WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: An interview with Anne Byrn, author of BAKING IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein and this is the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark and I'm Mark Scarborough and together with Bruce my husband We have written 36 cookbooks are working on the 37th. It's in editorial right now In fact, it's in the hands of the copy editor for the book right now Which means we're heading very close to layout and design for it. We'll tell you about that Sometime soon on the podcast.

It's going to be out in june of 2025 And I have to say that we're both more excited about this book than we have been about a lot of books. And we got 36 to be excited about. So we'll tell you about that on down the road in the podcast. In this episode of our podcast, we've got, as is always the truth, a one minute cooking tip. Bruce has an interview with Anne Byrne. She is the author of Baking in the South and will tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. Consider using soy sauce instead of salt next time you think a recipe needs some salt. Now, I'm trying to sit, I'm sitting here thinking, what are the limits to this? What is something that I would never put soy sauce on? Okay, like, baking recipes. We would never put soy sauce instead of salt in brownies. Or in cookies, cakes, ice cream. I'm thinking next time you think you want to salt your steak, or the next time you even want to salt your oven. Oatmeal.

Try a little bit of soy sauce. Really? Oatmeal? Porridge, why not? Put a little on your corn on the cob. Okay, that one I can buy. Yeah. Um, I can also say that if you want to add a little umami flavor to beef, pork, veal, if you're eating veal, or even chicken stews, that consider using soy sauce. Instead of salt as the salt agent adds so much more depth of flavor it does especially in brown braises and brown stews It's a great alternative salt consider it.

Okay before we get to the next segment of this podcast Let's say that we do have a newsletter. It comes out once twice a month Maybe once a month at this point you can find it on our website cooking with bruce and mark. com or just bruceandmark. com You can sign up there as I always tell you we don't capture your name or your email and you can unsubscribe at any time It's Mostly unrelated to this podcast.

I think the latest one was all about passata, the tomato reduction that is famed in Italian food and that you can find at grocery stores and places like world market and home goods across the North American landscape. Anyway, you can sign up for that there on our website and become part of that newsletter. Now, the next segment of our podcast, Bruce's interview with Anne Barron. You may know her as the cake mix. Dr. from years ago.

She made quite a success out of those books, but she's got a new book out, Baking in the American South.

Today Anne Byrne is with me, the New York Times bestselling food writer and author of the Cake Mix, Dr. Books. And she has a grand new book out this week called Baking in the American South, 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories. Hey, Anne. Hey, Bruce. Good to talk to you. Why do you think stories of Southern baking are so compelling? I think stories are compelling anytime, really, you know, regardless of the subject or the locale.

But I think particularly in this cookbook, I wanted, um, the focus is definitely baking, if this book is for people who love to bake, but it's also people who are interested in culture, you know, and maybe they don't understand the South. They, maybe they lived in the South and don't anymore. Uh, maybe they've got family in the South. And so I think it explains the South through recipes. And it was a fascinating project to work on. What was the process like for you? It was all over the place.

It was like casting a wide, wide net. It was about three years of, um, sort of reaching across the south, 14 states, but even looking at those border areas, say from Texas into Oklahoma or from. Arkansas into Oklahoma and Kentucky into Indiana, because a lot of the recipes that we may consider Southern, you know, they kind of reach into the Midwest a little bit, um, or up, you know, up the Atlantic coast. So I think it was reaching that, going back, really kind of studying some specific area.

Uh, areas of time in the south, civil war, you know, prohibition, uh, the World War I and II years rationing in the south, um, how rice production came into the south, how sugarcane production came into the south, kind of understanding the agriculture and the economy of the south, and then really understanding migration and how people migrated into the south, why they came and then why they left, which was a big part of, you know, southern banking as well.

How did you find these recipes and these super fascinating stories and people behind them? Well, you know, I mean, the stories are out there. I'll have to tell people the stories are out there. I mean, even our own families are pretty interesting, colorful characters, right? So, I mean, we, we've got stories all around us. Um, and, you know, today it's much easier to do the research than it used to.

