It was a grand evening, and I was struck by the wordless rapport that had developed between this young, gay, chatty white man and this taciturn, observant African American woman almost fifty years his senior. I was awestruck at the prospect of meeting her but also wanted Peacock to know that we had not yet unpacked boxes and that we had three preschool-aged children who could pierce the ozone layer with their shrieking. She was Peacock’s mentor and best friend as well as his flatmate at the time. “Miss Lewis” was Edna Lewis, legend-the woman whose books defined American country cooking for a generation and with quiet grace explored the primacy of the African American experience in every aspect of it. The day before, Peacock called with a request: Could Miss Lewis come? A mutual friend was staying at our house and invited him over to dinner. I was new to town, learning the city on the fly as I reviewed restaurants for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. There, following a stint at the Georgia governor’s mansion, he had become a local celebrity. I first met Peacock the same year Watershed opened, after he had just ended a stressful job at the high-volume, high-decibel Atlanta restaurant Horseradish Grill. He has such a strong attachment to food and its preparations, and he doesn’t stray. “He also made these awesome cucumbers with young leeks in season and a little mustard. “For me it was the stewed tomatoes he put on his vegetable plate in the winter,” says Anne Quatrano, the esteemed Atlanta chef who introduced Peacock to the first-time restaurateurs (among them Emily Saliers of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls) who opened Watershed in 1998. Every fan had a dish or two that went to the head of their list of food cravings. He was a skilled baker-his cornbread and “Very Good Chocolate Cake” counted among his standouts-but his real gift was in finding the right touch and tone that make simple cooking hard to forget. Scott Peacock was back in the kitchen.Ītlantans who recall Peacock’s tenure as chef at Watershed know that his biscuits weren’t served as a regular menu item but as an occasion: buttermilk ones at brunch, and flakier, more savory lard ones with his legendary Tuesday-night fried chicken. Word spread like melting butter on a steaming-hot cathead. Last December he quietly posted a picture of biscuits on Instagram with the modest announcement that he planned to invite small groups to this rural community to spend four or five hours with him making biscuits. Once Atlanta’s most visible chef, Peacock had seemingly retired from cooking when he bought a house in Marion-a town of three thousand in Alabama’s Black Belt region-nine years ago. But it is also a deep-dive history lesson, a hands-on session with a master, and a moment of Alabama Zen, the objects and the actions, the cook and the dish, part of a whole.

It is actually three pans of biscuits, some to eat with butter and local wildflower honey, some with mayhaw jelly, some with fried country ham. The women are here for what he calls a Biscuit Experience, which results in so much more than a pan of glorious, inimitable Scott Peacock biscuits. “It looks like a brain,” one of them ventures. “You are trying to develop some structure-see?” “Look what it’s starting to do,” he says, inviting the women to come peer at the lumpy blob. Once he’s worked the butter into the dry ingredients, Peacock dumps in cold buttermilk and gives the dough a vigorous stir. Everyone laughs (he’s a funny mime), and his hands dive back into the bowl to push the floury butter into shards. Peacock takes a hand out of the bowl, rolls his eyes, and begins riffling imaginary bills in the air to demonstrate the technique. Inside the bowl are two varieties of heirloom flour, homemade baking powder, kosher salt, and fat chunks of butter. Four women, who have driven hours to the small town of Marion, in his home state of Alabama, to join him in the sunny kitchen of a historic mansion called Reverie, crane their necks. “I call that counting the money,” Scott Peacock says, his hands deep in a vintage yellowware bowl and in constant motion.

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