Every Sunday after attending church at Bethany Baptist in Andalusia – or, in recent weeks, after tuning in to the online broadcast of the service – Brenda Gantt starts making lunch. “It’s a standing thing,” she says. “I always cook for my family.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, she would invite others over, too. “I love to entertain and have people come eat and relax,” she says. And she has plenty of room in her home, with a dining room table that seats 14. If need be, she can seat six more in the kitchen and another six in the den.

On a recent Sunday, as she prepared the same biscuit recipe she’s been using for as long as she can remember, Brenda decided to make a how-to video. That’s when she realized she’d have to hold the phone with her left hand and make the biscuits with her right. Not an easy trick, but she nailed it.

I’ve had so many ladies and men asking me to teach them how to make biscuits. Well here is a quick lesson. My mother and grandmothers made them the same way except they used hard crisco. I prefer that too. But this is the healthy way. Make sure you use White Lily Flour ( self Risen). So quick there is no excuse not to have biscuits often. Posted by Brenda Gantt on Sunday, March 29, 2020

In the video, the viewers don’t see Brenda, but they hear her unmistakably Alabama accent as she makes a well in her biscuit bowl filled with an undetermined amount of White Lily self-rising flour: “I make me a hole like a bird nest and I’m puttin’ in some buttermilk,” she says.

Brenda has been making these biscuits for so long that she doesn’t need to measure her ingredients. “I don’t measure, so I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “You just have to practice.”

Then she pours in buttermilk and some canola oil – even though she prefers to use Crisco shortening, she says, the oil is a healthier alternative – and mixes it, one-handed, just like every Southern grandma ever did for time immemorial. “Pull in as you go,” she says.

When the dough starts sticking together, she turns it out onto her chopping block, which she has already sprinkled with more flour. Still using that one hand, Brenda kneads the dough just enough. “You don’t want to work it a long time because your biscuits will be tough,” she warns.

She pats the dough flat and introduces her “most prized possession,” a biscuit cutter she made herself 52 years ago when, as a newlywed, she cut out each end of a can from a 1970s Chef Boyardee meal.

With a nonchalant twist, she cuts and then flings each biscuit into her greased cast-iron skillet, instructing viewers to bake them at 500 degrees until they’re brown. And that’s all there is to it. “This is just easy and quick,” she says. Certainly, she makes it look that way in the four-minute, 45-second video she posted on her Facebook page.

Unbeknownst to Brenda as she served those very same biscuits to her daughter and son-in-law and their daughters – the grandchildren always fight over the soft one in the middle, she says – her video was starting to catch on. In the blink of an eye, it had been watched more than a million times. She’s still in disbelief over all the comments and messages she received – too many to read them all.

“People loved it,” she says in a phone interview on a beautiful spring day as she takes a break from working outside planting daffodil and chive bulbs in her yard. “I think it brought back memories of their grandmothers making biscuits the exact same way.”

‘I stay busy’

Brenda, who doesn’t mind telling you she’s 73 years old, has five grandchildren – three granddaughters who live within golf cart-driving distance and another granddaughter and grandson who live in Tuscaloosa.

They call her “Big Mama,” and during the summer she hosts “Camp Big Mama” where they stay with her, learning to cook, going fishing and just having fun spending time together. At last summer’s camp, her youngest granddaughter, 10-year-old Banks, and two of her friends made wedding gowns out of toilet paper. “They were beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” she says. “We played music, and they walked down the aisle. We just had a great time.”

When she’s not cooking for her family or for someone in the community – once at a church fundraiser, she kneaded and cut out 900 biscuits in one evening – Brenda loves tending her flowers, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables in her yard. She mows her own grass. She also takes line-dancing classes at the local senior center and performs in a group that dances at area nursing homes.

“I stay busy,” she says. “I’m not a sit-around person.”

Originally from Northport, Brenda Hicks earned her bachelor’s degree at Livingston State University, then a master’s at the University of Alabama. She taught school – from kindergarten to seventh-grade science – for 25 years, taking time off to stay home with her son and daughter when they were little.

Her beloved husband George died just one month after they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in August of 2018. “We worked as a team,” she says. “We were with each other all the time.”

After he retired from the Alabama Beverage Control Board in Montgomery, George had time to take on more projects on their 80-acre, wooded homestead. He and Brenda bought an 1875 home and moved it to their property, transforming it into Sweet Gum Bottom Antiques.

After Hurricane Opal damaged the big virgin pines on their property, George cut the trees down, had them sawed into boards and built a six-bedroom, six-bath lodge with the wood. “He didn’t want it to go to waste,” Brenda says.

Their son and daughter-in-law held their wedding at Hickory Ridge Lodge, and it soon became a popular wedding venue. In the large commercial kitchen, Brenda and George did the cooking for events.

Brenda and George also bought another home, this one built in 1905, and turned it into the Cottle House bed-and-breakfast inn, which she still manages.

“You need to enjoy living,” she says. “We don’t get but one life.”

‘Make eating an event’

When her son and daughter were growing up, she insisted that they eat whatever she made for dinner. In the days before cell phones, she would take the phone off the hook when dinner was served, and everyone would sit and talk after they ate. She still believes it’s important for families to linger over meals and enjoy the time spent together.

“We need to make eating an event,” she says.

Her children have followed suit with their own kids, which is why they love, for example, rutabagas. “Both of their mamas are real, real good cooks,” she says. “They both cook like I do. All my grandchildren have been raised to eat all kinds of foods. We don’t coddle to them.”

Brenda’s repertoire includes “all kinds of meats,” accompanied by fresh vegetables and biscuits or cornbread. Once a week, she likes to cook a pot of dried beans or peas, which make “a cheap, filling meal that’s full of protein,” she says. And the leftovers can be used as the basis for other dishes – baked ham becomes ham spread, a pot of pinto beans becomes chili.

But she never wants to shame those who don’t cook the way she does, because she knows that not everyone learned in their mother’s kitchens the way she did. Instead, she wants to help others “learn how to feed their families without staying in the kitchen all day,” and without necessarily having to find a recipe.

After her biscuit-making video went viral, Brenda started posting other videos of herself making things like hot water cornbread, hamburger steak, baked honeycrisp apples and other dishes.

During the pandemic, especially, Brenda has noticed that “mothers don’t know how to cook and are a wreck because of it.” In order to help them, she has started sharing her videos on a new Facebook page, Cooking with Brenda Gantt. She plans to demonstrate a recipe per week, including some of the requests she’s received for dressing, meatloaf and tomato gravy.

“I guess I’ll have to plan a few Sunday dinners around those,” she says.

But, as generous as Brenda is, there’s one recipe she’ll never share. Just a few days ago, she made 350 tea cakes for a family in her community whose home was hit by a tornado earlier in the week, “so they can have a dessert for several days,” she says. “They absolutely melt in your mouth. It’s the only secret recipe I have.”