The Bitter Southerner Podcast: The Exactly Right Cake
(opening theme music)
Chuck Reece: It's The Bitter Southerner Podcast, episode four of our second season from Georgia Public Broadcasting and the magazine I edit, The Bitter Southerner. I'm Chuck Reece, and today we're talking about cake. Not just any cake, but the exactly right cake.
[00:00:30] Chuck Reece: Now I don't want to start the show off with a downer, but here are a couple of facts about your host. One, I was an only child. And two, my mama died of cancer when I was just 11 years old. And I bring this up today only because of something that I'd learned a couple of days after she passed away. And I learned it the first time I walked into the kitchen of the funeral home where her body lay [00:01:00] in repose. And on the tables in there, I had never seen so many beautiful cakes in my life. And that was the beginning of my knowledge about a specific part of southern culture.
Chuck Reece: See, when a small town community in the south prepares to come together to honor someone who has passed away, something clicks in the brains of the community's cake bakers. They get to thinking. They remember little acts of [00:01:30] kindness done for them by the departed. They remember what she loved to eat. The little things she said to them over the supper table. And then they take all that information and bake the exactly right cake. And the cake stands on a table in a funeral home kitchen not merely as solace for the grieving, but as a tribute to the one who's gone away.
[00:02:00] Chuck Reece: The exactly right cake is, in its own humble way, a historical document. And that, dear hearts, is our subject today. Welcome to episode four, The Exactly Right Cake.
Chuck Reece: Now my view of the cake as a historical manuscript was mostly just my own conjecture, and even that was shallow until I met a woman from Nashville, [00:02:30] Tennessee, named Anne Byrn. Some of y'all might know her by her nickname, The Cake Mix Doctor, and she is indeed the person who has taught America how to take that box of Duncan Hines in the cabinet and turn it into something special.
Chuck Reece: Now Anne has written a host of cookbooks, she's been on the New York Times Bestseller List, and she has sold millions of copies of them. But among her books, I have a favorite. It's called American Cake, and in it Anne traces the evolution of [00:03:00] cake in America from the 1600s to the present day. And not just what was cooked and where, but also who cooked it. And when I read American Cake, I
1 learned many things I felt like I should've known already, so we invited Anne to our studio to talk about them.
Anne Byrn: I had to look at recipes, not only thinking who could have afforded that recipe, [00:03:30] but who made that recipe. Who was in the kitchen? Coconut cake, uh, jam cakes, caramel cake, uh pound cake, fruit cake, all these labor intensive recipes that southerners have bragged about for generations really did come as a result of having slave labor in the kitchen. There is no way from the labor standpoint before KitchenAids, before electricity, that you could have beat pound cake batter.
[00:04:00] Anne Byrn: Think about incorporating a pound of butter with a pound of sugar, 12 eggs, a pound of flour. That was a lot, a lot of weight, and it took a very strong and able cook to do that. Um, and on and on. Chopping the amount of fruit that goes into a fruit cake. And then when you get into different types of layered cakes and the tea cakes, and when sugar became less expensive and you had the seven minute icings, who whipped all the egg whites? Yeah.
[00:04:30] Anne Byrn: I mean it's very humbling. It's very...for me it was very humbling. And I felt like as a writer and as someone who loves to bake, I had to be able to tell that story any time I could. And to be comfortable giving the acknowledgement when I could.
Chuck Reece: Yeah. In recent times there seems to be a greater willingness to pull the lid off of truths like that.
Anne Byrn: Hmm.
[00:05:00] Chuck Reece: That we once thought it was more convenient to ignore.
Anne Byrn: Yeah. That's true.
Chuck Reece: That common blessing we've heard a thousand times.
Anne Byrn: Right.
Chuck Reece: Bless this food and the hands that prepared it. The last part of that is way deeper than most people think.
Anne Byrn: I think you're exactly right. And when we say those blessings now, I think of that very thought. And anyone who has put together a lot of effort to- for a holiday [00:05:30] meal, you're feeding 16 at the table. You- you know there were a couple of people or one person in particular who went out of their way and has been on their feet all day. I think it's just a courtesy to acknowledge them in the blessing. We also acknowledge people who are not here, i.e. in the south, those who've died.
2
Chuck Reece: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Anne Byrn: I mean in every blessing we have with our family, we have to say that because [00:06:00] somebody's... it's, it's that holiday and, and Aunt Mary Jo's not there, you know. So it's courtesy to her children that she be remembered in the blessing.
Chuck Reece: Yeah.
Anne Byrn: We have a lot of holdovers like that and-
Chuck Reece: We do. We do, and, and the blessing at the table should give us an occasion to talk about those things that we used to ignore.
Anne Byrn: I think it's good. That's a very good point.
Chuck Reece: I like to think that every time a new culture becomes part of the south, whether [00:06:30] it's, you know, Latin immigrants or, you know, refugee populations like the ones who live in my little hometown of Clarkston, Georgia-
Anne Byrn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chuck Reece: ... you know, from places like Syria or Vietnam, or... All those people bring a new flavor.
