Southern Breads: Recipes, Stories, and Traditions

By Marilyn Markel, Chris Holaday and Bill Smith

“Mouthwatering bread recipes . . . The authors bring heartwarming stories of Southern kitchens, told by hushpuppies, biscuits, and everything in between.” —Southern Living
 
The warmth of the oven and the smell of fresh-baked bread conjure comforting memories of tradition and place. Aside from being a staple on every table in the South, these breads and their recipes detail the storied history of the region. Biscuits emerged from Native American and European traditions. Cornbread, with its vast variety, is a point of debate among Southerners over which recipe yields the most delicious results. The hushpuppy, developed possibly to quiet whining dogs, is a requirement for any true catfish or barbecue meal. Author Chris Holaday and top culinary instructor Marilyn Markel offer the mouthwatering history, famous recipes and heartwarming stories of Southerners in their kitchens.
 
“Southern Breads is a book every cook, baker or wannabe will want to add to their collection—or start a collection. It not only includes recipes, but the history of breads and their sidekicks (and the how-tos)—adding up to the magic of Southern cooking.” —Cleveland Banner
 
“In addition to classic recipes, including the no-knead Sally Lunn Bread, a brioche-like loaf with English roots, Southern Breads offers a number of irresistible ‘go-with’ recipes. Pinto beans, made luxurious by a small but essential chunk of salt pork, are the ideal complement for cornbread. Country-ham compound butter for biscuits? Yes, please.” —Indy Week

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439658901

Book preview

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

When people are asked what defines the South, their answers will vary from differences in history, geography, climate and even accent. Perhaps the most important difference, however, is food. The South has many famous foods, but the most culturally pervasive and important is bread. The story of Southern breads is an extremely interesting one that helps us define who we are as a regional people.

Many regions of the world have their distinctive bread cultures: France has the croissant and baguette; Italy, the ciabatta and focaccia; the Middle East, pita; India, naan; and so on. In the South, we have cornbread, hushpuppies and biscuits. To a Southerner, these three breads are not just a side dish; they are essential to the meals they are served with. In fact, they are often the star of the meal: biscuits for breakfast (filled with jams, ham and cheese or just butter), hushpuppies as the required companion to barbecue pork and fried fish and cornbread at any time of the day. And it doesn’t stop there; there are also numerous derivatives, such as spoon bread, zucchini bread, pumpkin bread and more, all uniquely flavored by the harvests of the South.

While these breads can be quite delicious absolutely plain, what goes on the bread can be equally important. Toppings and accompaniments allow the same bread to be eaten numerous days in a row but in a new way each time (example: cornbread panzanella and cornbread with pinto beans start with the same cornbread recipe, but the end results are quite different). Recipes can be turned into creations both sweet and savory.

Another important part of Southern bread is the stories that go with them. These led us to incorporate the bread memories of Southerners from across the region. Almost everyone has powerful memories of bread—of eating it or of watching it being made by a beloved family member in the kitchen. When asked, some responded first with I don’t have a good story, but after we got them thinking and talking, inevitably an important memory, often from childhood, soon came out.

The historical origins of Southern breads are also important, so we have assembled recipes from some of the earliest cookbooks to focus on the region’s cuisine. Some may seem strange and foreign to us today, but others are not so different. Regardless, it is on these historical recipes that Southern bread culture has been built.

In cultures around the world, breads are a staple part of almost every diet. They are hearty and sustaining; there is a reason the idiom staff of life, used in reference to bread, came into being in seventeenth-century England. Said American poet Emily Dickinson in a letter to a friend in 1845, I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing Flour, Milk, Saleratus, & C., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch. We heartily recommend the same to you.

Chapter 2

LESSONS TO LEARN

Before anyone can appreciate and understand Southern bread, they need brief lessons in three other important subjects: history, geography and science. Yes, this is still a cookbook, but it is also a tale that involves human migration, wars, slavery, airborne fungus, chemical reactions and scientists. It didn’t start with our great-grandmothers in the kitchen with cast-iron skillets, after all.

