Sawmill gravy and biscuits is a traditional breakfast here in Arkansas and my home state of Kentucky. I can directly trace it back to the early 1800’s in my family. Great, great grandpa emigrated from Germany, sailing 62 days on a tall ship from Liverpool to New Orleans. He settled in Kentucky, married a local girl and she made the gravy.
Curiously, in Arkansas it’s called sawmill gravy while in Kentucky it’s just gravy or milk gravy. However, there’s a reason for that. Here it takes it’s name from logging camps and sawmills where it was a breakfast staple and the name stuck.
The great greats slaughtered their own hogs and made their own sausage. Grandma made scratch biscuits and made the gravy with milk from their own cows. They traded for flour, salt and pepper in the small community a few miles away by wagon and she cooked breakfast over a wood fired cast iron stove.
I make it a little differently. I buy everything at the grocery including canned biscuits. That’s right, I buy canned biscuits for the convenience and because I can’t make them better than Hardees or Pillsbury – yet.
Sawmill gravy is traditionally made with sausage, but my family likes bacon and sausage, so naturally we use drippings from both. The combination of the two creates a sublime mixture that can’t be duplicated with only one or the other. Biscuits and gravy is not only a beloved Arkansas Original, but a revered breakfast throughout the south.
Find it online: https://www.cooksavorcelebrate.com/sawmill-gravy-and-biscuits/