Anne Byrn: Definitely.
Chuck Reece: That gets thrown in the gumbo pot.
Anne Byrn: The chocoflan, those tres leches, those cakes of Latin and Mexican heritage [00:07:00] came out of canning factories, recipes off of m- milk cans in factories where people learned how to bake a cake using this product. Then those swept up into Texas and you started seeing tres leches cake and chocoflan in Texas.
Anne Byrn: Um, so I think it's such... so interesting to look at ingredients in the cakes we've loved and say, "Why did they use that? Why did grandmother put evaporated [00:07:30] milk in her chocolate icing on her chocolate cake? Oh, that's right, she's from Oklahoma originally."
Chuck Reece: Right.
Anne Byrn: It was a frontier ingredient as well.
Chuck Reece: So-
Anne Byrn: So a lot of those Texas recipes use canned milk for various reasons.
3 Chuck Reece: And it was really interesting to me going through American Cake, that when you finally work us up to the 2000s-
Anne Byrn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chuck Reece: ... you know, you really start seeing how closely connected these modern recipes [00:08:00] are to people's homelands.
Anne Byrn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chuck Reece: Either regions of, of America that they've grown up in or cultures they bring with them as immigrants. You know, like chocoflan.
Anne Byrn: Yeah.
Chuck Reece: And the tres leches cake, which we've all grown to love.
Anne Byrn: Very much so. Yeah, I think you're right. And the way we bake today is a melting pot. It is a gumbo, for sure. It's, it is all of the people who have come to this [00:08:30] country. And it's all the ingredients, you know, that you have, we have at our disposal to bake with. Um, it's flavors that we've sampled in restaurants, you know, that have introduced us to these new flavors.
Chuck Reece: Right.
Anne Byrn: Uh, it's who our children are in school with. Um, it's words we're more comfortable saying than we used to. I mean, it is defin- it has definitely affected the way that we bake. I think we're in bit of a baking funk right now. I don't know where we're headed where we haven't created any new content in a while. Let's [00:09:00] just say that.
Chuck Reece: You'll be hearing more from Anne along the way as she puts things in historical context for us. But as for what she said about baking being in a funk right now, maybe our next two guests might give Anne reason to hope.
Chuck Reece: Let me introduce you to two incredible bakers, Tracey and Kelli Wright. They're [00:09:30] sisters. They live in Atlanta. And Tracey says they bake with a purpose.
Tracey Wright: A lot of health related issues that black people have are because of the foods we eat. So, we wanted to be able to still enjoy these things that we grew up on without having to worry about it compromising our health and our wellbeing. To kind of make it a movement, like bring awareness to what you're putting in your body.
[00:10:00] Chuck Reece: What they bake, their cakes, cookies, muffins, donuts, it covers the range of 21st century eating. You can eat vegan from Two Dough Girls or you can be an omnivore. But you can always know that no matter what the ingredient is, Kelli
4 and Tracey have gone out of their way to find the healthiest and purest version, because Kelli says a cake should never be the first or last thing somebody has to give up when they try to get healthier.
[00:10:30] Kelli Wright: We want you to be able to have it on your, your last days and still enjoy it enough. You're like, "Oh, the doctor said I couldn't have this." We wanted to, you know, make it special, make it so you don't feel guilty. You know, take some of that guilt out.
Chuck Reece: Kelli and Tracey created their own bakery called Two Dough Girls. A name that pays tribute to the great Outkast song Two Dope Boyz in a Cadillac.
[00:11:00] Chuck Reece: Now listen to that. I know all you Outkast fans in the house are feeling all this right now, and let's take it back to the cake. The Two Dough Girls bake cakes and cookies with cultural roots and dirty south hip hop, and as a service to the African American community. And even though Anne Byrn didn't know about The Two Dough Girls until I introduced them to her, she says they're working in a [00:11:30] vein that has deep historical roots, the application of pop culture to baking.
Anne Byrn: If you go back through, there were cakes named after opera singers who were touring the United States. I mean, we've always been really open I think, in baking, to accepting whatever was happening at the time. Go back even further in American history and they were naming cakes after presidents.
Chuck Reece: When I first met Tracey and Kelli, The Two Dough Girls, they were making one of their most popular creations. It's called the Southernplayalistic [00:11:56] Cake, again named after an Outkast album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik.
Tracey Wright: So there's a little salt, baking soda in there.
[00:12:00] Kelli Wright: Plenty of flour to make it fluffy and, and soft and pretty.
Chuck Reece: And everybody who's baked a cake knows that you start with the dry ingredients and then-
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative), you'd put-
Chuck Reece: Add the wet ones.
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tracey Wright: Right. Do it separate.
Kelli Wright: We actually separated it this time for you.
5 Chuck Reece: Other ingredients in the cake include brown butter and cane sugar. And if you [00:12:30] want to know just how picky Kelli and Tracey are about their ingredients, listen to them talk about looking for the right sugar.
Tracey Wright: In our business we learned that some granulated sugars have pulverized bones in it, which, it keeps-
Kelli Wright: From animals.
