Thank you for reading Between the Layers! Please enjoy and share this free post with your friends.
IF YOU SCROLL THROUGH PHOTOS on my iPhone, they’re mostly of food. When the winter morning light streams in the kitchen window on the north side of my house, I’m able to capture what I cook and bake in stunning natural light. It is something I do weekly because obviously there is a lot of recipe testing and photography for this newsletter. And while I have become more proficient at it, when given the chance to work with a real photographer, my heart sings. Last January I baked ahead and stashed pound cakes, cookies, and biscuits in the freezer for a photo shoot for my new book, Baking in the American South. In February, I drove the carload to Athens, Georgia, where for two weeks photographer Rinne Allen would photograph them. One pound cake didn’t weather the road trip to my satisfaction, so I bought more butter and cream cheese, and even though I didn’t pack my heavy KitchenAid, decided to recreate that cake with a hand mixer. But the gas studio oven had just scorched a glorious pecan pie on the right side, and I couldn’t take the chance it might ravage my pound cake in the same way.
So Rinne called her next-door neighbor Laurene. I didn’t know at the time, but Laurene had just lost her husband. They were driving from Wisconsin south to Athens, one following the other, in cars packed for warmer winter weather and months of joyous visits with grandchildren. But they got separated on the road heading into Athens, and he didn’t feel well and pulled into a gas station where he fainted. The attendants found emergency information on his phone, called his daughter, she met the ambulance at the Clarke County hospital, but by the time they found Laurene unpacking her car in her driveway, it was too late. Her husband was gone. That Laurene would take in a stranger so soon and let me sit at the kitchen table and stare into the quiet house while the cake baked in her GE electric oven with the light on, is not lost on me. It was as if some higher power was helping us all move that cake along, and it emerged from the oven the most glorious golden brown I have ever seen. I let it cool, then cut an ample slice. Tami Hardeman, the food stylist, drizzled a translucent orange glaze over the top. We had one satsuma orange with tiny leaves still intact to place alongside. And that pound cake, my favorite pound cake even before it became Laurene’s oven’s cake, would surely be the book’s cover, we all thought. After the shoot, I carried the pound cake to Laurene.
By March, the photo shoot was over, but those gun shots fired on March 27th changed my hometown forever. Here is how to read about that moment when a shooter killed three schoolchildren and three adults, and Nashville lost what little innocence we had left. If I didn’t love my state of Tennessee, I wouldn’t speak up like I have in this space and on social media about our overly relaxed gun laws. It’s an embarrassment that gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson opened a headquarters in East Tennessee as their former home, the state of Massachusetts, banned their manufacture of assault weapons for commercial sale outside of law enforcement and military uses. Smith & Wesson weapons were used in mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Aurora, Colorado. And when the state legislature was handed an August special session to craft gun safety legislation, nothing came of it. I am over partisanship. I’m asking Santa to bring us all a federal assault rifle ban in 2024.
April, on the other hand, brought rays of sunshine, visits from people I love, a trip to Mississippi to photograph a family’s heirloom chocolate pie, hunting for Easter eggs in tall green grass, sugar cookies, and the scent of flowers.
My blushing peonies arrived in late April as rays of hope. They are my favorite flower, a finicky flower with all sorts of needs. It takes the right combination of sun, warmth, rain, the deer kept away by fencing, and prayer, for them to arrive at all! You learn how to cut them, turn them upside down and shake off the ants before you bring them inside, and that sweet, sweet smell!
By June I was hiking along the rugged northern coast of Ireland where people know hatred and reconciliation all too well. I wrote about it and of my new friend Ciara Ohartghaile at Ursa Minor bakery who writes the newsletter Gorse here on Substack. My friend Susan Puckett stepped in and told us about her family’s Schaumtorte in my absence. In July, tomatoes from my garden were an intensely prolific crop, and we looked for every chance to make BLTs and pan con tomate. For paid subscribers, I baked glass bread (pan de cristal) for pan con tomate and shared a recipe for whipped feta. What do you remember about July other than the heat?
By September my grandchild had another birthday, so you might think it was those confetti cupcakes that highlighted the month, but, in truth, it was cheesecake. I baked a dark Basque cheesecake for the first time and stumbled upon my new favorite cheesecake—Eleanor’s Cheesecake—while reading the cookbook, Kugels & Collards. The book’s authors Lyssa Harvey and Rachel Barnett invited me to speak about cake at the meeting of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina on October 7. And that October Saturday morning, I was the only gentile in a room of Jews staring at their phones and connecting with friends and family in the state of South Carolina, the U.S., and in Israel, as news spread of the Hamas attacks, the deaths, the hostages, and an imminent war, which is now a humanitarian crisis. Let’s face it, 2023 has brought bad news. I never promised you just recipes in Between the Layers. I know many of you are here because of my recipes, but honestly, my life is more than recipes.
Yet recipes thrill me in a creative and scientific way and drew me like a magnet to the book, Lessons in Chemistry and the Apple+ series. Paid subscribers received the recipe for Lessons in Chemistry Lasagna. It is the lasagna that keeps on giving and feeding, and there seems something loaves-and-fishes biblical about it even though Elizabeth Zott in the book was an atheist. Two other bright spots of fall were reinventing Trisha Yearwood’s apple pie and watching the movie Holdovers, set in a New England boys’ school in the 1970s. Paul Giamatti, the cranky history teacher, reminds me of those study hall proctors we used to have in high school. You doubted seriously they had a life. And Da’ Vine Joy Randolph was spectacular as the big-hearted school cook and grieving mother of a son who had just been shot in the Vietnam War. My family knows I cry at any movie about underdogs or just dogs. I’ve wondered why that is, and the best I can figure is that both are humble creatures. In November, I wrote about my own dog named Ella who turned nine and what she means to me. You can read that post over on Instagram.
Perhaps inspired by Trisha’s pie and the apple, I read North Woods, by Daniel Mason, and hung onto every word. Have you read it? I’m listening to Meryl Streep read Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake now, and it is mesmerizing. Once December arrived I learned to make better cinnamon rolls from the talented Andrew Janjigian at Wordloaf. It’s the flour in the filling, how you spritz it with water to make the filling more syrupy, and it was a foot in the door to making soft milk bread, something I will continue to practice in 2024.
In these last days of this last month, I baked my husband’s favorite coconut cake and am still trying to make a better one. I’m reading the pages of my book before it goes to the printer in January. I’m also following the news that this platform on which I write, Substack, has drawn extreme criticism for allowing overtly Nazi content, according to Jonathan Katz in The Atlantic. Sometimes noble intentions and creating a space open to everyone has consequences. So here’s the bottom line: If you make money on newsletters about hatred, then you need to monitor content and kick out the misbehavers. The year 2023, like I said, was A LOT. This day, December 26, was always a special one in our family because it was my mother’s birthday. She would complain each year that her birthday and Christmas merged together as one, but she knew if we were home for Christmas, then we were home for her birthday as well. It’s the big things we might agree about—being kind, making a difference, loving your neighbor as yourself. But those little things keep tripping us up. I look down at all the stones and sticks in my path and am reminded what my publisher, the late Peter Workman once told me as he guided me through the architectural splendor of New York City, past the Flatiron Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building. Look up, Anne. Don’t forget to look up. Cheers to 2024, the year we look up. - xo, Anne You’re on the free list for Anne Byrn: Between the Layers. If you’re liking what you’re reading, why don’t you become a paying subscriber for more recipes, stories, and content.
|
0 comments:
Post a Comment