The Bisquick Diaries

Love and baking across the years

Photo by Rai Vidanes on Unsplash

The first thing I ever baked was a batch of Bisquick chocolate chip cookies. The recipe was in a yellow cookbook, a promotional item to market Bisquick . The book was cheaply made and already falling apart when I got my hands on it. The cardboard cover was hanging off the metal spiral binding and the pages were splattered with batter and stained with vanilla extract.

Bisquick™, originally invented in the 1930s for the purpose of biscuit making, was a popular, convenience food during my 1970s childhood. The pre-made mix of flour, baking soda, and lard was no longer just used for biscuits and the company likely took advantage of women’s new liberation from the kitchen by showing them how to “have it all”-homemade food, without spending one’s days in the kitchen.

My mother fully embraced Bisquick. A stay-at-home mom at the time, I’m not sure she was looking to reduce dinner time prep as much as she just loved the recipes. Our weekly Sunday pancakes were made from the recipe on the Bisquick box, our birthday cakes were made with Bisquick. Heck, my Midwest mother even made flautas with it. (Imagine our surprise when we moved from Ohio to California and ate real flautas for the first time!)

When it was time for me to learn how to bake, I opened up that yellow, Bisquick cookbook and turned to the batter splattered recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Oh, how I loved to bake those cookies. I would pull out the large, white & green Pyrex mixing bowl and get to work. I loved to eat the raw batter, even though my mother would scold me and tell me it would make me sick. I decided that, when I grew up, I would live in an apartment and eat as much cookie dough as I wanted. Maybe, I would think in a fit of rebellion, I wouldn’t even bake the cookies at all-I would just eat the dough.

When I was done baking, I would put a few cookies on a plate, carefully cover the plate with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for my dad, because he loved the cookies best when they were ice cold. It was then that I established a connection with my dad through my baking. That connection is still alive today. Back then, it was a way for me to standout against all my other siblings. A way to get his attention. “Love me!”, they said.

Later, I would make the cookies for the men I was dating. Because they were made from Bisquick they didn’t taste like the usual Toll House chocolate chip cookies. These were unique, just like me. “Love me!”, they said.

In the early days of dating my husband, I made a Bisquick, Chicken Tamale “Impossible Pie”. It quickly became comfort food for him and likely played a part (along with my brownies) in deciding that I most definitely was someone he wanted to live with. “Love me!”, the Impossible Pie said, and he did.

I rarely use Bisquick in my baking anymore. I bake from scratch, taking extra steps to measure out and combine flour, baking soda, and butter for most of the baking I do. I no longer ask to be loved because I know now that I am enough-whether I bake cookies or not. But occasionally, I still make Bisquick Chocolate Chip cookies or Chicken Tamale Impossible Pie. I make them to show people I care about them and want to comfort them. “I love you!”, they say.