Tracey Wright: From animals. Well, we don't know. How do we know, what, what?
Kelli Wright: It could be human bones. Who knows?
Tracey Wright: They could be.
Chuck Reece: Oh lord. (laughs).
Tracey Wright: But if you ever buy like a natural sugar from maybe Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, or Sprouts or something, sometimes the labels will say-
[00:13:00] Kelli Wright: That it's vegan.
Tracey Wright: And have bone shards.
Kelli Wright: Bone.
Tracey Wright: It's like, what? Why are you putting bones in there? But it's, so to, so it won't clump.
Kelli Wright: So it doesn't clump, yeah.
Tracey Wright: But who cares about clumps? Just smash 'em.
Chuck Reece: The Wright sisters also include pecans in both the batter and the icing of the Southernplayalisticcake, and it's a straight up nod to the south.
Tracey Wright: First of all, they smell great when you toast 'em, but then they also just pop. They pop more in the cake. Because it-
Kelli Wright: The nutty flavor really, um, comes out.
Tracey Wright: It's simple, but, but popping. I don't know. (Laughs).
[00:13:30] Kelli Wright: Exactly. Yeah.
Tracey Wright: (Laughing) All right.
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Chuck Reece: Th- That's kind of like Outkast music too.
Tracey Wright: Yeah, simple but popping. You know?
Chuck Reece: Yeah.
Kelli Wright: Yes.
Chuck Reece: Did y'all ever think about Southern, (laughs) Southernplayalisticcakealac [S00:13:41]?
Tracey Wright: (laughing) Not 'til just right now when you said that, but that's hilarious.
Chuck Reece: Well, y'all can play with that after we-
Kelli Wright: That's hilarious.
Tracey Wright: Totally.
Chuck Reece: ... finish this interview and we're eating cake.
Tracey Wright: Totally, cause we love to spin off pop culture and music and-
Kelli Wright: Yes.
Tracey Wright: ... so people can relate to and remember-
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
[00:14:00] Tracey Wright: ... you know, and Southernplayalistic is a name that people will remember. And hopefully a flavor that they'll remember one day-
Kelli Wright: Absolutely.
Tracey Wright: ... when they try it.
Chuck Reece: I'm just glad to be standing and watching somebody make a cake and I don't have to do it myself.
Kelli Wright: Yes.
Chuck Reece: So roll in.
Tracey Wright: All right.
7 Chuck Reece: Tracey holds the mixing bowl steady as she makes the batter and they go deeper into the baking process.
[00:14:30] Tracey Wright: We're adding in the whipped egg, the egg whites to the um, to the rest of the batter. Now it's looking like cake.
Kelli Wright: Yes.
Tracey Wright: Still nice and um, heavy and rich and it's getting fluffy again. Yes.
Chuck Reece: You have good bowl technique.
Tracey Wright: Thank you. That's what happens when... Nevermind.
Kelli Wright: You know what? Say it. Say it.
Chuck Reece: Go ahead. Say it.
Kelli Wright: Say it.
Tracey Wright: That's what happens when you take years and years to perfect your bowl [00:15:00] technique. Cause um, that's how we kind of got into baking as children. It was like, you know, all the, all the family get togethers were pretty much at our house. And we were like the sweets house, like "You guys have to make the pound cake. You guys have to have the carrot cake." And with my mom, she was like, "Well, you guys have to help. So, if you guys want to eat, you guys want this carrot cake, you want all this, you have to help us."
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tracey Wright: So we were in there cracking eggs and, um-
Kelli Wright: Mixing.
Tracey Wright: Mixing, measuring, um, of course cleaning, and just learning different techniques. So yeah, she's had half her life to-
[00:15:30] Chuck Reece: You've been doing it your whole life.
Tracey Wright: Yeah to-
Kelli Wright: Pretty much.
Tracey Wright: ... to figure it out. Her bowl technique.
8 Kelli Wright: We didn't, we didn't eat out a lot growing up. And like she said, every holiday it's like you better have that-
Tracey Wright: (Laughs).
Kelli Wright: ... those desserts or it's going to be trouble.
Tracey Wright: Or I'm not coming. (Laughs).
Kelli Wright: Right. It's like you guys are the ones. Or i- if the, you know, we were going somewhere else it was like, "You better bring the pound cake. You better bring that carrot cake and a couple other dishes, yeah. So we became like, the part of [00:16:00] the family that did the desserts. And it's like every- like, "We'll do all that other stuff. Don't worry about it. Just make sure the cake is there."
Tracey Wright: Make sure the cake is on the counter-
Kelli Wright: Yeah.
Tracey Wright: ... and it's already baked when I get there please. Thanks.
Kelli Wright: Yeah, so... So now all we would do is add the pecan. Is it pecans or pecans? How do y'all say it down here in Georgia?
Tracey Wright: I heard...
Chuck Reece: There is a great debate about that.
Tracey Wright: I heard its pecans when they're on the tree and when they come off it's pecans.
Chuck Reece: (Laughs). I don't think that's right.
Tracey Wright: (Laughs).
Kelli Wright: (Laughs).
