Without fail, every single Northerner I’ve ever brought home to Arkansas thinks I’m insane the first time I mention chocolate gravy and biscuits.   They imagine some bizarre combination of saw tooth gravy with chocolate mixed in, or maybe country gravy with cocoa on top. They never seem to imagine the reality.  

I’ve had the same conversation about chocolate gravy and biscuits so many times now that when I do introduce someone to it for the first time, I just say, “trust me, it’s not what you think.”  

I don’t need to sell it.  Once I pour the chocolate over the biscuits and drop a dollop of butter in the center, everyone is sold. 

When I was a kid, my mother served it on Sunday mornings. I ate it from a big cereal bowl while I read the comics.  I washed it down with at least two glasses of milk.

 Over the years, chocolate gravy and biscuits developed into true soul food, for me anyway.    When I moved away from home and started learning to cook, I immediately tried to imitate my mother’s recipe.  I watched her make it at least a thousand times growing up, so I figured I could approximate the ingredient amounts.  

Mom never uses a measuring cup.  She makes it by eye, instead.  There’s roughly a half a cup of sugar, more or less, to taste.  Then she adds an eighth of a cup of cocoa, roughly, maybe a little more, and a couple of cups of milk (depending on whether she wanted it to thicken quickly).   This is combined together and heated in a sauce pan until just before the milk began to boil.  It’s important to let it get just so hot, but not any hotter. 

Mom then let it sit and thick up for a bit.  If it was too runny while heating, she’d toss in a pinch of flour here or there.  She never had a proper recipe.  Instead, Mom watched her mother make it in their cabin on Silex Mountain.   I imagine Grandma learned to make it from watched her mother.   No one ever wrote it down.   

The first time I tried to make it was a disaster.  I scaled the milk, so it tasted burnt.  The second time, I put too much cocoa in.  I tried to make it once a week for two years, and I could never land on my mother’s exact combination.  I could make an edible version, but it wasn’t my mother’s.   I looked up recipes for chocolate gravy, but it appeared that no two were the same.   Some included eggs and heavy cream, others just call for sugar, maybe a little flour, milk, and cocoa.  

Finally, after about three years of trial and error, I landed on the right combination.  It was sheer luck.  I don’t know how I discovered it, but I was able to repeat it from that day on.   It was almost like a physical memory, since I didn’t write it down either.   My hands simply know when to stop adding flour and sugar; they know when to quit pouring milk into the pan, how long to stir.  

I love the dish for the obvious reasons:  it’s basically runny chocolate pudding poured hot over buttermilk biscuits.  Who wouldn’t?  I also love it because it’s sort of a southern secret.  People who grew up here know all about it, people who didn’t are amazed it exists when they discover it.  Part of me hopes it stays that way, which is why I never wrote it down either, until now.   

Lately, I've been thinking about chocolate gravy.  Something about the non-stop recession talk reminds me of being a little kid with dirt poor parents, but feeling pampered every time my mom threw together some sugar, chocolate, and the right combinations of movement over the stove.