I mean, you don't physically have to be in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Lupton, you know, collection of African American cookbooks. You can access them online. I did travel down to Tuscaloosa to look for them. Through a lot of those books, and that kind of led me on the path of finding the tea cake recipe, which was, um, linked to a woman in, um, Clarksville, Tennessee, which is not far from Nashville where I live.

And as it turned out, I was trying to find her through her children because she had moved to Atlanta later in life. And then, um, she had just died. So, I mean, it was, you know, I was, I felt myself at times trying to catch up and find people. While they were still here, if that makes sense. Because people who are older have knowledge of history that reaches further back than we do. And um, and they can speak to their parents and their grandparents. That was, that was tough.

It was, it was the most difficult part was finding the actual people, you know? You just mentioned a tea cake. Let's talk food. Tell me about that cake. Well tea cake is like a sugar cookie, except it's Puffier, spongier, you know, and I think we probably in the beginning, you know, something like what we call a sugar cookie was a tea cake, but with the change of ingredients in the South, and it's probably true outside the South as as vegetable shortening.

or lard were substituted for butter, perhaps in some of the old English recipes. Um, you get a spongier product with vegetable shortening than if you use butter. Uh, you also with new leavening agents, you know, say you use buttermilk in the tea cake.

In the recipe, and you use baking soda, you're going to get a lot of rise, a lot of sponginess like a cake, um, or you use baking powder, it's going to be, it's going to rise up nicely, but it's going to have a kind of a firm crumb to it, like you find in baking powder cakes. So depending on. What the formula is, what the ingredients are. Tea cakes can vary from a crispy sugar cookie all the way up to something that's pillowy like a cake.

You describe Southern baking as the first and possibly finest style of baking America has ever known. Can you explain that? That's right. Are we ready for a food fight? I wasn't ready to make that statement until I had done the research and wrote the book. Um, but I do believe that it is the first and the finest because of the breadth of the recipes. There are so many recipes. And what it draws from are the English and the French recipes for baking and a lot of German recipes.

And, you know, depending on the people, you know, a lot of these recipes were written down, but some were not. Um, you know, as, um, I forgot who my source was said that, you know, the, a lot of the English authors, um, and the, uh, did a great service because typically English people weren't, didn't write things down. The Germans did. They wrote everything down. They kept the beautiful diaries and they wrote all the, you know, beautiful early cookbooks in America.

Um, but it was after the civil war, um, there were, uh, charitable cookbooks were written in the South to raise money. To build hospitals and to help and feed people. And it was those cookbooks that were seen as not just fundraisers, but as preservation, because they documented the recipes that were baked in the homes, you know, in the 19th century. And as a result, those recipes have been carried down and carried down.

But a lot of the baking in the South and outside had to do with, did you have access to sugar, flour? Did you live on a farm and have eggs and butter? Um, and did you have the means then? Did you have labor to cook? Did you cook it or did you have slaves? I, it, you know, I think that's where baking gets really complicated in the South.

And I talk about all of that, but I do believe as a region compared to the Northeast, compared to the West, that Southern baking was the first and the finest style of baking because of its sheer grand variety. You were raised in Tennessee. It's where you live now. Can you talk about how baking there differs from the rest of the South? That's a good question, Tennessee and Kentucky are both in the upper South, uh, in Virginia as well.

Virginia's a completely different state baking wise because you have the tide water and you've got the mountain, uh, but Tennessee and Kentucky are quite similar. We would have had German influences coming down from the mid, late 20th century. Midwest. We're both, uh, Nashville is a river town, the Cumberland River. Nashville was the home of Martha White cornmeal and flour, which was tied to the Grand Ole Opry. They both promoted each other. It was a good symbiotic relationship there.