[00:16:30] Chuck Reece: I- I- I- I think it's kind of like, well real- I- One thing I do know is that most people say it the way they grew up saying it.
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right.
Chuck Reece: However their parents said it.
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Chuck Reece: Uh... My parents said pecans. Here's the thing. I don't think anyone would ever get insulted by on pronunciation over the other.
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Chuck Reece: So now the batter is done.
Kelli Wright: So the batter is done.
Chuck Reece: Wow. And it-
Kelli Wright: And you see it's very like mousse like. It's super thick.
Chuck Reece: Oh it is.
Tracey Wright: It's not mousse like. It's heavy still.
[00:17:00] Kelli Wright: Yeah.
Tracey Wright: Mousse is kind of like-
Chuck Reece: Yeah. Yeah.
Tracey Wright: It's a heavy mousse.
Kelli Wright: You're right.
Tracey Wright: Maybe like pudding.
Kelli Wright: Yeah more like a pudding. Like a pudding pie.
Chuck Reece: It just looks like really delicious cake batter to me.
Kelli Wright: You want to taste it?
Chuck Reece: Yes, ma'am.
Tracey Wright: Well you can try it.
Chuck Reece: As soon as I can. There's got to be a spoon in this house somewhere.
Tracey Wright: And some spoon- Yes. (laughs).
Kelli Wright: He's like, "Yes please."
Chuck Reece: All right now I'm- I- I'm gone. I'm gonna get a bite.
Kelli Wright: He has a pecan in the spoon. (laughs).
Tracey Wright: Pecan. (laughs).
10 Kelli Wright: All right. His eyes are closed so...
Tracey Wright: All right.
[00:17:30] Kelli Wright: They've been closed. All right. That's telling me everything.
Chuck Reece: Great God almighty that's good.
Kelli Wright: Yeah. Even before we put it in the oven?
Chuck Reece: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Kelli Wright: That's awesome.
Chuck Reece: The next step would be putting the Southernplayalistic cake in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. But just so we didn't have to wait, the sisters had brought one they had already made. And it tasted just playalistic [00:18:00] [00:17:53]. And definitely, even defiantly southern. And after they finished baking, we sat down with slices and carried on our conversation.
Chuck Reece: The Wright sisters say their work to make healthier desserts requires a ton of research. And Kelli says that research has led them to some dead ends.
Kelli Wright: We made some big messes. It took a while to kind of, okay this is the kind of egg you need for a vegan cookie. This is what you have to do for brownies. This is what you have to do for cake. So it did take quite a bit of research, a lot of trial [00:18:30] and error to figure that out. And still like the pound cake we did recently, it's just like, man, like we can't make pound cake vegan. We can't.
Tracey Wright: Right.
Kelli Wright: Like you can't because pound cake has that s- signature fluff, that signature density, and it's like we can't disrespect pound cake like that.
Tracey Wright: (laughs).
Kelli Wright: Down here in the South anyway.
Chuck Reece: That's right.
Kelli Wright: (laughs).
Tracey Wright: (laughs).
Kelli Wright: So we had to really just like buck down and say, "We're gonna figure this out." Because it's something that we wanted to do.
11 Tracey Wright: Yes.
Kelli Wright: And it's just like a science project. You have to keep doing your research. Keep [00:19:00] trying things out 'cause it's been like a couple years since the first time we tried it.
Tracey Wright: Yeah we have...
Kelli Wright: And we just got it down like this Spring or something.
Tracey Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Kelli Wright: And one of 'em was like a sponge like it's a- like there- this is not a pound cake texture.
Tracey Wright: This is weird. It just-
Kelli Wright: (Laughs). And I don't want to do that. I don't want to say, "Oh this is pound cake." And you're over here chewing it like it's bubble gum.
Tracey Wright: (laughs).
Kelli Wright: Like, people won't come back for that.
Chuck Reece: Well no and people will know, who grew up eating pound cake-
Kelli Wright: Right.
Chuck Reece: ... will know that it ain't pound cake.
Kelli Wright: Right like, "What is that? They're- They're liars over there."
Chuck Reece: Yeah.
Kelli Wright: Like don't, don't talk to them.
Chuck Reece: Right.
Kelli Wright: Don't buy from them.
[00:19:30] Chuck Reece: Well but it seems to me that y'all have, have pulled off something harder than simply finding vegan alternatives. Not everything on your menu is vegan.
Kelli Wright: No.
Chuck Reece: You just have figured out ways to make it vegan.
12 Kelli Wright: Right.
Tracey Wright: Yes.
Chuck Reece: For people who want it that way.
Kelli Wright: Yes.
Chuck Reece: Uh but the cake you just fed me wasn't vegan.
Tracey Wright: No.
Kelli Wright: Cannot be, cannot be veganized. We would not disrespect it that way.
Tracey Wright: No that's not one of them.
Kelli Wright: Well but, you know, the thing about it is your, your using other, healthier alternatives in terms of the ingredients that you source.
[00:20:00] Tracey Wright: Right.
Kelli Wright: Right. We want to um keep it simple. You know I think that simplicity, you can taste that simplicity.
