Cathead Biscuits. Sift flour and salt together into a large mixing bowl. Make a dent in flour by pushing flour from center toward sides of bowl. The recipe for these extra-large biscuits comes from Virginia Willis, the author of " Secrets of the Southern Table." A phrase her grandfather once used, the name indicates that it's a biscuit as big as a cat's head.

Mash small chunks of lard into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or with your fingers, letting each addition integrate fully before adding the next, until all the lard has been added and the mixture resembles coarse-ground cornmeal. According to Southern Living's The Southern History of Biscuits, cathead biscuits must be drop biscuits, stating that cathead biscuits were "born out of necessity; they had to get things done quickly, do it simply: Make your biscuit dough, and then pull and drop huge clumps of the buttery dough onto your baking sheet." Enter, Cathead Biscuits. A free-formed biscuit, about twice as large as the typical southern biscuit, it is believed that the name came from them being compared to the size of a cat's head. You can have Cathead Biscuits using 8 ingredients and 11 steps. Here is how you achieve it.

Ingredients of Cathead Biscuits

You need 1 1/2 cups of AP flour.
Prepare 1 1/2 cup of cake flour.
It's 1 tbs of baking powder.
Prepare 1/2 tsp of baking soda.
Prepare 2 tsp of salt.
Prepare 3/4 cup of unsalted butter stick cut into cubes.
You need 1 1/4 cup of buttermilk.
It's 1/2 cup of melted butter.

As to the ingredients, to be honest, all biscuits are pretty basic. Cathead biscuits, I learned, are godly little things. They are fluffy, buttermilk biscuits brushed with melted butter. Inside, there's a pocket of gooey, melted cheese.

Cathead Biscuits instructions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and spray a round cake pan. If doubling the recipe, use a 9x11. For this recipe I used a 9x11..
In a mixing bowl, whisk the AP flour, cake flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together..
Scatter the butter cubes throughout the flour mixture..
Using a pastry cutter or two knives, cut the butter in the flour mixture until it resembles a coarse meal with some chunks of butter..
Make a well and add the buttermilk in the well. Using a fork, gently toss the flour mixture into the buttermilk, scraping the sides of the mixing bowl..
The dough will be sticky so make sure you coat your hands with some flour before doing the next step..
Mix the dough with your hands, but not too much. You do not want the dough to be smooth at all..
Now take chunks of dough and place inside the baking pan just as you see in the picture above..
Brush each piece of biscuit dough with melter butter and bake about 20 minutes or until top is brown..
The edges will have a little crunch that adds some good flavor..
Very thick and moist biscuit and it is good with some honey, preserves, butter, bacon, sausage, eggs or just plain..

I did some research on the recipe, which apparently hails from a small section of Eastern North Carolina, toward Rocky Mount and Tarboro. Husband and wife team Jason and Carolyn Roy opened the original Biscuit Head restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, to share their love of southern cooking, their inspiration from travel, and their commitment to local foods. Fluffy Southern Cat Head Biscuits are the kind of biscuit you make for holiday gatherings, for elaborately-stuffed Saturday morning breakfast sandwiches, and for "splurge day" biscuits and gravy. In other words, they are for the celebratory days when calories don't count! Thanksgiving or Christmas Biscuits Cathead Biscuits are a southern staple.