The Irresistible and Timeless Appeal of Southern Baking

Author Anne Byrn reveals why the time-honored holiday menu is so revered, plus three recipes to share

Anne Byrn,

AARP

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Published November 13, 2024

AARP (Danielle Atkins)

When I was a young food writer in Atlanta in the early 1980s, there was nothing I liked better than celebrating a holiday with friends.

This meant I didn’t have to drive all the way home to Nashville for sweet potato casserole — or endure family drama. And especially no obligatory canned jelled cranberry, thank you very much. My creative friends simmered cranberries with Grand Marnier, orange zest and a touch of ginger. If I stayed in Atlanta, I ate steamed green beans tossed with a light tarragon vinaigrette. And the dessert was something splashy, like white chocolate bread pudding.

When I got the courage to tell my mother I wasn’t coming home, she was disappointed, so I said I needed to stretch and grow — and not that I’d felt trapped by the cornbread and chess pie legacy that had been decided for me. I had been writing about food in Atlanta, the largest, most vibrant city in the South. I had gone to Paris and studied French cooking for three months. I had reviewed restaurants and interviewed Julia Child. These family recipes, although unique to my Middle Tennessee region, seemed as ordinary as a same-old starched cotton dress.

Recipes connect us to our past

Thinking back now, I have no trouble recalling the Nashville holiday menu, which like the limestone beneath our family home, never budged. It was highlighted by homemade yeast rolls my mother would buy from her friend Ella Beesley until we learned to make them ourselves. They were as soft and light as angels’ wings.

Once I was married and had children, we jumped onto a schedule of where to spend holidays — with your family and without. Decisions were made for us. But I soon found that some of the new recipes from my husband’s family thrilled me, like sweet potatoes with fresh orange juice or scalloped oysters baked with butter, Ritz crackers and loads of cream.

And now, as my children are grown and living in Florida, Connecticut and Colorado, I am the one home in Nashville. Both of my parents and my in-laws have passed, so it’s up to my husband and me to keep our family traditions alive. Those recipes I once shunned because they were part of my mother’s world are now part of mine. And I feel responsible to bake them each year and pass along their stories to my children and my granddaughter. It’s that repetition that not only makes us better bakers but also reinforces traditions that began long before us. The holidays preserve what the everyday loses.

Family recipes are more than instructions on how to make a casserole or cake. They are the people we love — a mother, an aunt, a grandmother. They might be penned in their handwriting, smudged from a spill of cocoa, yellowed from time’s passing. They are our story, too. So why wouldn’t I want to make these recipes each holiday over and over infinitum?

Like a strong family tree, the main dishes, sides, breads and desserts are weighty limbs outstretched from the trunk, but more curved than straight. It's as if they have grown in fits and starts, shrinking back on those years when children didn’t come home, and growing steadily again when grandchildren arrived and visits were more frequent.

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While I’ll never refuse someone bringing a new appetizer or salad to a holiday meal to share, when it comes to the cornbread dressing, rolls and dark pecan pie with fresh Georgia pecans — those legacy recipes are non-negotiable.

Why I treasure Southern baking

About three years ago, I was traveling on a book tour and was at the Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Someone in the audience asked me what I was working on next, and I replied a book on Southern baking. Without hesitation, a woman raised her hand and asked what’s so special about Southern baking.

I paused — shocked, really — and was unable to begin an answer. I was a fifth--generation Tennessean and had written more than a dozen cookbooks, many sharing the wonderful family recipes and stories of my South. Southern baking was the best in the land, I thought to myself. Didn’t everyone know this?

"Baking in the American South" by Anne Byrn includes 200 recipes and more than 150 photos from 14 states.

Rinne Allen/Harper Celebrate

Bake With Anne

Byrn shared three recipes from 'Baking in the American South' with AARP members:

Nashville Chess Tartlets

This smaller version is great for summer barbecues, packed in box lunches, and on the table at holiday parties.

My Grandmother’s Virginia Spoonbread

One bite, and you will see why cooks have revered it and why historians have waxed poetic about it.

Ella Beesley’s Refrigerator Rolls

These are the Southern version of Parker House rolls — light as a feather and yet wickedly rich.

Well, obviously they didn’t.

So the book I began to write also became a quest to find out why Southern baking is so distinctive. Is it special just to me? Or to everyone and why? Why more so than in the Midwest or California?

Through a three-year process of diving into the recipes and stories of 14 states, from Texas clear up to Maryland, I learned that Southern baking was formed by the people who have lived here and the land — the coasts, bayous, rolling farmlands and mountains. Together, these people and the Southern land have birthed a style of baking unknown anywhere else in the country.

The South is where cornbread feeds you. Biscuits are special. Pudding comforts. Pies are forgiving. Cake is for celebration. Cookies for children. Southern baking has sprung out of home kitchens just like mine, not commercial bakeries.

So it’s no surprise that the South knows that homemade tastes better than store-bought. And that recipes — like memories — connect us.

Ella's rolls bake in both tradition and family

As I have aged, I have come to understand the importance of baking and setting up traditions and repeating these traditions and recipes. It's so that folks younger than myself have something to hold on to when I’m not around to help scatter flour on the counter so the roll dough doesn’t stick. I know by instinct the exact moment to pull Ella’s rolls from the oven, and I want my daughters, son and granddaughter to know this as well.

And I will continue to make yeast rolls with my grandaughter — and if I have more grandchildren, when they’re old enough to stand on a stool to reach the counter, too. There’s something precious about small, chubby hands pressing into soft dough. A smile spreads across their face, the same kind of look when they’re jumping into freshly fallen snow or a pile of leaves, I imagine. Sheer joy.

We cut out dough rounds together and dip them in melted butter, fold them in half and place them side by side in a baking pan like people on a bus, I tell my granddaughter. Then we cover them quietly with a cloth to let them rest and rise, and pop them in the oven and smell them baking. That aroma is like no other. We eat them warm, right from the pan.

I want to carry on traditions and repeat recipes for preservation’s sake, and I’m not alone. My granddaughter is likely to proclaim to her teacher, friends and her other grandmother that she’s "going to Nashville to Nene’s house, and we’re making rolls.’’

Ella Beesley’s Refrigerator Rolls, to be more specific. Recipes are oracular, said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Eudora Welty. In her introduction to The Jackson Cookbook (1971), she said recipes "had to be imparted — there was something oracular in the transaction — and however often they were made after that by others, they kept their right name. I make Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake every Christmas, having got it from my mother, who got it from Mrs. Mosal, and I often think to make a friend’s fine recipe is to celebrate her once more.’’

When I was young, I wasn’t hungry for the same family recipes, but now, these recipes are precious memories, and they’re all I want to eat.

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Anne Byrn is a New York Times bestselling American cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She writes a weekly Substack newsletter called Between the Layers.