Chuck Reece: We've already talked about how the Two Dough Girls are dedicated to making black families healthier through their baking. But they say that one of their other goals is to show that two black women can run a business on their own and keep that business in their family. Even Tracey's son, who's just in the first grade, helps out.
[00:20:30] Tracey Wright: He's really into it. Like he'll be watching and sometimes he wants to help.
Kelli Wright: He's a great salesman as well.
Tracey Wright: He is.
Chuck Reece: Oh really?
Tracey Wright: Yes.
Kelli Wright: He is.
Chuck Reece: Tell me about it.
Kelli Wright: He's a great little salesman, Tracey like...
13 Tracey Wright: Well people come by our table if like- if we’re popped up at a farmer's market or an event or something. And he'll be like, "We've got brownies." And he's doing the arm. And, and like showing the display and turning and, and saying, "Would you like to try this?" And, yeah he's all for it. He's all in.
Kelli Wright: Yeah.
Tracey Wright: And he's-
Kelli Wright: And hopefully he'll keep that spirit.
Tracey Wright: I hope so.
[00:21:00] Kelli Wright: 'Cause he's only six and you know how teenagers are. 'Cause that's when we're really going to put him to work.
Tracey Wright: 'Cause he's not tall enough to wash the dishes yet. But he has already asked if he could. So, so soon.
Chuck Reece: I don't know. I- I-
Kelli Wright: Believe me I'm ready for you to soon.
Chuck Reece: Uh I remember my Aunt Mary, when it was time to uh shell peas or string beans or something like that, and particularly to make sauerkraut, you know. She would put my little keister up on a stool in front of the sink with a dish pan full of [00:21:30] cabbage and she would hand me what is basically just a tin can with one lid cut off of it. Which, sh- sh- that, she was tough, she would do it with a pocket knife.
Kelli Wright: Oh my God.
Tracey Wright: Wow.
Chuck Reece: And she was blind.
Kelli Wright: Oh!
Tracey Wright: Oh! She was amazing.
Chuck Reece: Yeah.
Kelli Wright: She sounds like a G.
Tracey Wright: Superwoman. Right.
Kelli Wright: Wow.
14 Chuck Reece: Oh she was. She was the OG canner and preserver for our entire family.
Tracey Wright: Oh nice.
Kelli Wright: I love that.
Chuck Reece: And, you know, she was- but she- she- she would be like, "I'm gonna make you a [00:22:00] kraut cutter. And I want you to stand over the- this dish pan until it's kraut sized."
Kelli Wright: Yeah.
Chuck Reece: You know, and there'd be like five heads of cabbage in there.
Tracey Wright: Wow.
Chuck Reece: And, you know, I think it's okay... Not just okay, but probably a great idea to put your kids to work-
Kelli Wright: Definitely.
Chuck Reece: ... knowing where their food comes from.
Tracey Wright: For the things they can do. That too.
Chuck Reece: Yeah.
Kelli Wright: And also-
Tracey Wright: Because he likes to juice lemons, he likes to do stuff. So yeah (laughing) I mean...
Kelli Wright: And just to, to have him around. And, and let him know what, what does [00:22:30] mommy do all day. And also too um, just kind of show him an alternative to a career in the future like if he's like, "You know I want to just travel. Or maybe I want to cook like my mom and Auntie." Or something like, there's alternatives. 'Cause I know growing up for us there was just like, "Are you going to be a teacher?"
Chuck Reece: Right.
Kelli Wright: "Are you gonna work in the courtroom? Are you gonna be in law? A doctor? Are you interested in any of those things?" And it's like if you're not, it's like, "Well what do you do?"
Chuck Reece: Right. So what are your, your hopes for Two Dough Girls as it grows?
[00:23:00] Tracey Wright:
15 Well another part of our growth as, as black women business owners, we want to be, I would say maybe a transition maybe for women who-
Kelli Wright: A resource.
Tracey Wright: Yeah a resource. A place where they- if anyone needs to start fresh in a new- like anyone that may have um, like, a history and has a hard time finding work anywhere else. We want to give per- people a second chance.
Kelli Wright: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
[00:23:30] Tracey Wright: So that they don't have to turn back to crime or whatever. Or, or a domestic violence situation or anything like that. Or, or refugees.
Kelli Wright: Yeah.
Tracey Wright: Like people who, who need help the most.
Kelli Wright: You know better yourself and make a life for yourself outside of whatever they're going through.
Tracey Wright: 'Cause we, we love the sense of community here and we want to be a part of that.
Chuck Reece: Cake and community. I think we ought to try more of that.
[00:24:00] Chuck Reece: Our thanks to the Two Dough Girls, Tracey and Kelli Wright. If you are ever in the Atlanta area, you gotta try that Southernplayalistic cake. And you can learn more about them on our website.
Chuck Reece: Now we heard the Wright sisters talk about how they view baking as a way to [00:24:30] improve the lives of African-Americans. So I think it's time to bring back Anne Byrn for a little more context. About how baking to advance the social good, that goes back a long way.