And then I think it was a lot like Louisville, you know, which was further north, also along a river. Um, but we, uh, the, the, where Tennessee and Kentucky sort of hit each other on that line, that was the wheat and Corn Belt of the South. Those were the plains that those were the land was flat out and we were nothing like the Midwest. But if there was a Midwest in the South, that would have been it because we don't have mountains. We don't have the coastlines. Um, so it was very agricultural.

And I think, uh, people came into that area to grow tobacco and they found that, you know, corn and tobacco kind of. Worked along the same kind of schedule, and as a result, a lot of cornmeal was really was grown in this area. So chest pie, for example, chest pie, you see that recipe throughout the southeast. It is like an old desperation pie, transparent pie, you eggs and sugar and butter. But in Nashville, in Middle Tennessee, we thicken it with cornmeal. So to me, and a little bit of vinegar.

We didn't, you know, early cooks did not have access to citrus. So there would have been no lemons or oranges in this area of the South going into pie, we would have used vinegar. And, and so to me, Chef's pie has to have that tang to it, you know, I've got to taste the vinegar and there's got to be a little grit in there from the cornmeal that is Chef's pie. Um, the other thing I think unique about this area, um, is that it being a state capital and during the, yeah.

Not in 1920 when women were, you know, the amendment to the constitution for women to have the right to vote was ratified. Tennessee, Tennessee was the 16th state. And so our tea rooms became quite popular and a lot of recipes kind of came out of that and were glorified from those days like, um, like trifles, sherry trifles, um, egg bread, chicken on egg bread. So I talk about in the book, you know, some specific recipes. That came from specific points in time.

What do you think most Americans don't know about Southern baking? They don't know that it's as diverse as it is, just as they probably don't know that the South is as diverse as it is. I think the South as a region is painted as sort of one, you know, pretty narrow and insular. Um, but we're, um, we're a lot more diverse than people think we are.

And, um, And not just, you know, in politics, but I think in, in baking as well, because people, whether they've been Jewish or German or English or French, Creole, you know, they've held on to recipes that have been in their families because they've been, these recipes have been baked for the holidays. So probably, yes, pecan pie is important, and I think pound cake probably is the, to me, it's the most symbolic recipe of, um, southern baking, and that's why it's on the cover of my book.

Why is pound cake so symbolic of southern cooking? I think it reaches back. It's one of the oldest recipes. And again, it, it, it talks of access, you know, it talks, uh, did you have access to butter, sugar, flour, and eggs? And that tells a lot about where you came from and, you know, how you made your money and who was in the kitchen baking. But I think through the years, pound cake has been lifted up really on a cake pedestal because, because those ingredients were precious.

through hard times. They were precious. You had to have, you can't really cheat with those ingredients and make a true pound cake. Enslaved peoples from Africa and the Caribbean strongly influence cooking and baking traditions in the South. But as you just mentioned, Jewish, German, Irish influences are there. I think that surprises a lot of people. Can you talk about, uh, what kind of impact those cultures had on Southern baking?

Well, I think on the German that, you know, like I mentioned, they wrote things down. We've got record of that. Um, you see the, the, the, the jam cake that I grew up in, in Nashville, the blackberry jam cake. Um, we.

You know, we make every Christmas, well, you can see how it came down from, it's, it's the state cake of Kentucky, and then it's in Tennessee, well, it's in northern Alabama, and it's in western North Carolina, wherever German people settled, they would settle in the south on land where black walnut trees grew, because they knew underneath those trees, there was dark and rich loamy soil, and there would be You know, steady crops, but they also baked with spices and, um, and the same can be said

for Jewish people and how they settled and came in through whether New Orleans or they came in through New York and down or on through Charleston, but their style of baking was repeated. And there's those recipes were repeated, the marble cake, the chocolate roll for Passover, the, uh, the got leaves, chocolate, chewy cookies, you know, that can be made flourless.

