While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

Bust out the butter, scoop up the lard - May 14 is National Buttermilk Biscuit!

We've had a thing or two to say about this sumptous Southern treat in the past, so we'll pretty much let that do the talking.
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Biscuits. Everybody has an opinion on them - particularly in the South where nary a country breakfast spread exists without a steaming batch fresh out of the oven.

They're also served hot with a side of controversy: lard versus butter, White Lily flour versus run-of-the-mill, twisting or not twisting the biscuit cutter. Generations of home cooks, like Lisa Fain, have sat around the table buttering up their own version and debating the right way to make them.

Fain - a Texas native-turned-New Yorker - writes the Homesick Texan food blog, and has now compiled those nostalgic recipes she grew up with into “The Homesick Texan Cookbook.”

She's not claiming her biscuits are the end-all be-all, but you can bet your cowboy boots they're pretty darn delicious.

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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

This month, every day is golden delicious - September is National Biscuit Month!

Making truly wonderful, light, fluffy biscuits is almost a lost art form, but luckily, you've got a whole month to discover your biscuit-baking gift!

Show us your biscuits | Ode to a bologna biscuit | My Dad and biscuits

What we know as biscuits today began quite differently. The name is derived from Latin, meaning "twice-cooked." During the Middle Ages, biscuits were hard, twice-baked and made to take on the road. In fact, biscuits are still considered to be sort of a cracker everywhere else but here. No hardtack for us!

Soft, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth golden biscuits from the South can be made many different ways, but as one who regularly chows down on Mama's magic biscuits on Saturday mornings, let me point you in the right direction. Callie's biscuits, made with cream cheese, bake up light and fluffy, perfect to split in half and spread with preserves, butter, cheddar cheese or even wrap around homemade breakfast sausage. Double the batch and you can freeze half for next weekend's lazy breakfast!

Want to change up your biscuit baking? Try Southern Living's tempting cinnamon raisin and pimento cheese variations. Here's to hoping your basket will be filled with biscuits all month long!

Some tips from our Managing Editor's "biscuit mission" a few years back:
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We have a bit of an obsession with biscuits at Eatocracy. To us, they're more than just a tender, flaky, piping-hot, butter-slathered lump of bliss - they're a link to the past and often the people who made them for us.

Your assignment - share your biscuit story. It can be an account of the method you use to make a perfect batch, a remembrance from your youth or - and we're hoping some of you will have the opportunity to do this - following your mother, grandmother or other favorite biscuit maker into the kitchen and recording them as they work their magic.

Get some background on our biscuit fixation and upload your pictures, text and/or video by January 31, 2011 using iReport. We'll post our favorites in a loving tribute to the nation's biscuit makers.

See Assignment Biscuit on iReport

Previously – Lick the screen – a Biscuitville bologna biscuit and An ode to Dad and biscuits

Let's say for the sake of argument that you've been drinking. For a day or two. Possibly three. It's the holidays (which you loathe), you've been hanging out with family (who loooove themselves some holiday cheer), and your home borough (hundreds of miles away and to the North) has suffered a snowpocalypse that has inspired every national newscaster to tell you, with no small measure of glee that all your worldly possessions, neighbors and colleagues have likely been consumed by yeti. (So sorry.)

You probably would not mind a biscuit. Oh, who are we kidding? In order to survive the next hour of your life, you're going to require the ingestion of a biscuit roughly the size of a hassock, ideally with some manner of viciously salty pork nestled within its floury depths.
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Down South, it's not breakfast without flaky, fluffy lard biscuits born of a cast-iron skillet. They are more than just morning fare; they're time machines that transport some of us back to years far leaner.

My old man was a Baptist preacher's kid, during the Great Depression. He grew up poor.

He had an enormous appetite, and enjoyed all kind of new and exotic foods. I like to think of him as a sort of proto-foodie. He would always clean his plate and proudly slap me on the back when I was able to inhale everything served to me and still ask for seconds. It wasn't until I was older that I understood that when you go to bed hungry as a kid, you grow up making sure you eat every single morsel presented to you. Because you never know when it's not going to be there.
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