The author of five published histories, Virginia Fisher has also worked as a writer at EWTN and as a director of religious education in a parish church. Mostly, she likes working in her kitchen in between working on her novel The Kitchen Madonna.
Kissing someone who doesn’t love you is like slathering margarine on your grandmother’s homemade biscuits. First, there is the issue of margarine versus pure, sweet butter. Then, there are the biscuits themselves. There is the matter of your grandmother all by herself, not to mention the man or woman pressing their lips to yours.
I’d like to start with Olera’s buttermilk biscuits. She did not make them from a can that you bang on the countertop to open. Forget a boxed mix. My grandmother made them from scratch, and she did not skimp on the fat. Olera Virginia refined her biscuit making when she was a young mother living on a dairy farm, getting up at 4AM to make breakfast for my grandfather and the farmhands. Even when she lived alone, she made biscuits or cornbread most days. She would cook dinner for at least four almost every day because she knew someone would drop by and be hungry — one of her grandchildren, her brother, or various kinfolk in transit. And she was certain they’d want hot bread with butter. What she probably knew in her secret self was that we came to be around her as much as for her lovingly prepared food.
Olera’s golden biscuits had a crusty bottom because she cooked them in a cast iron skillet with generous butter. When your knife cut into her pillowy biscuits, a little puff of steam greeted you because she only served biscuits fresh from the oven. She unselfishly saved the cold leftovers for herself, crumbling them into her buttermilk when she was alone. And the only thing you could put on her biscuits was sweet butter. No margarine made it past the front door — and not because she was loyal to the dairy industry or was worried about anyone’s arteries. Never mind that margarine is cheaper or that Julia Child was on her side during the dark, low-fat years of the 1980s and 1990s. She loved the taste of rich butter and wanted us to know that anything else was counterfeit.
What does any of this have to do with kissing? A lot of fake products and ideas came to the fore in the 1960s. Margarine had been around for decades but really began to fly off of supermarket shelves during that upside-down decade. Today, we consume about three times as much of the oily, yellow stuff as we do butter. Not only have adulterated foods pushed aside pure foods, we have come to want our food fast. These days, no one is in the kitchen very much. So who is getting their “hunger fed as much with understanding and affection as with bread?” Who knows that old kitchen Madonna prayer anymore or sees it on a plaque hanging over a stove or sink?
In the 1960s the sexual revolution took off, overfed by Alfred Kinsey’s fake statistics and a socio-biological subversion of the nuptial meaning of the body. Just more counterfeit — and forget about purity. The traditional understanding of dating, courtship, and marriage withered, and most are familiar with the fruits that resulted. The statistics on abortion, pre-marital sex, unwed mothers, acceptance of homosexuality as a valid lifestyle, STDs, and AIDS are all the direct result of the instant gratification approach to God’s plan for love and the body.
Now back to kissing and fast love and anything fake. Kissing someone who cannot possibly know that they really love you — and that you reciprocate and love them too — is like slathering fake oily margarine on your grandmother’s homemade pita bread, Parkerhouse rolls, cornbread, biscuits, sourdough bread, or whatever kind of bread your grandmother or anyone else dear to you could have made. We all could learn a thing or two from my grandmother, who took her time to do everything from scratch, from the beginning, one step at a time, whether in the kitchen or not.
True love can’t be hurried. Kisses belong only to my beloved. Don’t walk into my kitchen, kiss me, and then ask for a biscuit. It takes time for two people to grow in knowledge of each other and to discern if they should become one. As the pope has said, attraction is not love’s finished form. Love is not something ready-made. It is a task given to a man and to a woman.
What do you want? A canned biscuit with margarine or a homemade buttermilk biscuit with pure sweet butter that would please even your grandmother? Love takes time. You have to get out your iron skillet first. Make sure it is clean. Get out all of the ingredients and don’t forget the butter. Give the oven time to get really hot. Prepare those biscuits just like your grandmother told you. In the meantime, read Pope John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility and Theology of the Body.
Although that is a lot of biscuits to make, just remember, then come the butter and the lips!
