Happy PUB DAY, Baking in the American South! 🎈🎉📕 - No. 302

Why I wrote this book + follow me on tour + Lemon Icebox Pie cools things down

YESTERDAY, I WAS IN THE KITCHEN baking a sweet potato cake and sliced sweet potato pie from my new book for a digital media appearance that will air in early October. If you had told me 25 years ago when my Cake Mix Doctor book released that I would be reaching audiences in this virtual way one day, I wouldn’t have believed you.

And yet, anything is possible. Today marks the birth of my new book, Baking in the American South! For the past three years, it has lived alongside me. I have been informed by it and now understand more deeply the region I call home.

I wrote this book full of 200 fabulous recipes and untold stories of famous people and not-so-famous ones because I was curious what recipes could tell me about Southern culture.

I wanted to write about people seen and unseen and from the past and present. I wanted to dig deeper and go further than Southern cookbooks have before.

I sensed Southern baking was the best in the land because its pies, puddings, cakes, and biscuits taste superior to those baked elsewhere. But after the research, I learned that Southern baking was the first and finest style of baking America has ever known in spite of the fact that it was often rooted in scarcity and has simply fed people.

Southern baking involves working through the South’s warm climate and getting used to sticky bread doughs and the effects of humidity. It is both an art and an economy. It has paid the rent.

Whether out of love or because they were forced to, Southern cooks have baked the cakes and rolled the pie crusts on farms where they grew many of their ingredients. Virginia author Edna Lewis writes in her Taste of Country Cooking cookbook that corn pone batter was stiff and formed with both hands in an intimate fashion— ‘’fingers closed to make a large egg shape.’’ Those finger indentations left the marks of the maker baked into each corn pone.

You might wonder how I wrote this book.

In the beginning, I compiled a list of ‘’must have’’ recipes such as strawberry shortcake, salt-rising bread, spoonbread, skillet cornbread, banana pudding, fritters and beignets, yeast rolls, Sally Lunn bread, Hummingbird Cake, black bottom pie, and blackberry cobbler. I also researched each of the 14 states and spoke to people in those states to gauge what unique recipes needed to be in the book. From there I listened to stories, read books, accessed archives, and took a big picture look at the South and considered how railroads, poverty, isolation, slavery, migration, and many other factors including agriculture affected what people baked. It was an ongoing project for more than three years. It consumed me, for sure!

A story in the first chapter on cornbread stands out as a favorite.

The Nina Cain’s Batty Cakes recipe is named after Nina Cain who cooked for Curtis Flowers’ family in Florence, Alabama for many years. I read about Curtis Flowers and her connection to Nina Cain in a newsletter published by the Colonial Dames of America.

Flowers was discussing how her great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves to work cotton fields prior to Empancipation. Author Alex Haley encouraged her to make the names of the enslaved available at her public library because family records can be fonts of information for families searching for their stories. Flowers spoke to me how she couldn’t erase the fact her ancestor was a slave holder, but she could shed light on the names of the enslaved to honor their lives. This cornmeal griddle cake recipe was something Nina Cain was known for. The little lacy corn cakes are about the size of a silver dollar, and she fried them in hot lard.

I also learned how important buttermilk was to cornbread. You need a lot of it in a recipe, and if you have the time to let the cornmeal soak in the buttermilk ahead of time, it makes a creamier cornbread. And until this book, I didn’t really understand the role of high heat in baking biscuits, either. If the oven is very hot - 475 to 500ºF - the biscuits rise higher in the pan. 

Ewing Steele’s Alabama Orange Rolls.

Hopeful I could uncover recipes that were near-forgotten or simply hyper-regional, I found Possum Pie (chocolate custard buried under whipped cream) and a Chocolate Tomato Cake, both from Arkansas. I had never heard of a pie made from ripe cantaloupe either—a railroad recipe—but it is delicious!

And I am obsessed with Ewing Steele’s Alabama Orange Rolls. They became our Christmas morning treat one year. It’s a beautiful story behind this recipe. Ewing Steele was a caterer in Birmingham, and she worked in the kitchen with young German prisoners of war during World War II.

My granddaughter and husband savoring Ewing Steele’s Orange Rolls.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in a book this size is finding, testing, and adjusting historical recipes so they work today. We can only guess what type of flour or sugar might have been used in an older recipe. And even if grandmother’s cake called for Swan’s Down cake flour, the formulation might be different today than it was a century ago. As our measurements have changed, I included cups as well as grams because many home cooks bake with a scale today. But grandmother likely had her own flour scoop and knew how she measured a cup—level or rounded—or possibly she didn’t measure at all!

In addition, tastes have changed over the years. What might have been considered delicious in the 1930s may seem spartan today. I found this to be the case in making chocolate cake. Our palates today can withstand a lot of chocolate, but older recipes had a more modest hand.

Now what?

I’m going on book tour, something I’ve grown accustomed to as I have promoted each of my previous books. This is my 16th book!

With the Cake Mix Doctor, I was thrown onto local morning TV, QVC, and even Good Morning America. The newspaper interviews came easy because I could anticipate tough questions. Radio, I found, had a cadence and you needed to speak in sound bites. Podcasts, I’ve grown to love, because they are more conversational and relaxed.

