While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigenous American, European, and African—collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition. Recognizing that sentiments around southern baking run deep, Sharpless takes delight in deflating stereotypes as she delves into the surprising realities underlying the creation and consumption of baked goods. People who controlled the food supply in the South used baking to reinforce their power and make social distinctions. Who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not had traditional meanings for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. By the twentieth century, however, the popularity of convenience foods and mixes exploded in the region, as it did nationwide. Still, while some regional distinctions have waned, baking in the South continues to be a remarkable, and remarkably tasty, source of identity and entrepreneurship.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

Gives recipes for baking in the tradition of the American South.

A complete and comprehensive Southern baking book from one of the South’s best and most respected bakers, Cheryl Day.

The cake mix doctor...doctors cake mixes to create more than 200 luscious desserts with from-scratch taste.

A compilation of sixty-five of the greatest cake recipes from the South, plus plenty of baking tips, from the author of Southern Pies. It’s time to relax on the porch swing and feast your eyes on some of the tastiest cakes you’ll ever sink your fork into. There are recipes here for everything from Brown Sugar Pound Cake and fluffy white coconut cakes layered with lemon curd or raspberry jam to the chocolatey goodness of Mississippi Mud Cake and the extravagant elegance of Lady Baltimore Cake. With cakes this delectable, it’s no wonder Southerners are so proud of their baking history. Jam cakes and jelly rolls; humble pear bread and peanut cake; cakes with one, two, three, and four layers; and even Eudora Welty’s bourbon-soaked white fruitcake—each moist and delicious forkful represents the welcome-to-the-South attitude of the sultry Southern states. The Baking 101 section explains the basics, including buying the proper equipment, mixing the perfect batter, putting on the finishing touches (that means frosting, and lots of it!), and the how-to’s of storing your lovely cake so that the last slice tastes as delightful and moist as the first. As you page through Southern Cakes, you’ll surely come across some old favorites as well as many new delectable treats, plus a generous helping of Southern hospitality in each and every slice. “Food writer Nancie McDermott has compiled 65 of the most sinfully delicious cakes . . . and the result could make even Scarlet O’Hara weak in the knees.” —Chocolatier Magazine “For my money, the grandest-looking cakes in this book are the brown sugar pound cakes baked in a tube pan with a lush mass of caramel glaze drooling down its sides, and the classic coconut cake, with its feathery, dazzling white frosting. When I brought the coconut cake to the office, people in the street were literally lunging at it.” —Los Angeles Times

Witness the rise of Southern baking from humble recipes to one of the world's richest culinary traditions in this essential cookbook from bestselling author Anne Byrn. With 200 recipes and hundreds of photos, Baking in the American South has the biscuits, cornbread, cakes, and rolls that will help you bake like a Southerner, even if you aren't.