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!”
