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Mary Martha Greene, a lobbyist and cookbook author, learned the art of making cheese biscuits from her late Aunt Mimi.
Photo by Crush Rush
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Cheese isn’t the only key ingredient in Mary Martha Greene’s famous cheese biscuits. They also include Rice Krispies, a trick she learned from Aunt Mimi.
Photo by Crush Rush
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Greene shapes dozens of cheese biscuits on a baking sheet.
Photo by Crush Rush
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Greene takes a tray of cheese biscuits out of the oven in her Columbia home.
Photo by Crush Rush
Mary Martha Greene
Resides in: Columbia and Beaufort.
Brush with greatness: Celebrity chef and Julia Child collaborator Jacques Pepin once kissed her hand.
Culinary awards: Only one, which she received in ninth grade for baking napoleons for State Foreign Language Day. (But it was first place, and she still has the trophy.)
Secret weapons: Cookie scoops. Greene has 16, from a tiny scoop for benne seed wafers to a large one for crab cakes.
Charity work: Greene teaches baking to homeless and at-risk youth ages 17 to 25 at the Mental Illness Recovery Center Youth Drop-In Center in Columbia.
Mary Martha Greene has a confession: She is not the true cheese biscuit queen.
That title rightly belonged to her Aunt Mimi, a maestro of the stand mixer who brilliantly folded Rice Krispies into her dough and created a unique and scrumptious take on the Southern treat—more like an English tea “biscuit” than fluffy American biscuits.
When Mimi died in 2009, Mary Martha was the only family member who knew how to make the savory cookies and keep the cheese biscuit tradition alive.
“I’m just a pretender,” she says. “I didn’t even know all the secrets.”
But Greene, a lobbyist for education issues who splits her time between her ancestral home in Beaufort and her house in Columbia, soldiered on, and her cheese biscuits became a hit. The crown was passed.
When Greene’s goddaughter Sally Key, fresh out of college, asked in 2018 for a primer on how to cook Greene’s favorites, Greene penned what would become The Cheese Biscuit Queen Tells All. To her surprise, the book was picked up for publication by University of South Carolina Press after a friend recommended it.
Greene’s first book tastily blended family recipes with engaging family stories. It, too, was a hit. In February, USC Press will release her second book, The Cheese Biscuit Queen: Kiss My Aspic!
As the title suggests, Kiss My Aspic expands on the storytelling to include spicy anecdotes from her battles as a lobbyist in the General Assembly, family quips and more than 80 new recipes. The book is also a plea for others to savor their own family recipes and stories for generations to come.
The first book “was a love letter to my Aunt Mimi,” Greene says. “I hope this book will encourage people to collect their family recipes and family stories and write them down. That’s how you keep the memories alive.”