Anne Byrn: The cookbooks were a fundraising tool. For the suffrage movement. For women who could. And they, and their message was, you can be at home, you can cook well, you can feed your family, and still support the right to vote. Effecting [00:25:00] change through something as simple as recipes and cake.
Chuck Reece: We've already established this season that you can in fact change the world over a bowl of gumbo. Looks like you can do it over a slice of cake too.
Chuck Reece: Just ahead we serve up cake from the pages of the wildly popular, and greatly [00:25:30] misunderstood, 1980's cookbook, White Trash Cooking. I'm Chuck Reece. This is The Bitter Southerner podcast. And we'll be right back.
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Chuck Reece: Welcome back. We're taking on this episode about how cakes bring communities together. And how our history is buried deep inside the batter and the frosting. [00:26:00] So let's take a minute to listen to Tori Hook. Tori grew up in Franklin, Tennessee. About a half hour south of Nashville. But now she lives in Kansas City, Missouri. We talked to her on Skype and she told us that not long ago, she had made for the first time, a cake that had been passed down in her family for generations.
Tori Hook: The cake that I made is my great-great-grandmother's uh banana cake. And she [00:26:30] made it every year for my grandfather's birthday. And so he made it some when he was younger for my dad when my dad was growing up.
Chuck Reece: And that cake made an impression.
Tori Hook: Um, it's a very moist cake. Kind of dense. Um very sweet. And it has this frosting on it that's like uh, almost like a marshmallow cream. I think now they would call it a seven minute frosting.
Chuck Reece: Now they might. But her great-great-grandmother didn't.
[00:27:00] Tori Hook: She always called it a 22 minute frosting which I was very confused about. I, I never met her, you know, I just heard about it. And I realized it was probably 22 minute instead of 7 minute because when she would have made it, she would have been whipping it by hand. Uh and not with a mixer which I'm sure would have taken quite a bit longer.
Chuck Reece: Tori's great-great-grandmother made the cake in the house she lived in her entire life. Located in a little town in the Missouri bootheel. Tori's grandparents [00:27:30] still live there. But the cake with the 22 minute frosting, sadly, had fallen through the cracks of time.
Tori Hook: I think that when you forget culinary traditions or really any traditions. I- it just feels like you lose a part of yourself. And so something I've really started trying to do for holidays and um, just other special occasions is reviving some of those recipes.
Chuck Reece: So for her dad's 50th birthday, Tori decided to make that cake. She first asked [00:28:00] her grandparents for the recipe, but they didn't know where it was. They did, however, go looking. And they finally found it. Typed up on a 3x5 index card by Tori's great-great-grandmother. Tori followed that recipe. Adapted it to some dietary no-no's in her family. And served it to her father. He loved it.
Tori Hook: I was really skeptical about it working and creating this pillowy, marshmallowy texture that he remembered so fondly. But, sure enough, it worked. And he was [00:28:30] so excited about that frosting.
Chuck Reece: Thanks Tori for telling us your story.
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Chuck Reece: The types of cakes that define southern culture take many different forms. The pound cake, the coconut cake, the red velvet cake. But southerners are weird, so we like to add some creations that stray a long way from the classics. Things with [00:29:00] names like the potato chocolate cake, or the Our Lord's Scripture cake, or Arnalee's Stratgon's [00:29:05] chocolate dump cake. Now all of those recipes are featured in a 1986 cookbook by Ernest Matthew Mickler called White Trash Cooking.
Ernie Mickler: In the beginning of the book I state that there's white trash and then there's White Trash. And white trash with capital letters has manners and pride. The one with small letters doesn't have any manners and pride.
[00:29:30] Chuck Reece: That's Ernie speaking back in 1986 on Michael Feldman's What Do You Know. A show that was produced back then by Wisconsin Public Radio. Now Ernie Mickler, in some ways, seemed like an unlikely guy to write such a cookbook. He did grow up poor and white in rural Florida. But Ernie also grew up gay. And wrote this tribute to the food he'd grown up on after he had moved to San [00:30:00] Francisco and built a new life for himself. And sadly, two years after this interview was taped, the AIDS epidemic ended Ernie's life.
Chuck Reece: But his book endures. And it offers a thorough and rich account of recipes and conventions that many of us grew up with. Some of us have forgotten. And that folks who aren't southern couldn't imagine in the first place.
Ernie Mickler: Sometimes you have to take two or three cracks at it before you get it right. But uh the food is very good but the names, and the language, and all that I, you [00:30:30] know, they're hard to beat. And I really wanted to get that down.
Chuck Reece: Now White Trash Cooking is not strictly a baking book. It's full of other recipes. Like broiled squirrel, the anti-stick peanut butter sandwich, cooter pie, and something called whiskey sauce and here's the recipe: 2 cups of sugar, a half [00:31:00] pound of butter, teaspoon of pure vanilla, 1 pinch of salt, and 1 entire cup of Jack Daniel's whiskey.
