From biscuits to cornbread, Anne Byrn documents Southern baking from 14 states

Nowhere else in the US do the traditions of cornbread, biscuits, puddings, cakes, and pie, run as deep as in the South. In her new book, Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories, Anne Byrn shares the stories and techniques behind the most treasured recipes of the region.

Evan Kleiman: The recipes in your book come from 14 states. We in the West tend to think of the South as a monolith, but in fact, there's incredible diversity of land, people, and lifestyle. Can you speak to why you think such a robust baking tradition was created and has been maintained in the South? 

Anne Byrn: I would say it's been created because of the land, which is very unique. The Southern, southeastern part of the US is unique. And you're right, the diversity of the coastlines — the bayou, the farmland, the mountains — we've really got it all. And the people. 

Because of those long spans of coastlines, and New Orleans and Charleston in particular, we've had a lot of different cultures come to the southeast, and they've left their baking traditions here. Also, we have not had the commercial bakeries that have been found in the Northeast. So our baking has really been at home, and it's been to feed people. I think that's what makes us unique.

"Baking in the American South" compiles recipes from 14 states. Photo courtesy of Harper Celebrate.

Cornbread, we have to start there. How did it become, as you call it, "the daily bread of the South?"

It was what everybody had access to. We could not grow wheat everywhere. We could grow corn everywhere, and that's why corn is sort of the lifeblood and cornbread. But not everybody had access to wheat, and the early baking with wheat flour would have been in New Orleans, where it was imported. The flour was imported from France, and baking in the South is all about access. Who could afford it? Was it available? You could grow corn in any patch of land, and it could be milled at home, or it could be milled in the local mill, and people had access to it. 

The type of cornbread they baked really had to do with the type of corn that was grown in that area. That's how tradition started and kept up, because a mother would bake yellow cornbread, then her daughter would as well. And thus, it goes on and on and on. In Middle Tennessee, where I was raised, I was always raised on white cornbread. It was made from white cornmeal, and I have found in my research that that is unique, also to parts of Mississippi and North Carolina as well.

How many recipes for it are there in this book?

For cornbread? Between 22 or 24, I believe. I believe everybody has the right to make cornbread the way they want to make cornbread. Unlike some authors, I'm not going to tell you there's only one way to make cornbread, because there's not. To me, that was the pleasure of writing this book, finding the stories, finding these people, and really tracing it back to why sugar was added to cornbread and why Crescent Dragonwagon in Arkansas brings this recipe for cornbread from Brooklyn to the southeast, serves it at her bed and breakfast, and she considers it sort of the great cornbread that's right in the middle. It appeals to northerners, southerners, Blacks, whites, because it's made with yellow cornmeal and has a little bit of sugar. To me, those are the stories. Cornbread made on a griddle, corn hoecakes. I grew up on fried cornbread so to me, that's the real fun of it.

Talk a little bit about the different kinds of cornmeal that we should know about, or corn flour, for that matter, and what you look for when you are sourcing it.

Well, it depends largely on the recipe. I would say that I think of cornmeal in two camps. It's either coarsely ground or it's finely ground. If I'm going to make spoon bread or little corn cakes, maybe corn sticks that have a lot of crust and real crispy, I might choose a finely milled cornbread because the inside, the texture inside, is going to be really creamy. Whereas if I wanted a cornbread that's big and bold and has nice, crunchy edges and a lot of real forward corn flavor, then I want a coarsely ground cornmeal. 

I also feel like, like you mentioned, the locally milled, you're going to have more flavor. They're more freshness, more interesting cornmeal if it is locally grown and milled, and most of that is the coarsely ground, or, as we say, unbolted. It is not sifted, and it has not been enriched with any B vitamins. On the other hand, that finely milled cornmeal, that is what you're going to find on the supermarket shelf. 

Do you want to give a shout out to your local mill, the mill that you really love buying cornmeal from? 

Sure, I'll give a shout out to three actually. In the South, one in East Tennessee is called The Old Mill. They have a fabulous coarsely ground white corn meal, and they will ship it. There's also the War Eagle Mill in northern Arkansas. Same thing, coarsely ground, gray cornmeal. And then in Virginia, one of the oldest mills is Wade's Mill. It's in the Shenandoah Valley. Their corn is grown fairly close by. They're growing some of the heirloom old varieties of corn, the white flint, white hickory shoepeg yellow corn, and some of those are just so delicious and fun to work with. 

