better known as Princess Pamela, was an iconic Manhattan chef who rose to fame in the ’60s. She cooked the food of her South Carolina origins, and her customers went crazy for it. Journalist Mayukh Sen writes that being admitted to Princess Pamela’s Little Kitchen “was like scoring drugs,” and she served several celebrity guests, including Andy Warhol and Gloria Steinem.
Princess Pamela was notoriously selective about who she let into her place and was unafraid to kick out anyone she didn’t like. Apparently, you had to be worthy enough for her food to pass your lips. Council mentions referring back to the peanut butter biscuits in Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook often, but her fascination with Princess Pamela doesn’t end with biscuits. Princess Pamela eventually disappeared from Manhattan’s culinary scene, and no one knows what happened to her. The idea that someone so visible and elemental could simply vanish, with seemingly little care taken to uncover her presumed death, is a haunting reminder of how easy it is for America to forget the hands that feed it.
Giving Black bakers and chefs the acclaim they deserve is part of Council’s mission, and she’s writing about it. With a book in development, Council will publish with Clarkson Potter, which published Toni Tipton-Martin’s award-winning cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking. Council plans to chronicle her own evolution in the bread baking world, along with elevating the names of those who shaped her craft.
With all this talk of food, Council and I soon realize we’re both hungry. I hop off my stool, and as Council locks up at Bomb Biscuits, she notes that behemoth food hall Krog Street Market is a short jaunt away down the street across the Atlanta BeltLine Eastside Trail. The trail brims with joggers, dog walkers, bike riders, and friends enjoying a casual stroll. As we walk, the clanging of construction speaks to the neighborhood’s ongoing development. If this morning is any indication, Council has planted herself in the perfect spot for Bomb Biscuits’ continued growth.
Known for being the birthplace of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood stands as a symbol of where we’ve been and where we might go. Adorning a building across from Irwin Street Market is a tropically colored mural with the phrases I can’t breathe and No justice, no peace emblazoned on brick — cries some of us still need to hear. Not far from Irwin Street, John Lewis Freedom Parkway, named after another giant of the Civil Rights Movement, casts its inspiring, if slightly formidable, shadow. I can’t help but think it’s beyond time to celebrate the women who fuel the movement; the women who do the hard work of nourishing our communities and keeping us alive.
The biscuit, too, deserves a celebration. In Council’s hands, she’s revisioning the narrative of who bakes them, and who belongs in the larger world of bread baking — a space typically dominated by the visibility of white chefs. Growing up, my family didn’t bake biscuits, so I didn’t learn. I admit my woe over missing something that feels quintessential to my heritage. As she explains how different kinds of buttermilk can affect the protein in flour, I realize the idea of learning from Council brings connection to a shared past and an investment in America’s future. A lofty ideal? Maybe. But I think Council’s grandmother Geraldine would be proud of the way she’s spreading the biscuit love.
“Still She Rises” is available in Issue No. 2 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Jasmin Pittman Morrell is a writer and editor interested in narratives centering and celebrating Black and Indigenous presence, food, and art. Her essays are included in Meeting at the Table: African-American Women Write on Race, Culture and Community (2020), The Porch Magazine, and other anthologies. She's also written for The Bitter Southerner about mothering an interracial child. Alongside her family, Jasmin loves calling the mountains of western North Carolina home.
Melissa Alexander’s work focuses on the interrelational intimacy that exists within the Black American community, encouraging the model and viewer to lay down their guard. Her work is her protest, her rebellion, her chance to strengthen and control the Black narrative that has been washed, overlooked, and undervalued. She resides in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood with her daughter. She’s a big fan of A Tribe Called Quest, Conan the Barbarian, and Zora Neale Hurston.
