Cornbread Chronicles: Anne Byrn Explores the Cornerstone of Southern Baking

After cookbook author Anne Byrn tasted Atlanta chef Kevin Gillespie’s crispy cornbread wedges, she tried to eke the recipe out of him ... to no avail.

“After no secrets were revealed, I ordered an eight-wedge pan from Lodge, which is what the chef uses, and bought fine white cornmeal from J.T. Pollard in southern Alabama, also what the chef uses,” Byrn writes in the cornbread chapter of Baking in the American South. “Then I got in the kitchen to create my version of Gillespie’s cornbread. And you know what? It’s pretty darned close.”

Such are the journalistic curiosity and hands-on research that guide Byrn’s thoughtful collection of recipes for traditional breads, biscuits, rolls, cookies, cakes, puddings and other baked confections of her home region.

And there’s a reason the cornbread section dominates the cookbook. “Cornbread in the South is everywhere,” Anne says. “What you had access to—that is the story of Southern baking. And pretty much everybody had access to corn.”

A Nashville-based food journalist and author whose career has included newsrooms of the South, kitchens of Europe and a series of books under The Cake Doctor moniker, Byrn scoured her home state of Tennessee, along with Georgia, Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, East Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, the Delta and beyond, to collect stories and baking recipes that narrate the complex history of the region.

In more than 50 cornbread-encrusted pages, Byrn catalogs a couple dozen recipes that variously call for yellow corn, white corn, sugar, no sugar, ginger, duck fat, peppers and more. “People were making recipes mostly because that’s the recipe you were raised on,” she says. “Cornbread is a well-defined memory. You really remember the kind of cornbread you tasted when you were young, and that’s the kind of cornbread you want to make.”