Baking in the American South is Here! 🎉 - No. 281
Baking in the American South is Here! 🎉 - No. 281
The best biscuits, cornbread, cookies, cobbler, cake, pies, puddings, Baba au Rhum, buttermilk panna cotta + pocketbook rolls AND 6 bonus recipes when you pre-order
LAST APRIL I DROVE SOUTH TO Glendora, Mississippi, to stand in the kitchen where Maggie Lean Cox once baked chocolate meringue pie for the Buford family. Lee Buford Threadgill whisked together the egg yolks and sugar just as Maggie had—with a fork—in the same green Pyrex bowl, adding cocoa, a little flour, warm milk and butter, and she baked the pie until the meringue on top was nut-brown.
Maggie began working for the Bufords in 1958, and her photo still hangs on the wood-paneled wall. Lee spent her 14th summer in this kitchen with Maggie watching her cook and writing down recipes. She remembers how those early mornings set her on a path to study French cooking in Paris where she realized she had tasted this fine food before. Maggie, of Creole descent, had been seasoning the family’s food so well for so long that Lee said she had little to learn in France.
We carried fat slices of Maggie’s pie into the den. It was the most delicious chocolate pie I had ever tasted.
A complicated South
The Mississippi Delta was just one stop on a journey I made through the South over the past three years to collect recipes that tell the story of Southern baking. Classic Lemon Meringue Pie, Sherry Trifle, and Pound Cake, were essential, but so were quirky ones like Arkansas Possum Pie, Cantaloupe Cream Pie, and Red Devil’s Food Cake. From fancy to down-home, the recipes in this book pretty much sum up the South. They reveal people and places I didn’t know, some I do, and left me with a deeper appreciation for the Southern baking I often take for granted.
Southern baking was quite possibly the first and finest style of baking America has ever known. And Black women like Maggie who raised the babies, baked the cakes, and kept other women’s houses throughout the South, also juggled their own children, cooking, and cleaning. They created many of these fine recipes, and I wanted to tell their stories, too.
All of this, plus 200 well-tested recipes and Rinne Allen’s gorgeous photos, intersect in Baking in the American South. My book will be released Sept. 3, and I’ll be heading out on a Southern road trip this fall. (A sneak peek of that tour is below.)
If you pre-order my book now, you’ll grab these six yummy bonus recipes:
Nannie Raynes’ Nutty Delight
French Silk Pie
Scuppernong Hull Pie
Norma Cupp’s State Fair Cornbread
Junior Mann’s Cheese Biscuits
Kay Meeks’ Blueberry Layer Cake
Writing a book on Southern baking might be simple if you just want to tell your own story.
I was more curious about what I didn’t know. How could I have lived in a region all my life and not known that Arkansas is all about pie, that there’s a sub-region of the South where Lane Cake and a ‘’sticky’’ lemon cake are baked religiously, and that orange rolls are unique to Alabama?
The recipes in my book come from 14 states, and the sources for the recipes are as diverse as the recipes themselves. They come from school cafeterias, boarding houses, tearooms, churches, synagogues, farms, mills, home kitchens, and even the White House. I’ve included some of my own family’s favorites, too, baked by my aunt and grandmother as well as my mother, Bebe, who was a wonderful cook.
Let me tell you a cornbread story that’s all about family:
For decades, Linda Carman was the home economist at Martha White Foods in Nashville, and she had moved back to her hometown of Cullman, Alabama, when we spoke on the phone. Linda taught much of the South to bake cornbread, as her mother had taught her, traveling into the isolated hills and hollers of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee in the 1970s and ‘80s, places where ladies were more interested in fixing her up with their sons than listening to how to bake better cornbread.
The cornbread of her Alabama youth was thin and crispy, made of white cornmeal and either buttermilk or sweet milk, depending on what you had.
‘’My daddy had a couple furniture stores in town and he came home for ‘dinner’ in the middle of the day,’’ Linda says. Her mother would say, ‘’Call Daddy and tell him dinner is about ready and he can come on home if he doesn’t have a customer. Then she’d say, watch for his pickup coming down the hill, and then she’d take the hot skillet out of the oven and pour cornbread batter in it. It was piping hot when we sat down.’’
To this day, the secrets of great cornbread, Linda says, are getting that skillet really hot and flipping the cornbread out of the skillet once baked. ‘’Don’t let it sweat in the pan. You destroy the crispy part.’’
Cornbread doesn’t know politics, religion, or race. Everyone loves it. Biscuits, too.
Orrie Piper Ogletree (‘’Nanny’’) taught her granddaughter, author Shirley Corriher, how to bake light-as-air biscuits by baking them three times a day on her farm in Covington, Georgia, and Shirley would graduate from Vanderbilt University with a chemistry degree and consult with Pillsbury on their frozen biscuit line. That family recipe yields soft biscuits baked tightly together in a round cake layer pan.
Some of my favorite biscuit recipes in the book are Shirley’s biscuit and Nathalie Dupree’s amazingly easy two-ingredient recipe as well as Scott Peacock’s legendary biscuit made from a wet and shaggy dough, pricked with a fork for steam to escape, and baked in a scorching oven. People travel to Marion, Alabama, to learn to bake biscuits from Scott, and I was honored he shared his method with me.
I was introduced to Lexington, Kentucky, pastry chef Stella Parks’ foolproof biscuits that use yogurt instead of buttermilk. I came to love tea biscuits, a Charleston recipe with an egg added to the dough. And who doesn’t love angel biscuits with yeast added for lightness. They are part biscuit, part roll, and irresistible filled with shaved ham and a dab of fig preserves.
