3 Southern Holiday Recipes That Have Stood the Test of Time

A cookbook author and fifth-generation Southerner shares their stories in a new compendium of the region’s most defining bakes.

Anne Byrn is a best-selling cookbook author and the former food editor of The Atlanta Journal- Constitution and The Tennessean. Draper James

Southern baking, writes veteran cookbook author Anne Byrn, is “quite possibly the first and finest style of baking America has ever known.” She makes the case for it in her latest tome of a cookbook, “Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories.”

A fifth-generation Southerner, Byrn looked far beyond her home state of Tennessee. She researched each of the 14 Southern states, interviewed locals, and dug into library archives to find the best recipes and stories, both present and past. “I took a big-picture, step-back look at the South and considered how railroads, poverty, isolation, slavery, migration, and many other factors affected what people baked,” she said. “It was an ongoing project for more than three years. It consumed me!”

Rinne Allen

There was also plenty of another kind of consumption: the rigorous testing and tweaking of historical recipes for modern home cooks. “What was considered delicious in the 1930s might seem spartan today,” she noted. Part of the challenge was finding modern equivalents for old ingredients and translating measurements—or lack thereof. “Grandmother likely had her own flour scoop and knew how she measured a cup, level or rounded, or possibly she didn’t measure at all!”

Her perseverance was rewarded. The final collection, which includes entire chapters on cornbreads and biscuits, and sweets from obscure regional pies to famous Christmas cakes, tells a story of Southern baking, tradition, and culture. The recipes’ stories are woven into the lives of generations of Americans. Byrn shared three gems just in time for the holiday season.

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How to Bake Like a Southern Grandmother

Anne Byrn shares five timeless tips from bakers past:

Repeat favorites, especially for the holidays. People remember recipes that are repeated annually. And grandmothers were good about that.

Bake with your senses, using touch and your sense of smell to determine if a cake is done.

Let little people come into the kitchen and watch and help.

Don’t scrimp on ingredients. I was told stories of baking during the war years and using precious white sugar. I was told about how people of Appalachia would save money to bake a cake to bring to a holiday supper. People have scrimped and saved in order to bake something nice for the people they love. You should, too.

Tell the story about the recipe. Pass on family stories so they will be remembered.

My Christmas Family Tradition

Byrn and her grown children have a Christmas tradition of getting together to decorate sugar cookies and take family photos, “the tackier the sweater or apron the better,” she said. Some details have changed over the years: “Our mugs of cocoa have gravitated to flutes of bubbly.” Others are constant: her grandmother’s crescent cookies, punch cups of boiled custard (an old-time Tennessee specialty), and freshly baked yeast and sweet rolls, all putting a Southern stamp on their festivities.

RECIPE: MRS. MOSAL'S WHITE FRUITCAKE WITH BOILED CUSTARD

RECIPE: DUNCAN HINES'S BUTTERHORNS

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.