I just love, you know, when I, when I see a recipe of Jewish pound cake, you know, in a Jackson symphony cookbook or something, I always get tickled because I know that it is such a symbol.

of assimilation, you know, and Marcy Cohen Farris, who is a friend of mine, who has written all the wonderful books on, on Jewish cooking in the South, I mean, she will say that, you know, her mother, I think they live next door to either Baptists or Methodists in their small town in Arkansas, and it was as much about, Coming in, preserving their family's recipes as it was assimilating and becoming a part of the town and embracing Friday night football, you know, and, and learning how to make a

Baptist pound cake. I mean, those were things that you just did and how I think in the South, how in, especially in cities like Atlanta. When there was an early Jewish population, the Seeligs and some of those names and people who, you know, they employed, um, African American cooks in the kitchen and that relationship, and there was one caterer, Mary Bell Jordan, who was Vernon Jordan's, uh, mother.

Uh, she was a very famous caterer in Atlanta and she catered all of the Jewish weddings and, um, holidays, uh, and she just kept this treasure trove of, um, food.

Of kosher recipes that she knew how to prepare, but no, I think, um, and then the French influence obviously through New Orleans, through Charleston, it was fascinating to see, to, to learn that Baba Aram, you know, is still made on Christmas Eve and, and the story of Beignets and that, you know, the Cajun cooks, and that is a Cajun recipe, Acadian, so that is a French recipe as well, frying, but the black cooks throughout the South, understood frying and that's why fried foods, you know, are a

part of the Southern story. And I did put some fried foods in the, in a chapter in this book, even though they're not baked, there's still very much the beignets, the collage, um, fritters, banana fritters, apple fritters, they're all part of, of a sort of that mishmash in the South, the French, black, Caribbean, Jewish, it's all here. And it's all in the recipes. The history of the South is as rich in your book as the recipes. And you talk about the complicated history of the South.

You write all visions of gone with the wind aside, the South was largely poor. So what direct impact did that have on the baking that came out of the South? And Are there any examples of that that were so popular they're still around today? Well, cornbread. Cornbread is the example. And that's why I began the book with cornbread. I mean, we, yeah, you're right.

You may think of the South as lofty and pancakes and southern soft yeast rolls, but most people like cornbread because corn grew everywhere. Corn grew everywhere. Uh, and you could feed your family with a patch of corn, you know, from the back, from the backyard. So, and have it milled yourself or milled in town. Um, so cornbread, and cornbread is baked differently and it's looked at differently across the South.

I mean, whether you bake cornbread with white or yellow cornmeal, or you pour it onto a griddle and cook it like a corn cake, or if you put it in a skillet and make a big pan of cornbread.

Dad. is southern baking and it's simplest and most honest and real because all you really needed was a liquid and meal and You could have some leavening in there if you wanted to early recipes didn't maybe an egg if you had chickens That's it and can home cooks in the north in the midwest on the west coast Create these southern bakes even without access to some of the more Traditional southern ingredients like white lily flower.

Oh, yeah, definitely and I go into flower at the beginning of the book uh, because there is uh What you said is exactly true The spirit of Southern banking is that you should use what you have. So it would have been complete disservice for me to write this book and say, well, you've got to have like Lily, or you've got to have, you know, Carolina ground or whatever. No, you've got to use what you have that is Southern banking. And then, but learn how to adapt it. in a southern way to the recipe.

And maybe you make the biscuits with your local flour, but you find that they're a little too hard. So how do you soften that flour? Well, the next time you use two thirds of that flour and you add another third in of cake flour, something even like, you know, even King Arthur's cake flour or Swansdown cake flour, which has a lower protein count, it reduces the gluten in your flour. And they're going to be softer and fluffier.

So I give you a lot of tips for biscuit making, um, using what you have. Anne Byrne, your new book, Baking in the American South, 200 recipes that are untold stories is full of history as well as fantastic recipes. Great. Good luck with the book and thank you for talking about it with me this morning. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. That's a lot of effort and research that went into that book. Long time. She says three years. I could believe it. That's a lot of research.

