Erie Biscuit Day

Men love Biscuits—enough to merit the capital B. At least, certainly, the coal miners did in turn-of-the-century Erie with a time-honored tradition called Biscuit Day. The biscuit, itself, traces back to ancient Egypt, but it was a brittle, unleavened thing compared to the soft variety of the South. During the 1870s, as summer wound down in Erie, men returned to the mines to unearth what American Indians called the “rocks that burned.” Before that happened, though, the coal town celebrated with mulligan stew and buttermilk biscuits with apple butter.

“Coal was the thing that brought (the settlers) to Erie,” says septuagenarian Alan Wise, walking around the Western Victorian-style digs of the Wise Homestead. Inside, square windows are cut into the dry wall, revealing the interior mud that built this homestead over a century ago. It’s a peek into the past. Wise takes out a photo of an old advert/invitation for Biscuit Day with a quaint idiom printed on something the size of a price tag: “Be a live fish, and get in the swim,” it nudges. It’s the only physical proof that the communal gathering took place.

Fast forward to September 14 when the 11th Annual Erie Biscuit Day is set to go. (The Erie Historical Society rebooted the anniversary, unclear when the original festival ended.) The conveyor-belt oven in Black Jack Pizza on the historic Briggs Street, paired along with baker Bill Equitz’s industrial mixer, will churn out nearly 1200 biscuits—a simple concoction of Pioneer flour, milk and fat. However, deep within every biscuit batch is a formulaic science. Sure, come the Erie celebration, we can emboss them in gravy, slather jelly and jam on them, or empty a beehive on it. (Or as Sir Mix-A-Lot advises in “Buttermilk Biscuits”: Dip them suckers in Aunt Jemima.) Above is a taxonomical breakdown of the porous plate cleaner.