Ernie Mickler: You use it on any kind of dessert that you want to use it on. Hopefully a lot of them. It's a real strong whiskey sauce too, it's good. Now they used it on uh on bread puddin', and uh some different things that, you know, were a little uh not bland, but not so heavily flavored.
Chuck Reece: Now the recipes in White Trash Cooking were inspired by people that Ernie knew [00:31:30] personally when he was growing up. Petie Pickette was his childhood friend and we reached her by Skype from her home in Florida.
Petie Pickette: Ernie never met a stranger. So everyone he met he made friends with and talked to about cooking. So he would gather recipes that way. Old family recipes of
18 different people he talked to. So that, so that the, for lack of a better word, manuscript grew and grew and grew. Until it finally was a book.
[00:32:00] Chuck Reece: But the recipes are just one part of the cookbook. White Trash Cooking also features Ernie's beautiful photographs of the south.
Ernie Mickler: I went to the countryside and I tried to, tried to take pictures of things that would evoke what we really came from and what we really are. And there's some rural people. And what a lot of people in the north seem to think is that they're all poor. Well that man in there with the felt hat on could be a millionaire. I mean, you know, it's just, it's a lifestyle, it's not an economic, I mean it's not a- uh, it's a social thing.
[00:32:30] Bill Fagaly: It's so poetic.
Chuck Reece: That second voice you heard after Ernie's is Bill Fagaly. He's the former chief curator at the New Orleans Museum of Art. And Bill and Ernie actually dated in the 1970's, and part of White Trash Cooking was put together by Ernie with Bill at his side.
Bill Fagaly: He did a beautiful job. I mean, I think he did a much better job maybe than some [00:33:00] of the renowned, so called great, southern writers. Because his portrait of white trash people was so poignant and so honest and to the point. And he did it with great reverence.
Chuck Reece: Ernie's photos of southern life are what first attracted a contributor to The Bitter [00:33:30] Southerner, Michael Adno [ 00:33:31], both to the book and to Ernie's story. Michael wrote a James Beard Award-winning piece for our magazine about Ernie, called The Short and Brilliant Life of Ernest Matthew Mickler. In the 1980's, some folks wrote Ernie Mickler off as a yahoo. A curiosity. But at the same time others thought he might be the most brilliant southern folklorist and [00:34:00] photographer of that era. Speaking to us by Skype Michael says reaction to White Trash Cooking was distinctly mixed.
Michael Adno: It was deemed one of, you know, the best cookbooks of the Spring cookbook season by the New York Times. I mean Harper Lee blurbed it. Uh Roy Blount Jr., you know blurbed, I mean there was just um... There was just an outpouring of, of respect and warmth for it. But at the same time, you know, the New Yorker uh magazine rejected an ad for it. They cited that it would, you know, offend its [00:34:30] readership. And that was also Ernie's trouble with getting it published, is a lot of publishers were so afraid of publishing something with a title like that.
Chuck Reece: Now I remember myself when White Trash Cooking came out because I was living in New York City at the time. My first thought when I saw it in a book store was, "Oh my God. What kind of unmerciful shit am I gonna have to listen to [00:35:00] because of that book." But then I bought a copy and I read it. And I learned that
19 it was chock full of heart. And a lot of other people felt that way too because only a month after White Trash Cooking hit the bookstores, its original publisher called The Jargon Society decided it simply couldn't meet the demand for the book. Jargon had received 30,000 orders, but it had printed only 5,000 copies. So it sold the rights to another publisher. Mike Adno says it's no surprise that 30 [00:35:30] years later people are still talking about White Trash Cooking.
Michael Adno: He did like what all great art does. Which is, you know, cultivate empathy like, you know, help people better understand the world. You know, for it to kind of still have that staying power 30 years later, I mean, you know, it's aged pretty well I think.
Chuck Reece: All the recipes in White Trash Cooking are affordable to cook. You're not gonna [00:36:00] spend a lot of money on ingredients because the people how gave Ernie the recipes didn't have the money to spend on fancy ingredients. Michael Adno says that one of his favorite cake recipes from the cookbook is something called Reba's rainbow ice box cake. Ernie learned about this cake on a trip to Alabama.
Ernie Mickler: I went over there and I- I met this lady, uh Reba. What was funny is that recipe I, [00:36:30] was one of the first recipes that the publisher wanted to try. So they had this big party one night and they made this Reba's rainbow ice box cake which I thought it was really delicious. But instead of, you know, going all the way they went to, they had some sort of a little uh, little French pastry shipped in on the side, you know, in case people didn't like it. And everyone was afraid of it except me and I ate it. I thought it was really, very, very good. Hell of a lot better than the French.
[00:37:00] Chuck Reece: Now Reba's rainbow ice box cake includes the following: 1 cup of confectioner's sugar, 2 eggs separated, 1 cup of pecans, a half a cup of Oleomargarine, 1 #2 can of Dole crushed pineapple, 2 boxes of lime jello, 2 boxes of cherry jello, and graham crackers.
