In “Annie Fisher’s Beaten Biscuits Meant Business,” Gravy producer Mackenzie Martin digs into beaten biscuits, the tender, flaky hardtack rolls that date back to the 1800s, when they were often served with ham and particularly popular in the South. Historically speaking, beaten biscuits were incredibly laborious to make—so they were viewed as a culinary delicacy.

And at the turn of the 20th century, no beaten biscuits were as famous in Columbia, Missouri, as those made by Annie Fisher. Serving her beaten biscuits at a party or dinner was a major hostess flex. A prominent surgeon wrote that Annie Fisher was “the most efficient cateress in the town of Columbia and that no university or social function was really classy without her service.”

These days, the kind of success that culinary entrepreneur Annie Fisher enjoyed a century ago might be partly attributed to an impressive marketing plan, investors, or at the very least, access to a bank loan. But here’s the thing about Annie Fisher: As a Black woman in Jim Crow Missouri, she didn’t have access to those advantages, and yet she amassed a fortune anyway.

In addition to starting a bustling catering enterprise almost completely on her own, Fisher also ran a successful mail-order business shipping to both coasts and became quite the real estate mogul, renting out more than a dozen homes at a time. Her success was heralded nationally with newspaper headlines like “Road to fortune paved with beaten biscuits!” and she was even featured in Clement Richardson’s “The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race” alongside other famed entrepreneurs of the era, like Madam C.J. Walker, the hair care pioneer who became the first Black female millionaire in America.

To investigate Fisher’s legacy, Martin visits her hometown of Columbia, Missouri, and talks with Verna Laboy, who has been giving historical reenactments of Fisher’s story ever since the story first “captivated her soul” 30 years ago. She also meets community leader Sheila Ruffin, who tried unsuccessfully to preserve Fisher’s last standing home before it was torn down in 2011. Finally, she speaks with food columnist Donna Battle Pierce. When Pierce was integrating her Columbia elementary school, she says knowing the story of Annie Fisher would have been deeply empowering to her—but she laments that she didn’t learn about Fisher until she was well into adulthood.

Eighty-five years after Fisher’s death, Martin asks, what could it have been like if Columbia had started to celebrate Fisher’s legacy sooner?

Acknowledgments:

This episode of Gravy was reported and produced by Mackenzie Martin, a James Beard-nominated podcast producer and reporter at KCUR Studios in Kansas City, Missouri. She is the senior producer for A People’s History of Kansas City and the editor of Seeking A Scientist. Her stories have aired on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Here & Now and Marketplace.

It was part of a collaboration with the KCUR Studios podcast, A People’s History of Kansas City. Hosted by Suzanne Hogan, A People’s History of Kansas City is a show about the underdogs, renegades and visionaries who shaped City and the region.

Special thanks for this episode to KCUR Studios’ Suzanne Hogan, historian Mary Beth Brown, historian Bridget Haney, Vox magazine, and the “Renewing Inequality” project at the University of Richmond.

For further reading on beaten biscuits, we recommend John Egerton’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History.

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