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Sorry to repost my reply from another thread, I hate to spam up the post but I feel like every American should know about the Minstrel Show
It wasn’t just a form of comedy, it was an entire entertainment industry all on its own, like movie theaters or concerts today. It eventually got replaced by/morphed into Vaudeville (still with blackface/black clowns) which was then replaced by cinema.
For a good 50-100 years, a major form of entertainment (not just in the South btw) was pretty much just: “haha black people are such stupid clowns! Look, that one thinks he’s fancy! That one’s a no-good drunk! Oh look, that one’s trying to give a speech!” It was pretty formulaic with standard props, just like you’d expect to see at a clown show. So fried chicken and watermelon were standard props like “tiny car full of clowns”, oversized shoes, a flower pot for a hat, a flower that squirts water, etc. For that reason they carry a very unpleasant legacy that reminds people of an insult to injury that still hasn’t been made right, in my opinion.
The format was pretty similar to the show Hee-Haw actually, kind of a fun variety show, just wildly racist and it’s obviously pretty fucked up to pick on literal slaves. Real bitch move there.
So people who know something about history are pretty salty about that and forms of the Minstrel Show were still happening here and there recently enough that people alive today remember seeing them.
Irish people caught some shit, but not like that. I’m not sure if Irish-American racism like that happened recently enough that living people remember it, or that it was ever to the extent that it formed an entire entertainment industry.
In addition to the previous gravy comments, namely that you absolutely must use some crumbly sausage textured protein and the associated fat, I’ve got something else to mention.
Perfect crumbly biscuits are so good and also so tricky to make, that I feel like there’s a slim chance you nailed it the first time, so keep trying.
I struggle to nail it and I’ve been attempting on and off for decades. What makes it difficult is:
if you over-work them (stirring more than ~12 times) and the ingredients become homogenous, the texture is ruined.
They’re still edible but nothing like the real deal.
If the ingredients get warm then the butter will melt and once again ruin the texture.
If you cut the biscuits wrong (e.g. twisting) the sides will “smear” together and they won’t rise right, ruining the texture again.
A perfect (buttermilk/crumbly) biscuit should be fluffy, crumbly, golden brown on the outside, white on the inside and have 10-20 little yellow butter “pearls” dispersed throughout it, something like tiny blueberries in a blueberry muffin.
Even knowing all that, I still find myself failing often and chasing that 5-10% of times when they came out perfect. That said, I’m shit at baking bread for some reason, just cursed it seems. Other people (grandmas notably) can just fucking nail it every time.
The gravy should be pretty easy: start with a generous amount of fat, lightly brown a little flour to make a slurry, add milk little by little until it’s thick like a chowder, add black pepper and “sausage” crumbles. You can always add more milk, NEVER ADD MORE FAT