Family Recipes, Family Ties - Grandparents.com

Biscuits and gravy is all there is to say. Max Moran, a 47-year-old artist and grandfather of four, who lives and paints in Baiting Hollow, N.Y., is sure of this. He shunned the dish as a child and the recipe could not be further removed from the lithe and stylish fare favored in his world of health-conscious, food-obsessed Soho artists. Yet when his first grandchild was born five years ago, Moran had a sudden irrepressible urge to make the biscuits and gravy that his grandmother had made on a wood-fired stove in their remote corner of the mountains and hollows of south eastern Kentucky.

"You want to protect your children from adversity, from anything that might hold them back," he says, "but you also want them to know where they came from."

His urge had more time to incubate than most parents'. Married young, he divorced at a time in which no one discussed joint or shared custody. Women were expected to rear the children; men were expected to pay for it. Soon after, he moved to New York.

"I was 26 years old, I was making a living painting billboards or working in restaurant kitchens," he said. There was simply not enough contact with his children for the atavistic desires and needs and worries and appetites to develop.

As young adults, however, his children wanted to know their father. "We got close," he said. And when his children began to have children of their own, Mr. Moran began to experience the biscuit-and-gravy urge. His own parents, he realized, may have had similar urges.

His mother was a go-getter, his father had a distinguished career in the Air Force, and they moved their young family north and up to a middle-class life in Columbus, Ohio. But they took their children back to Appalachia every summer. Perhaps, says Moran, his parents wanted him to see the things that they themselves could never put into words: how brutal their parents' lives had been, getting by on a coal miner's paycheck, living without plumbing and electricity, eating what the family grew or foraged, never wasting a scrap. Perhaps his parents wanted him to understand the work it took to live such a life, the generations of effort required to move up and out.

"I would sit there rolling my eyes. I’d sit at the white table in my grandmother’s immaculate, whitewashed kitchen, and I'd watch her stirring the bacon, stirring the flour into the bacon grease, stirring in the milk, stirring the gravy, stirring the gravy. There might be a pot of beans with a ham-bone, or pine needle soup," he says, "It was like what you feed animals, it was poor people's food."

He couldn't get out of the hills and later, out of Ohio, fast enough. Moran lived on Martha's Vineyard, in Europe, in New York City, and now on the North Fork of Long Island. He's enjoyed so much success that he is no longer embarrassed to look back, no longer afraid that the past might catch up with him and pull him back. Rather, he is beginning to relish the family story.

"My grandmother was a McCoy of the Hatfields and McCoys. My father's family were red-dirt sharecroppers who moved from North Carolina to Kentucky in 1920 to work the mines," he says, "It is a quintessential American story. My father picked cotton, he fought in two wars, he put his two children through college. He raised us to live in a world that he couldn’t begin to imagine."

This is, he says, what he wants his grandchildren to know. "I want them to know what it took — the courage, the effort, the vision. I want them to know that that spirit is in them," he says.

Of course, he says, he can't say these things. But he can serve his grandchildren biscuits and gravy.

"That dish tells the whole story. If I leave them anything, it'll be that recipe. No matter how humble, that recipe has been passed down through the generations and it is sacred. It summons the spirits and muffled voices of many generations. It says the things that I could never explain," he says.

In fact, he can taste an epic just thinking about biscuits and gravy. "They are like the bottom of a soup pot," he says. "The essence, the soul of the thing."