Your picnic is missing biscuits
I have a small complaint about modern picnics.
They are often beautiful. They are not always meals.
Somewhere along the line, the ideal picnic became a scattering of photogenic snacks: a baguette, a wedge of cheese, a handful of berries, perhaps a tiny jar of olives if someone was feeling ambitious. This is lovely for approximately 20 minutes. Then everyone is still hungry.
A good picnic, in my view, should feel abundant. Not extravagant. Not expensive. Just generous. There should be enough food to linger over, enough food for seconds, enough food that nobody is quietly wondering what they’ll eat when they get home.
This is why I would like to make the case for biscuits.
There’s an inherent practicality to a good biscuit. Fresh from the oven, a biscuit is a creature of immediate gratification — meant to be split open with impatient fingers and painted with melting butter. But give it a little time in transit, whether that’s a 20-minute walk to the park or a two-hour drive to the lake, and something lovely happens. The crumb settles. The structure firms up. A good biscuit seems to become more itself after rattling around in a basket for a while.
(The only biscuit I distrust is a refrigerated one. Something about that blast of artificial cold leaves the dough tasting faintly filmy to me, as though the biscuit has spent too long in an airport lounge.)
This sturdiness is not merely practical. It is romantic. A biscuit arrives ready for adornment.
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Jam, of course, arrives first.
If biscuits have a soulmate, it’s probably jam, and while nothing beats a quick stovetop batch when you’re fully leaning into summer — the sort made by simmering peaches with a little honey and lemon juice until they surrender themselves entirely to the heat — good store-bought jam is more than worthy of a place in the basket. There is something faintly miraculous about watching fruit transform into a glossy, amber mixture that clings lazily to the back of a spoon, but there is also no shame in letting someone else do the stirring.
The only real rule is to seek out jars with ingredient lists that read more like recipes than chemistry textbooks and, if possible, contain visible evidence of the fruit itself. (This is also an excellent opportunity to round up tiny Bonne Maman jars that have accumulated after advent calendar season has come and gone).
Butter, meanwhile, rewards a little advance planning.
While I appreciate the cinematic appeal of arriving at a picnic with an entire chilled stick wrapped in wax paper, I prefer a softer approach: butter whipped until cloudlike and tucked into a tiny jar or deli tub. Maybe it’s flecked with chives and garlic salt. Maybe it’s perfumed with orange zest and cinnamon. Either way, it feels delightfully excessive in the way all good picnic foods should.
You could absolutely stop packing there.
The beauty of biscuits, however, is that they solve a logistical problem. They’re sturdy enough to travel, substantial enough to build a meal around and neutral enough to work with both sweet and savory toppings. Once you’ve packed them, you’re most of the way to a full picnic.
And while we tend to think of picnics as outdoor lunches — which means sandwiches, grain salads and the occasional tub of pasta salad — biscuits suggest a different possibility. Rather than packing lunch for the park, you’ve packed brunch.
The easiest addition is a batch of jammy eggs. Cooked for seven minutes, peeled and chilled, they travel remarkably well. Their yolks stay creamy without becoming runny, which means you get all the richness of a soft-boiled egg without worrying about a container full of liquid gold sloshing around in your tote bag.
Candied bacon is similarly useful. It can be made ahead — simply brush strips with maple syrup, coat in brown sugar and black pepper, and bake until crisp — tastes good at room temperature and occupies the pleasant middle ground between side dish and snack.
From there, think in terms of spreads rather than recipes. A tub of pimento cheese. A jar of pepper jelly. Honey. Fruit butter. Clotted cream if you’re feeling Anglophilic, ham salad if your predilections lean towards the American South. These require no assembly and very little forethought beyond remembering to throw them in the basket.
Fresh fruit helps, too. Berries, peaches, cherries, plums — anything that can be washed at home and eaten out of hand. Add coffee, whether that’s hot in a thermos, iced in a travel mug or purchased from a nearby café on the way to the park, and you’re done.
That’s really the point. A picnic doesn’t need to be elaborate to feel abundant. Biscuits simply give you a flexible, inexpensive starting place from which abundance becomes much easier. Better, they ensure that when the blanket gets folded up and everyone heads home, nobody is already thinking about dinner.
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