C.Alice Ooten Scott's Love
This webpage is dedicated to my grandmother
Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits
This special recipe has been an expression of love in our family for more than three generations. Grandma, the second oldest of nine children in a family that often lived in meager circumstances, learned this recipe while spending the night at a girl friend's house when she was young. She thought her younger brothers and sisters would like the semi-sweet chocolate sauce poured over biscuits so she learned to make it and made it for her younger siblings, and later her children, and later her grandchildren and some of her great-grandchildren.
Whenever we would spend the night at Grandma's, she would ask us what we wanted for breakfast. By the time we were teens, we never even answered her but simply gave her a look that said, "You have to ASK?". She would always smile and say she had bought biscuits.
Grandma never had a recipe...she just made it. One day, Aunt Shirley and her daughter, Rhonda, went to Grandma's and told her they wanted Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits and a RECIPE! While Grandma patiently made the gravy, Aunt Shirley measured everything before it went into the pot. Thank you Aunt Shirley!
I took the recipe with me to college and I now make it regularly for my children. My son, Jared, is Grandma's oldest grandchild and the first of more than a dozen grandchildren to be her third generation to love Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits. I'm sure my children and my cousins' children will make it for their children.
Grandma is gone now, but I still remember her and the love she had for me when I make Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits.
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Chocolate Gravy & Biscuits
| 1 c. sugar |
1/3 c. Hershey's Cocoa |
3 1/4 c. boiling water |
| 3/4 c. flour |
2/3 c. milk |
|
| dash of salt |
1 T. butter/margarine |
2-3 doz. biscuits |
Cook biscuits in the oven. Measure water into a sauce pan or
teakettle and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, mix the dry ingredients in a saucepan. Stir in milk until smooth. Add the boiling water to the other ingredients and heat over low heat, stiring constantly until it thickens. Add butter and serve over biscuits.
My family likes a milkier gravy... I decrease the boiled water to 3 cups and increase the milk to 1 cup.
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Wake Up, Jacob
Great-grandfather, Willie Ooten, worked for the railroad in Morgan County, Tennessee. The large family lived in very simple circumstances. They lived in little shanties along the river and occationally the river would flood.
One year, when Grandma was a young teen, Grandpa Ooten woke all the children chanting, "Wake up, Jacob (Jake up), don't sleep so sound the river's outside tearing your playhouse down." They really did have a shed outside that the children used as a playhouse! The parents and children quickly gathered what they could but with so many children to see to safety they couldn't grab much. Grandma mentioned that many of the children grabbed or put on their best shoes to try to save them from being washed away.
Grandma carried one of the younger children on her back as they waded through the water to reach higher ground at Aunt Laura & Uncle Hobart's house. (I seem to recall Grandma saying it was kneehigh water...but I'm not sure.) Grandma lost her good shoes along the way.
After they reached safety, they watched their house float down the river with everything else that they owned. They could tell which one was theirs because they had forgotten to turn off the lamp lit in the window. Presumably, the house eventually caught fire from the lamp and burned or was destroyed in the water.
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