Baked in Tradition with Anne Byrn

Honoring the roots and evolution of Southern baking

In 2021, when Anne Byrn was on tour to promote her book A New Take on Cake, an audience member asked her what was special about Southern baking. To her consternation, Byrn, a lifelong Southerner, couldn’t come up with a good answer. “I hemmed and hawed,” she says, “and looked to the audience like a pitiful puppy!” Byrn’s new cookbook, Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories (Harper Celebrate, 2024), is the result of a years-long journey to respond to that simple but provocative question. “I have a better answer now, a bigger answer,” she says. “What I would say now to the woman from Ohio is that the South had the first and still has the finest style of baking in America, without a doubt.”
That unique style developed over the long, complicated history of the South. In the antebellum period, enslaved women introduced unique flavors, ingredients, and practices not found elsewhere in the United States. For nearly a century after the Civil War, the rural nature of the region meant that most baking happened in the home. Those home bakers, both African American and white, followed the recipes of their mothers and grandmothers but often substituted with what was affordable and accessible. “Southerners, especially during Reconstruction and the Depression—they were born substituting!” Byrn says.
Baking in the American South honors Southern traditions of baking while also showing the ways those traditions have evolved over time to welcome new people and new styles of baking redefining the idea of Southern cuisine.