Goodness Gracious, Great Balls of Sausage

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

This holiday season I was overcome with an addiction to my mother's sausage balls. Every year for Christmas Eve my mother makes little brown balls of goodness with Bisquick, cheese, and the kind of sausage that comes in logs. The recipe is simple but for some reason the result is amazing. If you dare to eat one, you'll find yourself reaching for another, then another, and another. Before you know it . . . you are fat! I offer up my mother's recipe, then, with due warning.

The strange, addictive quality of my mother's sausage balls led to research where the recipe came from (Yeah, this is the scholar in me, but y'all can just deal). Apparently, the recipe was created in the 1960s by folks at Betty Crocker for a product that General Mills introduced in the early 1930s: Bisquick. The story goes like this: salesman Carl Smith was inspired to create a product that made biscuit-making easier. While on a junket traveling on the Southern Pacific Railroad, the train's cook showed Smith how he prepared biscuit mix in advance and then kept it in the freezer for on-the-spot biscuits in large quantities.

Smith was inspired to pursue the idea on a large scale, and took his idea to Charlie Kress, a chemist at General Mills in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Homemade biscuits like the kind my grandmother used to make are made with lard or shortening, and so the challenge was to come up with a dry-store powder mix that included a leavening agent. By 1931, however, Kress had figured it out, and you could pick up a box if Bisquick for 35 cents!

Here's where the balls come into play: as with other products during this time period (for example, Fritos), promoting and marketing new food products required the generation of recipes that would excite and entice housewives. This is the era of the creation of the fictional character of Betty Crocker, who would dream up recipes for the masses using General Mills products. Recipes were generated for discussion on commercials, radio shows, product boxes, and cookbooks. In fact, this practice still continues with a number of food manufacturers, although the golden age of promotion-by-recipe is over (unless you consider this website part of that tradition . . . I reckon it is, in a certain sense).

Anyhoo, don't quote me on this, as you can never trust the Internets, but rumor has it that the sausage ball recipe was invented for the Bisquick brand sometime in the 1960s and, since that time, has become one of Betty Crocker's most requested recipes (presumably discerned by searches conducted on their website).

As I've discussed before, the holiday season is hyper-commercialized, right down to the holiday tradition of my own family! Who knew my family's favorite holiday snack was a consequence of a salesman's train meal? Who knew these fattening, addictive little balls were borne of a quest to make a dry leavening agent? Of course, once you try these things you might also ask, "who cares?" These will be great for tonight's New Year's Eve party!

Serves/Makes: 10

• 1 pound hot Jimmy Dean sausage
• 8 ounces Cheddar cheese, grated
• 3 cups Bisquick baking mix