Even as Covid made book marketing more virtual, I have been a reluctant camera gal shying from the spotlight. But I understand now the beauty of an iPad, a tripod, a ring light, and extension cords snaking through my kitchen in order to teach a class online.

Mrs. Pritchard’s Chocolate Roll.

Because this book focuses on just one region of America, I’ll be able to travel to nearly 30 cities by car. Three book festivals require a plane ticket. But mostly, it is an honest-to-goodness road trip.

You can’t get to Oxford, Mississippi from my hometown without going through Memphis, so that’s the route I will take. And once in Oxford, I might as well head south to Jackson and the Mississippi Book Festival. And if I’ve gone that far, it’s just a little further to New Orleans. Especially if I can stop for lunch with Instagram phenom Landon Bryant in Laurel, which is what I plan to do. I’ll share plenty of stories from the road here in Between the Layers and on Instagram.

And I hope I get to meet you along the way! If you make it to my appearances on book tour, please introduce yourself and tell me you read Between the Layers.

Are you coming to see me on tour? Are you planning to bake from my new book? If you pre-ordered, it might be delivered today!

Johnetta Miller’s Lemon Icebox Pie.

Because this hot weather just doesn’t want to leave us, I am sharing a sneak-peek of Lemon Icebox Pie.

In warm Southern climates, there was nothing more refreshing than a cool lemon pie in the fridge. It was that classic pie you’d make ahead of time with eggs, sweetened condensed milk, and lemons, and chill. Originally a 1930s French Creole recipe that came out of New Orleans and made its way up into the Delta of Mississippi and through Alabama and into Tennessee and other parts of the South, it was the pie once there was refrigeration.

And that pie would travel to Denver, which is where cookbook author Adrian Miller’s mother baked it for church gatherings. Johnetta Solomon Miller was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on lemon icebox pie. And so after she moved west and joined Denver’s Campbell Chapel African Methodist Episcopal church (which Adrian has jokingly said stands for ‘’always meet and eat’’), this sweet confection of tangy lemon filling on top of crushed vanilla wafers was what she made for church potlucks and whenever people came together to share food.

Hope you enjoy the pie!

Why should those of you outside the South be interested in my new book?

What better way to understand the culture of the South than by baking its rolls, biscuits, pies, and cakes? We have more in common than we do differences, and food can be our connector.

- xo, Anne

P.S. The second winner of the paid subscriber giveaway is Laura Wyatt. A copy will be delivered to Laura this week! Congratulations!

• Cheers to my Substack friends who will be writing about Baking in the American South this fall: Caroline Chambers, Leah Koenig, and Jolene Handy. The Action Cookbook Newsletter’s Scott Hines will be in conversation with me at Carmichael’s books in Louisville on Nov. 21 at 7 pm.

• Here’s what you’re missing over on Instagram.

• Don’t have a copy of Baking in the American South? Here’s how to purchase one from your favorite retailer!

THE RECIPE:

Johnetta Miller’s Lemon Icebox Pie

This recipe closely resembles the recipe on the back of the Eagle Brand milk can, Adrian Miller says, and was ‘’something my mother made for holidays throughout the year, not just the summer ones. It was the one dessert we kids coveted.’’ I loved Johnetta Miller’s simple recipe, and I made a couple of adaptations, adding another egg and placing the pie in the oven to bake a bit longer so you don’t have to worry about raw eggs.

Makes 8 servings

Prep & Cook: 30 to 35 minutes

Bake: 20 to 27 minutes for crust and meringue

Chill: At least 4 hours

• Vanilla Wafer Crust:

• 6 tablespoons (3 ounces) unsalted butter

• 58 Vanilla Wafer or thin ginger cookies or 12 whole graham crackers (1 1/2 cups crumbs)

• Filling:

• 4 large eggs

• 1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk

• 4 to 5 lemons

• 1/2 cup sugar

1. Place a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat the oven to 350ºF.

2. For the crust, place the butter in a small saucepan over low heat to melt. Break the cookies or crackers into the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade and pulse until crumbs, 10 to 15 seconds. (You can also smash the crumbs using a large Ziploc bag and rollling pin and mix the crust in a large bowl.) Pour the melted butter into the processor and pulse 6 to 8 times so the ingredients pull together. Press the crust mixture into the bottom and up the sides of a 9-inch pie pan, or a 1 1/2-quart casserole.

3. For the filling, separate the eggs, placing the whites in a large bowl for the meringue and the yolks in a large bowl for the filling. Pour the condensed milk into the bowl with the yolks and whisk to combine well or beat with an electric mixer on low speed until well combined, 1 to 2 minutes.

4. Wash the lemons and pat dry. Grate the zest of 1 lemon in the bowl with the yolks. Cut all the lemons in half and juice them to yield 1/2 cup lemon juice. Pour this into the bowl with the yolks, and whisk well to combine, or mix on low speed 1 minute until well incorporated. Pour into the crust, and place in the oven to bake until set, about 15 minutes. Leave the oven on.

5. For the meringue, beat the egg whites at high speed with an electric mixer until foamy, 1 to 2 minutes. Continue beating, gradually adding the sugar until stiff and glossy peaks, about 2 minutes more.

6. Spoon the meringue over the top, and create swirls with a spoon or spatula. Place in the oven to brown, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove to let cool to room temperature, 1 to 2 hours, before slicing. Chill uncovered for up to three days.