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The Exactly Right Cake 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 [00:02:00] Chuck Reece: The exactly right cake is, in its own humble way, a historical document.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.
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