CAROL FAY ELLISON

One of ten children who grew up with their mother making biscuits for the family, Carol Fay Ellison started work as a dishwasher at Nashville’s Loveless Cafe in 1968. One day, when someone didn’t come in for work, she filled in as a line cook, making eggs, ham, and sausage. “Oh, lordy, it was hot then,” she remembered when we chatted with her in 2004. “If it was 100 degrees outside, it was 200 in the kitchen. You had to walk into the freezer to get cool.”

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Although she did nearly everything in the kitchen of the Loveless Cafe, Carol Fay Ellison was best known for her biscuits.

Gifted with her mother’s expertise, Carol Fay soon became the biscuit person. Biscuits had always been an essential part of the cafe’s meals; when they became her responsibility, she made a change or two in the recipe and created what became the signature dish of the legendary restaurant. “They had been using powdered milk, buttermilk, and water,” she recalled. “But with powdered milk, you make a dough that chunks and gunks. So I took it out of the recipe.” Precious few people apprenticed with Carol Fay to become proficient biscuit makers. “It can be tough teaching people,” she said. “A lot of them don’t want to put their fingers in the dough. And handling the dough just right is key.”

As she described it, making the cafe’s famous blackberry and peach preserves to accompany the biscuits was a far less exacting science. “All I do is add sugar to the fruit,” she revealed. “We used to cook them on the stove in big old rondos. Now I’ve got a tilt skillet, and we make preserves every day.”

After the Loveless shut down for remodeling early in 2004, Carol Fay’s skills and experience were key ingredients in a new kitchen that would stay true to the cafe’s culinary roots. “When we reopened, I did 149 hours in the first two weeks,” she said with a serene smile.

Jesse Goldstein, vice-president of operations for Tomkats, the company that saved and revived the Loveless Cafe, told us that Carol Fay’s presence in the new kitchen was essential, and not only because she was keeper of the precious biscuit recipe. As one who had been a vital part of the Loveless Cafe for well over a quarter century, she embodied an indomitable spirit that gave strength to those around her. “I love her,” Jesse said without equivocation. “There is no one in the world better to hug, or to be hugged by.” Carol Fay Ellison passed away in 2010.