In 2013, I baked 400 dried-apple hand pies, with a touch of cream and black pepper, per my nearly 200-year-old Appalachian family recipe, and boxed them individually with a hearty slice of coconut cake. This was for the now-infamous cake-vs.-pie debate at the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium in Oxford, Miss. I was not part of the debate, simply a neutral party tempting the audience with a little pink box filled with my rendition of both.
I was strong in pie, but honestly, I had just begun my public romance with cake. This simple and very traditional coconut cake became my first true cake love. I wanted to give the people a cake that had nothing to hide behind, something that truly was about lightness and comfort and deep satisfaction.
Recipe: Old-Fashioned Coconut Cake
While the debate ended in a tie, it swayed my pie-obsessed heart into new territory. I had been selling pies since 2004, hawking them out of my trunk through word-of-mouth business. Nashville was ripe with the kind of “rising tide lifts all boats” mentality that brought attention to our small and convivial city. I would load up the trunk of my black 1990 Volvo sedan and, with two kids in the back seat, park at my friend’s wine shop and wait for people to come pick up their phone-ordered pies. Nashville became known for its underground artistic community, all hellbent on supporting ourselves by supporting one another. That attention, though, also blasted the entire town into a kind of orbit that dissipated many of the things that made it so special.
Just the same, Nashville brought me a treasure chest of people who would help set my course as a pastry chef and writer. I was welcomed into this world and invited to be a facilitator of everyone’s pie and/or cake dreams during a real inflection point in the Southern food scene (and in the rest of America’s newfound awareness that the South is actually the center of so much that defines American food and flavor). These seemingly small moments in the South galvanized some of my core values. The Southern Foodways Alliance, established in 1999, was a significant part of the movement to study and celebrate our region’s food, stories and history.
John Egerton, an S.F.A. founder and a passionate close-talker, author and civil rights activist, was my entree into this world. In 2004, when I was an up-and-coming pastry chef in Nashville, making cornmeal-and-sorghum cakes in a cast-iron pan and ciabatta loaves in a wood-fired oven, I was fortunate enough to meet (and feed) him. He became my friend and mentor, reading my work and telling me that I had something. He introduced me to a lot of people, and most important, he liked my food. I learned of beaten biscuits under his tutelage and found a language that helped me place my food and writing in a broader historical narrative. He taught me how to study and research. He empowered me to tell my stories.
The basic fundamentals of this time in my life, as a writer and as a baker, were ultimately formed by my experiences of wanting to give my most sincere efforts for my Southern Foodways Alliance community. When I make this coconut cake, in all its old-fashioned glory, I see the young baker who was searching for beauty in the truest version of something. I see a young woman trying to get to the heart of a thing — of everything, really — by embellishing as little as possible, so as not to cover up what makes something so special.
Recipe: Old-Fashioned Coconut Cake
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