By Sheila Gaines

Contributor

 

What makes southern baking so special? That question was asked of native southerner, and author, Anne Byrn, while she was traveling through North Carolina in 2021 on a book tour.

She found herself at a loss for words but members of the audience were not. They offered, “it’s your mama’s cooking. It’s the biscuits. It’s the flour. It’s the people.” Byrn called these responses “many different answers, but no definite answer.”

Byrn’s latest book, “Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Three Untold Stories,” in many ways, is her detailed response. Each recipe is introduced with a story of how it relates to the south and several of those stories have local connections.

For instance, Mississippi chef, Vishwesh Bhatt, attended graduate school at the University of Mississippi and it was in Oxford that Bhatt started cooking “for beer money.”

This is just part of the story behind Vishwesh Bhatt’s “Not Your Mama’s Cornbread” recipe on page 26. “These are the flavors of my childhood,” says Bhatt. “My cooking comes from the places I remember.”

In an interview aired on a CBS morning news show, the news reporter stated that the people associated with the recipes contribute to the art of southern baking and “explore the South’s complicated past and present.” Byrn obviously agreed as this is exactly what the book’s subtitle implies. 

However, she also shared that not all of the stories pay homage to the warm and fuzzy feeling often associated with baking.

Byrn spent three years working on the book. During the CBS interview, she shared her recent revelation that many people in the south cooked from a place of underpaid employment and enslavement. This forced her to accept the fact that something she loved and valued so much could also have a dark story. She called those three years “an education in empathy.”

Byrn’s readers can empathize with Columbus native, Robbie Montgomery’s story, which follows that of Bhatt’s. Montgomery is the founder of Sweetie Pie’s restaurant franchise. She was also one of Tina Turner’s backup singers in the 1960s when black performers couldn’t go out to eat after a show in the South because of Jim Crow laws. So, she cooked her mother’s buttermilk cornbread in a skillet on a hot plate in the motel room. Byrn includes no less than 22 recipes and stories of cornbread and over 30 recipes and stories for cakes.

When the CBS reporter called pound cake the “cake of the south.” Byrn called it “the cake of social justice.” 

Monies made from pound cakes and other delicacies helped pay for alternative transportation to and from work for people during the Montgomery bus boycott and readers discover other food connections to the Civil Rights Era. Zephyr Wright was hired by Lady Bird Johnson to cook for the First Family and is believed to have influenced President Johnson’s passing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 “by relating her personal stories of discrimination and Jim Crow segregation to him.”

This book has stories and recipes from home cooks, bakeries and the white house. Wherever the reader’s culinary skills lie, they will find a home here in Byrn’s new book. As one commercial reminds us, if you are southern, then getting together means eating together. And this is the perfect season to master a new recipe or learn the story behind an old favorite for one of those get-togethers.

“Baking in the American South:  200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories,” by Anne Byrn. New York: Harper Collins, September 2024. 485 p. ISBN 978-0-7852-9133-6. $44.99