You have recipes for cornbread, gingerbread, crackling, cornbread, Zora Neale Hurston molasses cornbread, and one from the chef Vishwesh Bhaat that includes cumin seeds, jalapeños, and Parmesan. Could you pick a recipe from this chapter that you think people should try?

Perhaps Shelby Foote's cornbread, which is just cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, egg, and bacon grease or oil. That is, to me, basic cornbread. 

Another really great one is Rona Roberts' Brown Butter Kentucky Cornbread, especially if you are vegetarian, and you don't want to have any bacon grease or anything like that. You're just browning the butter, and you're using that to augment the flavor of the cornbread. That's a really easy, nice one, as well. It's really stripped down and simple. 

I do like the fancy cornbreads, I really do. I think it's so interesting how molasses, as a sweetener has been used to sweeten cornbread. Adding sugar to cornbread is such a hot button issue in the South, whether it should be sweet, whether it should not be sweet. But you know, frankly, it's all about access. Who had access to white sugar, who had access to molasses. You know, that recipe for Zora Neale Hurston with molasses, to me, that cornbread shouts celebration.

Historian Shelby Foote's recipe for cornbread uses seven ingredients.  Photo by Rinne Allen.

The biscuit chapter, like the cornbread chapter, is enormous and fascinating. Where did biscuits come from? Did they come from scones? 

Yes, absolutely, biscuits came from scones, and how they were influenced came in all directions. I think it's so interesting to look at the French influence on the southern biscuit in the recipe that's from Charleston — Grandmother's French Biscuits. The use of an egg is almost scone-like. That was an old French Huguenot recipe and was one that was shared in the Charleston Receipts, published in 1950. It's people again, and as with the biscuits, same thing as cornbread, they have used what they had to create a biscuit that they love. 

There is a really great photo in the book of a slab of biscuit dough on a baking sheet where the biscuits have been punched out, but not removed, and the whole thing is baked together. Tell me about that. 

That is Dori Sanders' Biscuit Bread. When I interviewed Dori Sanders, who's of South Carolina, comes from a family of peach farmers, and she's an author as well, she told me about this biscuit bread and how sometimes they just got in a hurry, and didn't have time for stamping out the biscuits. So they just laid down the whole piece of dough right on the baking pan and put it in the oven and then cut it up like a big pizza. And then sometimes they would cut some rounds out of it, but they'd leave the rest, because people at the table might differ whether they're an inside person and they want one of those biscuits that's been cut from the middle and is softer on the outside or an outside person and they like the corners that get very crunchy. 

We also got into a wonderful conversation about scraps. I think when you cut rounds of dough out of a rectangle, you're going to get scraps. So how all of these cooks that I interviewed, how they dealt with scraps, whether they're rolled, which was kind of poo-pooed, or did they wrap. Some of them, Carrie Morey wraps the scraps around her biscuits like a snake coiled around the biscuits to keep the biscuits going straight up in the pan. People made dumplings out of biscuits. They made something called biscuit pudding out of scraps of dough. It was all so interesting but this recipe from Dori Sanders, biscuit bread, there are no scraps whatsoever.

Anne Bryn says that the South didn't have the commercial bakeries of the Northeast, giving the region's recipes a homespun personality. Photo by Danielle Atkins.

I love the way that looks so much. We're recording this the day after the presidential election, and before we sat down today, I happened to open your book to the story you tell about the Satsuma Tea Room in downtown Nashville. Can you leave us with the story of Satsuma?

Absolutely. Satsuma was ground zero for voting on the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. In the hot summer of 1920, Tennessee, believe it or not, was the crucial 36th state to ratify. The liquor lobby, Jack Daniels in particular, was opposed to the vote, as were the church ladies, because they felt voting for women would take women out of the home. 

In the end, there was a young State House member from rural East Tennessee, and he had received a letter from his mother, and she asked him to quote, "be a good boy" and vote for the amendment. And sure enough, he did. 

It passed, and Tennessee became the 36th state, but it all was because of being in that Tea Room in Nashville, in that environment of women getting together, working together, and working together when things were not necessarily going their way. I am extremely proud of Satsuma to this day, and extremely proud of that young legislator from rural East Tennessee.