Like many stories, this one begins far from where it has ended. Actually, we shouldn’t say ended because the story of Southern bread is very much alive and still being written. But it all probably began in ancient Egypt. No one knows for sure, but we will give credit to the Egyptians for discovering how yeast works and baking the first leavened bread. The exact date is unknown, but it was probably over three thousand years ago. Before that, primitive forms of breads—essentially grains and other plants ground on a rock, mixed with water and baked on a flat stone—were common in many cultures.

WHEAT AND CORN

Wheat is a grass that originated in the eastern Mediterranean sometime after the last ice age. As people discovered the importance of the plant’s grains, or seeds, as a foodstuff, it spread to North Africa and Europe. In the early 1500s, the Spanish brought it with them as a crop when they began to settle the New World. It did not grow in tropical climates, but in drier parts of the colonies, it did thrive. From it, breads were produced to feed colonists in the manner in which they had been used to in Europe.

Wheat eventually spread into the colonies of North America. It was certainly grown in the South but not in the quantities it was north of the Mason-Dixon line or later west of the Mississippi. In the South, cash crops like cotton and tobacco took prevalence in fields. Up north, however, food crops were the choice of most farmers. So when the Civil War erupted, the South was at a disadvantage when it came to feeding troops due to a lack of—you guessed it—bread.

An 1863 drawing by Edwin Forbes shows farm workers stacking wheat near Culpeper Courthouse, Virginia. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Known by the scientific name  Zea mays, corn, or maize as it is often called, is a native of North America. Its kernels, when dried and ground, are one of the bases of Southern bread culture. Public domain.

While wheat was an old-world crop, the other main component in the breads of the South originated on the same side of the Atlantic. Corn, or maize, is a grain plant native to North America that was first domesticated by the indigenous people of Mexico several thousand years ago. Like wheat, it began to spread through trade as its importance as a foodstuff was discovered. By the time the Europeans arrived, it was a staple food for the Native Americans they came in contact with across the New World. Settlers soon learned to make bread from corn the way the Native Americans had. Before the spread of wheat, cornbread was the most prominent bread product of the South. People ate it every day and with every meal.

In the South, corn was more common and more easily grown than wheat. Wheat was used in biscuits, which are, of course, a quintessential Southern food, but they were mainly saved for Sunday dinners and special occasions. At least, that was true in the early years before improved transportation and the great wheat fields of the plains states. Like wheat, corn is today often identified with other parts of the country. Midwest states Iowa and Illinois are the top producers by far, but cornbread remains perhaps the most Southern of all foods.

BLENDING CULTURES

As we’ve mentioned, the story of Southern bread begins in several places. Wheat-based bread came from the other side of the Atlantic while bread made with corn had it beginnings on this side. Several factors then played a role in the spread of bread and other foods. The first one is the movement of people. Just like you might borrow the recipe of a neighbor, the instructions for cooking were shared. When people moved or migrated they took recipes with them and continued to make them in the way they had as a way of holding on to comforting traditions of native lands.

That brings us to another factor: environment. Recipes that traveled to new lands often had to be adapted to available ingredients. If you were a colonist in Savannah, say, it was probably easier to purchase the staples necessary for cooking. If you moved inland to frontier areas, however, they might be more difficult (or expensive) to find. Wheat doesn’t easily grow everywhere, for example, so that’s how settlers first incorporated the traditions of Native Americans into their cooking.

Settlers also originated in many different places, and each had its own cooking traditions. When the British arrived, they continued to cook like they had in their home country. It was the same with the Africans, Spanish, Germans and everyone else. And in the New World, those traditions began to mix. In most of the South, the food began to reflect the traditions of the British Isles mixed with those of African slaves. In Louisiana, it was the French and the Africans. And in Texas, the influences of Spain and then Mexico became apparent in the food.

When people from these different cultures met, they were exposed