A beautiful diversity of Southern recipes
I didn’t know much about Zephyr Wright (Lyndon Johnson’s cook who traveled to the White House with the family) and whose pecan pie you’ll want to bake each Thanksgiving. Or of Eliza Jane Ashley, cook at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion in 1957 during the Little Rock Nine desegregation riots. She fed seven governors and their families for 36 years, ending with the second term of Bill Clinton and died in 2020 at 103 years of age. Her buttermilk pound cake melts in your mouth.
Through these people I had never met, I began to realize that the Southern baking I knew in middle Tennessee was different than what others might remember. And the recipes I might find comforting might hold another meaning altogether to someone else.
Sugar, essential to Southern baking, along with cotton and rice created an economy dependent on slavery. And while outsiders may imagine the South as a white-columned Tara from Gone with the Wind, in truth, it was largely poor. People had milk cows and churned their own butter. Grandmothers measured flour out of chipped tea cups. It was an inventive, no-waste region that baked with sorghum and molasses when there was no white sugar. And while post Civil War baking in the North was influenced by factory innovation and commercial baking, Southern recipes became preserved in memory, written in diaries, or simply ripped off the box of baking powder.
Jackie Drake’s family recipe for brown sugar pie was born out of the unavailability of white sugar and has fed farm workers decades later in central Kentucky. Blackberry cobbler fed boarders at Ma Hoyle’s boarding house in Gastonia, North Carolina, just west of Charlotte, in the 1930s. Beulah Hinton Hoyle was widowed, and by feeding locals and lodgers, she could support her family.
In this beloved family recipe, you pile half of the blackberries and some sugar onto pie dough and that part goes into the oven, then you simmer the rest of the fruit with sugar on top of the stove, pull the cobbler out the oven, pour over the cooked blackberries and top with more pastry, then return the cobbler to the oven until bubbly. What results is a double decker extravaganza and the best blackberry cobbler in the world.
Recipes say a lot about you
Alice Bailey’s gingerbread, filled with spice and sorghum, speaks of West Virginia coal country. While men worked in the mines and timber industry, women farmed and raised the families. Everyone had a little patch of sorghum to make into syrup to sweeten their gingerbread.
If you bake buttermilk pie, like author Rick Bragg’s mother, you might hail from Alabama or Georgia. Fudge pie—middle Tennessee. Chess pie—the upper South. Chocolate chess pie—Mississippi. Lace cookies—Mississippi or Louisiana. Lane Cake—southeastern Alabama and southwestern Georgia. Chocolate roll or Awendaw—South Carolina. Orange rolls—Alabama. Cherry nut pie—Arkansas.
When I baked pastry chef Allison Vaughan’s citrus-infused chess pie, I understood in one bite that this was a Virginia recipe and Allison was keeping the memories of her Lynchburg grandmother alive at her 1748 Bakehouse in historic Springfield, just north of Jacksonville, Florida.
Driving home from the Mississippi Delta, I realized I had much to learn about Southern baking.
Even though I am a lifelong Southerner and have written about baking nearly all my life, I wanted to write a book that spoke to our similarities more than our differences. And I wanted it to be approachable to bakers no matter where they live and how much they know about baking.
My editor, a native New Englander named Rux Martin, read my manuscript in her Vermont kitchen. Curious, she baked Bill Neal’s lemon meringue pie for Easter last year and Mrs. Pritchard’s chocolate roll from Savannah for a fancy dinner party. She fell in love with Laura Bush’s Cowboy Cookies and watched with a twinkle in her eye as her blue-state friends gobbled up the best chocolate chip cookies ever. Slowly, Southern recipes crept into her repertoire. I could almost hear her Southern drawl…
Rux pressed me to explain Southern baking in a way so anyone, anywhere could understand it.
Whether you live in Vermont or California, Alabama or Alaska, you’ll adore Rinne Allen’s dazzling photography. And I promise, you’ll want to bake every single recipe no matter where you call home.
Happy Baking!
- xo, Anne
P.S. Why pre-order? It’s something to do right now! It guarantees you receive a book. And it’s important to authors like myself because it alerts retailers they should pay attention to our book. Plus, you get those six free recipes to bake NOW!
Norma Cupp’s State Fair Cornbread is as rich and tender as cake. Junior Mann’s Cheese Biscuits can be baked ahead for nibbling with drinks or tea. But what, you might ask, is Nannie Raynes’ Nutty Delight? It’s part pie, part meringue, and so very Texas.
Baking in the American South Road Trip
I have confirmed events in Nashville, Atlanta, Athens (Georgia), Oxford, Jackson, New Orleans, Little Rock, Greenville, Columbia, Birmingham, Savannah, Charleston, Pawley’s Island, Southern Pines, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Cashiers, and Raleigh. I will be at the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Sept. 14, the Six Bridges Book Festival in LIttle Rock Sept 27-28, the Decatur Book Festival in Atlanta Oct 4-5, the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville Oct. 25-27, and the Irma Bombeck Arizona Literary Festival Nov. 1-3. In a few weeks, I will share the complete road trip, and I’d love to see you!
Anne, this book looks amazing!! I just placed my pre-order and I cannot wait to receive it. I know your cookbook will not only contain fantastic recipes but I am looking forward to the history behind all of these wonderful recipes. You make cooking and baking so interesting and fun, and I truly appreciate all the effort you have poured into your craft.
It sounds enthralling, Anne, and what a pretty photo of you as well as the cake ! Sharon Kraemer in Atl. area