I made cheddar biscuits. In The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion, they come right after the recipe for Southern breakfast biscuits, which begins: “If you’re a Southern baker with any basic skills at all, you can skip right past this recipe. In fact, we’d appreciate it if you’d turn the page immediately.” I have none of this ingrained cultural knowledge and I don’t really know the first thing about biscuits, but I did need some kind of buttery and flaky snack that tastes good in hot weather. The cheddar biscuits contain a large amount of pepper (a teaspoon or more), with the unusual result that pepper becomes the dominant taste. They have an affinity with pumpkin spice scones.

(Photo: Potomac shore at Point of Rocks, Maryland.)

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