Chuck Reece: Now Ernie didn't put a picture of that cake in his own book. But I just had to see [00:37:30] one for myself. So we asked a Georgia chef to make one for us. Cassandra Laflan [00:37:35] has a great job. She teaches cooking classes on cruise lines as part of a culinary partnership between America's Test Kitchen and a cruise company. But fortunately, she didn't have to get on a boat to find the ingredients for Reba's rainbow ice box cake.
Cassandra: I was able to find everything in the modern day context except the [00:38:00] oleomargarine. That I could not find. But margarine is pretty common and very affordable. All the ingredients I think total cost less than $10. So right now I'm uh whipping the egg whites until they're fluffy. And this is going to take a while. This is such a weird... This is such an interesting (laughs) combination. And I would [00:38:30] not normally think of adding raw egg whites to a cake mixture that's not baked. I mean and of course we know that the c- the cases of Salmonella are like one in 300,000, but it's something that we as a modern American public worry about probably a little bit too much. I'm going to put these in another bowl.
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Cassandra: I can't tell you the last time I whisked egg whites by hand. The recipe did [00:39:00] mention an egg beater. Which is sort of a, not in a modern day kitchen any more. I mean my grandmother has one, but it's not something that I have. And I don't know what it's supposed to look like because there are not many pictures I the cookbook. Or most of the pictures are of people and how they lived which I also thought was very interesting. Because you don't expect that from a cookbook. You expect cookbooks to be mostly about food. And for that time, in the '80's, for a cookbook to be about the people.
[00:39:30] Cassandra: And if I took this recipe to another country what would it look like? Like would it be diced mango instead? Would it be macadamia nuts instead of pecans? Who knows. And I think this is really a culture of using what you have and making it work.
Cassandra: Do you remember Sandra Lee? People criticized her type of cooking. Semi- [00:40:00] homemade. But I think this is a nod to that type of cuisine. People that maybe they have limited income. Or limited cooking space and they make it work.
Cassandra: All right, here we go. So here um i have the cherry jello. And this is cherry jello and um two cups of liquid but one cup of liquid is the pineapple juice from the [00:40:30] can. So we've wasted nothing. We didn't waste the egg white. We didn't waste the egg yolk. And we didn't waste the juice from the pineapple can. Which I can really appreciate um as a chef. Because I hate to waste product. And I appreciate when people try to use everything they have.
Cassandra: So this is the part where I would normally beat this with an egg beater. But I'm just trying to make this fluffy. So that when I layer this on top of the cake, it's going to be nice and fluffy.
Cassandra: So right now we're getting ready to make the whipped topping. Which the [00:41:00] whipped topping is um heavy whipping cream. You can't let this go too far. Or it will turn into butter. I just want to check on this to make sure I didn't take it too far. This is perfect. Because it looks like frosting. And I think that is the point of this cake. Is for this to look like a frosting.
[00:41:30] Cassandra: And economically speaking, this whipped cream is probably the most expensive part of the cake. The graham crackers are usually on sale and affordable. The jello you can buy pretty affordably. The nuts are also expensive, but he also mentioned that you could take them or leave them, leave them out.
Cassandra: And then we're gonna decorate this. Just the piece de la resistance well with some maraschino cherries. And this is always good advice with a recipe, is make it the way it's written the very first time. Try it. And then you can experiment or [00:42:00] add. Because if you start experimenting or adding and something goes wrong.
21 You don't know if it's your changes or additions. Or if its the actual recipe itself. And two, you should enjoy it the way that person created it or wrote it.
Chuck Reece: Words of wisdom from Atlanta chef Cassandra Laflan. We thank her for bravely taking up our challenge to make Reba's rainbow ice box cake. And it really does kind of look like a rainbow. Sort of a psychedelic rainbow, but a rainbow [00:42:30] nonetheless. You can see for yourself on our website.
Chuck Reece: And that's it for us today y'all. Our producer is Sean Powers[ 00:42:39], his job is gathering the ingredients and writing the recipes for our shows. And our editor, Josephine Bennette[ 00:42:45], helps make sure you get the best tasting cake we can cook up. And if you want to learn more about amazing cake recipes or other southern recipes, check out a Bitter Southerner story called the Seven Essential [00:43:00] Southern Dishes by North Carolina food writer Sherry Castle[ 00:43:02]. We've included it in the show notes section of our site. That's also where you can find Michael Adno's story on Ernie Mickler and Anne Byrn's piece on southern table blessings. Thanks to all those writers. To Petie Pickette and to Tori Hook who is a card carrying member of The Bitter Southerner family.
Chuck Reece: Ever South, our theme song, was written by the always incredible Patterson [00:43:30] Hood [00:43:28]. And performed by his band Drive By Truckers. We heard additional music from DeWolf music. And if you like The Bitter Southerner podcast, please review and rate it on Apple podcast, even if you listen to it elsewhere. Those ratings and reviews really help spread the word.
Chuck Reece: Our show is a co-production of Georgia Public Broadcasting and The Bitter Southerner Magazine. You can access more from each episode at [00:44:00] gpb.org/podcast. I'm Chuck Reece, and my three instructions remain constant: Hug more necks, abide no hatred, and always spend your time doing what you love, with the people you love. And until next time, eat more cake.
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