There's a lot of research. There's a lot of recipes I want to try. And you know, this is a really interesting question. And this is, this doesn't have anything to and burn in her books. But this baking in the American South thing, the South is really known, right, for great baking pies and cakes and all that stuff. But other parts of the country are too. And how come we don't see baking in New England and baking in the Midwest and baking in California, the Pacific Northwest? I don't know.

I'm being silly, but regional baking. I don't think any region. I think baking in the South is sells outside of the South, but that baking in New England wouldn't sell outside of New England. Does that make any sense? It does. The South has, the South has had an image for centuries, right? New England, eh, it's so small, and Well, I mean, the South's Imagery is founded on enslaved peoples and the baking that enslaved peoples did in plantation homes. I mean, right?

Like cornbread and that kind of stuff. That's right. As you said, a lot of it is based on the enslaved peoples. And yet, of course, there is a lot of baking to be had in New England. But my hunch is a book baking in New England would not sell outside of New England. And I don't think it's as varied up here. You got, you know, But the variety of what you could do and call it from the South is so different. And as she said, the South incorporates so much more.

I mean, she's got 14 states, plus you've got the border states where things bleed through. What do we got? New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine. But we have a storied past and a storied history and a system. history that for many people is foundational to the United States. It's just an interesting set of problems. Before we get to the final segment of this podcast, let's say that it would be great if you could rate this podcast. Can we ask for five stars?

And if you could write a review, if a platform allows it, like Apple podcast, even just nice podcast does wonders for us. We are unsupported in any way. That is the way that you can support us. And we most appreciate it. All right. As is traditional, the final segment of this podcast,

what's making us happy? in food this week. And I'm going first. I never go first, but I'm going first. And what's making me happy in food this week is our pears. And here's why we went to Costco last week and we saw I walked. We didn't see. I walked past the pears out in the produce section and I could smell them as I walk past. I had to stop and say, Wait, where's that?

And I did a little research about Costco and fruit, and we've had a spectacular time with plums and peaches and nectarines this summer at Costco, and now we're having a spectacular time with pears, and I did a little research about this, and it's an interesting thing. We know that produce moves really quickly at Costco, and that is one of the legendary reasons why it's fresh, but here's another reason.

Why Costco produce tends to be extremely fresh, not only does it move fast, but Costco wants the boxes of pears that are closer to ripeness than your supermarket does, because in your supermarket it's going to sit on the shelf longer. That high turnover at Costco makes them want riper pears at all. Harvest in the boxes, pairs that would be mushy at your local supermarket by the time they got there and sat for two to three weeks.

Costco wants those because they know they're going to sell them immediately. So it is astounding. The pairs are just are outrageous right now. Well, I'm glad you bought the box because what you don't eat before we go on vacation. I'm turning into pear jam. Oh, I love pear jam. I do too. Maybe I'll even make a pear and lemon marmalade. That's a really good thing. What's making me happy. As you said earlier, veal, if you're eating veal, you should, you should eat veal, veal chuck.

Oh, our local farm. I shout out to Kelly all the time, Howling Flats. She harvested some veal and I never heard of a veal chuck roast and I braised it in a bottle of white wine with pearl onions and mushrooms and green olives and we ate it with mashed potatoes. And, and then noodles. I mean, it was enough that there were leftovers. still some left in the refrigerator. That's what's making me happy. And it was really delicious.

It was salty and it was savory and you didn't put dried fruit in it, which kept it away from being super sweet, which is always good for me. It was a wonderful meal. And if you don't know, in new England right now, we have actually tipped into fall and it has been. been extremely cool. In fact, at night, we've had our bedroom windows open and we've both been freezing at night in our bedroom. So we've tipped down into fall at this point and a veal stew was really just right for the moment.

Okay, that's the podcast. Thanks for being a part of this podcast journey. We appreciate it. Appreciate your time. So with us, we know there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of podcasts. You could listen to, thanks for listening to this one. And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food here on cooking with Bruce and Mark. So please go to our Facebook group, cooking with Bruce and Mark and tell us what's making you happy in food this week.

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