AFTER THE FLAMBEES AND TRIFLES GET BACK TO BASICS, TRY BISCUITS

Surfeited with all the wonderful holiday food, one would think a person couldn't, so soon afterwards, develop a longing for hot biscuits in the middle of a cold afternoon. But I did. Was it to get back to basics after all the flambees, fondues, trifles, eggnog and something called grog?

There weren't any special baking smells emanating from the kitchen. And biscuits aren't raved over for their aroma, like hot cinnamon buns, except by me. And I keep that quirk mostly to myself, for I've found it exceedingly difficult to explain the smell of a hot biscuit.

"You have to open the biscuit carefully," I expound. "Grab it with all fingers and thumb on one hand about half way down from the top and the same way with the other hand about half way up from the bottom and gently pull, giving it a little twist if necessary. This way the biscuit opens evenly and if hot and your nose is close enough to the invisible heat waves streaming upward, you'll smell the subtle but inimitable odor of wheat, chief component of the staff of life.

If you're experienced enough in association, you may also smell the good brown earth when it was first plowed for the wheat crop. And when the wheat really starts growing in the spring, you'll smell green and . . ." Here a listener once interrupted and said, "You can't smell green."

"Oh, yes, you can," I protested. "Green is crushed grass, dandelion and mint when you walk on it. Green is water flowing between banks where fingers of spring willows caress the stream. . ." Again my listener interrupted with "Green is green, a color, not a hot biscuit." So I changed the drift of the conversation.

With no special baking aroma to stimulate my palate, why a hunger for hot biscuits in the middle of the afternoon? Oh, there are so many unexplained questions just when one wants to start off the new year with a clear head and all questions answered.

Maybe it was the sight of the old blue crock in which Mama mixed those long ago breakfast biscuits. I had brought it out to fill with Christmas oranges. Into that crock, every morning, went a suitable amount of flour, lard, salt, baking soda and buttermilk (maybe some baking powder) to make biscuits for seven hungry persons.

"I'll make some for breakfast, I told myself and went about picking up some of the everlasting glitter from the carpet. Five minutes later and ten pieces of tinsel retrieved, my longing for hot biscuits overcame me. Into the blue crock when the makings for five biscuits. Five! Well, I don't necessarily eat them all at once, but don't count that out.

Bending and stooping whets the appetite. When I open one in the proper manner and smell plowed ground, wheat, green, and an old kitchen, one biscuit leads to another and another.

"I mustn't get out of the habit," I tell myself, mouth full. I don't know whether I'm talking about making them or eating them. Maybe I mean the habit of making buttermilk biscuits as opposed to other kinds. I've tried them all--sweet milk, beaten southern, cornstarch instead of baking powder, even mayonnaise, but when I get a longing for hot biscuits in the middle of a cold winter afternoon, it's buttermilk biscuits for me. Breakfast and supper too, if I have the longing. Not all in one day, of course. Fifteen biscuits! Don't say, "Obscene" or "Unthinkable." It's plausible. Small ones.

REJOICE!