My old recipe, the one I never, ever veered from, was all about the butter, chilled for a long time before I cut it, plopped into a specific brand of Southern flour, smushed in a very particular way between my fingertips. I knew the ratios by heart. I made it in big batches for parties, setting aside sheet trays full of rounds to bake over the course of a couple of hours, so they’d always come out hot, then brushing the tops with a little too much melted butter. When I start to think about biscuits, it’s that ratio that still comes to mind. So much so that paging through the chef Nicole Rucker’s new cookbook, “Dappled: Baking Recipes for Fruit Lovers,” I almost skipped the biscuit recipe altogether. I mean, ricotta? In biscuit dough?

It wasn’t my way. But I also figured that Rucker, who made her name in Los Angeles, baking at Gjusta and Gjelina Take Away, whose glorious lime pies at Fiona have barely made it home in my care and whose chocolate-chip-cookie crumbs have been smeared onto countless pairs of my pants, would make every step of her biscuits with care and intention. I also knew her technique would take some getting used to, simply because it wasn’t mine already. It did. Ricotta lies somewhere between liquid and solid, between the biscuit dough’s fat and its binder, and because of this, it messes around with everything I know about biscuits.