Whatever you may have heard about Southern baking, it’s not all “magnolias and moonlight,” said author Anne Byrn, who is signing her new cookbook on the subject, Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories, at Buxton Books on Oct. 10.
“The South was poor, rural and isolated, with the exception of places like New Orleans and Charleston, and later Atlanta,” Byrn said. “People baked out of necessity. They had to feed their families, and they did not have the commercial bakeries of Northern cities. That’s why the book begins with cornbread because, to me, cornbread is emblematic of Southern baking. Corn grew everywhere, and everyone, rich or poor, had access to corn meal to bake, whether it was hoe cakes or skillet cornbread.”
French wheat didn’t come to Charleston until later and, as a result, Byrn said, cakes and pie crusts were special occasion foods.
The Nashville-based writer is the former food editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and later wrote the bestselling The Cake Mix Doctor, which helped home cooks “fancy up” desserts using boxed cake mix as a foundation.
This latest book is “my love letter to Southern baking,” Byrn said. “It reflects a career in food journalism and reporting. I wanted to figure out the answer as to why Southern baking is so revered, why it’s so good, and why people outside the South don’t understand how good it is. To do that, I had to really look at the land, the crops, and the flour, the sugar, the eggs — the raw ingredients that go into baking — to understand the people and culture.”
What she discovered was a set of “foundational recipes” (in her words) that define Southern baking.
“Cornbread is Number One. And biscuits. Nowhere else in the world are biscuits made with baking powder and soda, and a soft wheat flour, and then put in a hot oven with a sort of wet dough so they rise up and steam. They are so light and flaky! And then, pound cake. Pound cakes were sold by women to raise money for transportation to Montgomery, Ala., for civil rights marches,” she said. “And then, I think puddings and custards are foundational. You might have someone use egg yolks in a custard filling for a pie and then save the whites to make a meringue.”
Byrn added that a lot of popular layer cakes, such as blackberry jam and caramel, were the result of baking by Jewish settlers in the South.
Food even played an important role in Southern literature, Byrn said, mentioning the Lane cake from To Kill A Mockingbird, in which the layers of vanilla cake were soaked in bourbon, and a coconut cake that played a central role in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding.
The cookbook touches on Southern celebrities and the foods they loved, including the grande Dame of Southern cooking, Edna Lewis’s sourdough pancakes and homemade baking powder; cake mix mogul Duncan Hines, who loved making homemade crescent rolls; former president Jimmy Carter (his White House chef apparently soaked cornmeal with milk before making cornbread to make it creamier); and Southern food legend (and former Charleston resident) Nathalie Dupree, whose two-ingredient biscuits are the favorite of Byrn’s husband.
Baking in the American South even nods to department store bakeries, in which professional bakers used vegetable shortening and powdered sugar to make decorative frostings, as well as church suppers. “There is no doubt in my mind,” Byrn said, “that the better cake was the church supper over the bakery.”
The deep dive into Southern baking has produced one basic pie crust rule that Byrn said she lives by: The type of pie crust depends on the role of the crust in the pie.
“If you’re making something full-flavored like chocolate or pecan or molasses, you might want vegetable shortening because it doesn’t really have a strong flavor of its own,” she said. “Fruit pies should have a butter crust because the combination of the fruit and the caramelizing of the butter and sugar is just the perfect combination of flavors. With something like a sweet potato pie that is very sweet, you might want to use lard so the saltiness balances the sweetness.”
Mrs. Collins’ Sweet Potato Cake
From Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories by Anne Byrn
“This gorgeous cake comes from the late Elizabeth Cate Collins who raised her family in the Nashville house before us and grew sweet potatoes in the back garden,” Byrn writes. “Each year after the harvest, she would bake a sweet potato cake to send to a son for his birthday. A taste of home, the cake was shipped frozen and arrived redolent of spice and seemingly fresh from her oven. In fact, she was so adept at baking and shipping cake that in her 2023 obituary it read, ‘She was one of the best local customers for FedEx and UPS, whose agents viewed her as a friend.’”
Serves 10 to 12
Prep: 35 to 40 minutes
Bake: 50 to 55 minutes
- 3 medium (1 to 1 ¼ pounds) unpeeled sweet potatoes
- Vegetable shortening and flour for prepping the pan
- ½ cup roughly chopped pecans
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1½ teaspoons baking soda
- 1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon ground cloves
- ¼ teaspoon ground ginger
- 1½ cups vegetable oil
- 1¾ cups granulated sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 4 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon confectioners’ sugar for dusting (optional)
- Wash the sweet potatoes and pat dry. Place them in a large saucepan and nearly cover with water. Place the pan over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and let simmer until tender, about 25 minutes. Test for doneness by piercing them with a fork, which should easily slide through. Drain and, when cool enough to handle, peel the potatoes and mash. You’ll need about 2 cups mashed sweet potatoes. Set aside.
- Heat the oven to 325°F, with a rack in the middle. Grease and flour a 10- to 12-cup Bundt pan.
- Place the pecans in a small pan in the oven to toast while the oven heats, 4 to 5 minutes. When the pecans are cool enough to handle, finely chop and set aside.
- Place the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, salt, cloves, and ginger in a large bowl and whisk to combine well.
- Place the oil and sugar in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer on medium-low speed until they are well combined, about 1 minute. Add the vanilla and eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition, a total of 2 minutes. The mixture should be thick and smooth. Stop the mixer, add the sweet potatoes, and blend to combine. Add the flour mixture and beat on low until just combined and smooth, about 1 minute. Fold in the toasted pecans.
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until the cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center, 50 to 55 minutes. Remove to a wire rack to cool in the pan for 20 minutes. Run a knife around the edges of the pan, give it a few good shakes to loosen the cake, then invert the cake onto a serving plate. If desired, spoon the confectioners’ sugar into a sieve and dust it generously over the top of the cake. Let the cake cool for 45 minutes, then slice and serve.
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