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Toni Tipton-Martin has either written or shepherded some of the most important culinary works of this century . Her mission has been to celebrate African American cookbook history. With the publication of The Jemima Code , Toni's annotated bibliography of her extensive African American cookbook collection, she reshaped the landscape of known sources for historians, chefs, and home cooks.
In her role as editor-in-chief of Cook's Country , she collaborated with Cook's Country and America's Test Kitchen executive editor Morgan Bolling on an enormously important book, When Southern Women Cook: History, Lore and 300 Recipes with Contributions from 70 Women Writers . She joined us most recently to discuss the legacy of women in barbecuing and outdoor grilling .
Toni Tipton-Martin has either written or shepherded some of the most important culinary works of the 21st century. Photo courtesy of America's Test Kitchen.
Evan Kleiman: You had an experience in the summer of 1999 that focused on a meeting you were invited to attend. Tell us a bit about what happened at that meeting for you and how it galvanized you in terms of creating a focus for your work moving forward.
Toni Tipton-Martin: Let me just thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this book. I humbly say that it's a great book but it's a book that's really timely and really important, too. Some years ago, I was invited to the organizing meeting for a group that ultimately became the Southern Foodways Alliance. We were invited by John Edgerton, a Southern writer, journalist, and scholar. He had this notion that the full story of Southern food had not been told, that there had been so many people omitted from the discussion and the recipes.
He brought together 50 passionate people at Southern Living's headquarters in Birmingham. I was this outlier. I'm from Southern California, raised on the beach in LA and I really didn't fit in with this group, except that I had a passion for Southern women, the stories, in particular, of African American women who had been marginalized or erased or their contributions stereotyped. It troubled me a lot because I have a grandmother who fit that profile, and those caricatures didn't reflect her at all. So I was really excited to be invited to this group but not sure what role I might play.
What was interesting about it is that because I was an outsider, I wasn't as invested in the recipe development part of the Southern food story. I was interested in the more human side. All of these people who were gathered — we're talking about Paul Prudhomme , Nathalie Dupree — they are recipe people. And that ultimately turned out to be my strength because I was interested in telling the stories of people and, in particular, women.
I became a go to for a lot of the women in the organization and women in the South, generally, who would whisper to me their frustrations about the way that their stories were being told. So while I was focused on researching African American food history, here was this whole other group of women who are feeling some of the same frustrations and sometimes anger, about the ways in which women are portrayed historically or not. I didn't quite know what I was going to do about any of that. I just held on to their stories and my connection to them until I had the opportunity to do something with it.
Pimento cheese spread can be an appetizer or the filling in a simple but satisfying sandwich. Photo courtesy of America's Test Kitchen.
One of the reasons this book is so interesting is that there's two primary threads that run through it. There are the recipes and the contemporary essays by women writers. More than 70 Southern women took part, and they range from food writers, authors, journalists, historians, chefs, aficionados, and culture keepers. Just to give us a bird's eye view, what were some of the topics that are covered by these modern women? And can you think of one or two essays in particular that speak to our current moment?
Some of the stories are very simple. We talk about the difference between White Lily and Martha White flour. We tell you about the woman who is responsible for that beautiful red wax drip on a maker's mark bottle. We talk about the women who formed cottage industries in their homes by using their expertise to prepare dishes that they could sell to create economic independence for themselves and their families.
One of the most compelling stories was written by Virginia Willis .Virginia is a longtime food expert. She's a chef. She worked for Martha Stewart and was trained by Nathalie Dupree but she's also a gay Southern woman, and she spent most of her life as an overweight woman. So we talked about the mystique of the Southern Belle and the fact that she was always represented in film and in history as a thin woman, a frail, fragile, demure, delicate woman. Virginia tried to help us understand the conflict and the tension between being portrayed, at one moment, in that way and in another moment, being portrayed as the best cook and the person who makes the best biscuits. It's such a great story.
I love that essay so much. I mean it. I think it will speak to so many women. I also love what she says about biscuits, "Biscuits are like people. They are better when they rise together."
I love that Virginia shares with us something that she learned from Nathalie, because Nathalie is known for a similar food metaphor for the expression of women supporting one another and bringing women together in the kitchen. It's called the "pork chop theory," and her words are, "One pork chop in a pan goes dry but when you add a second pork chop, the fat from one feeds the other."
This Louisiana-style cornbread dressing is so good you won't want to save it for Thanksgiving. Photo courtesy of America's Test Kitchen.
I love that!
Isn't it beautiful? And so between the two of them, we get these incredible expressions of this mystique and a way that women can support and encourage one another in times of trouble, despite the ways that we're portrayed in the broader community.
Recipe wise, that Virginia Willis essay links to the Pat-in-the-Pan Biscuits. Could you really quickly describe these biscuits?
Yes, these are a version of what most people in the South will know of as a cream biscuit. When you make cream biscuits, they are very, very wet. You can almost spoon them up with a spoon and make them like a drop biscuit. But instead of doing that, Shirley Corriher , who I think was the first one we know of, to really popularize this recipe of the way that they're made by hand, she rolls them in additional flour.
So instead of kneading the flour into the dough, you kind of roll it in at the end, after you've gotten this really wet mixture, and then you pat that into a baking pan, and what comes out of the oven is this crisp, edged, sort of crunchy biscuit on the outside. Then it's flaky and just really decadent on the inside.
Bourbon bread pudding is a beloved Southern Dessert. Photo courtesy of America's Test Kitchen.
Those Shirley Corriher biscuits are unbelievable. I've made them so many times.
Yeah, and I probably should correct and say that they're not going to be flaky in the traditional sense. I guess you would say they're fluffy.
They're so light.
Yes, they're light and fluffy but here they have this amazing crisp crust on the outside and I happen to be one of those that really loves, whatever the baked good is, I want the part that was attached to the outside of the pan where the heat comes in contact with it. But there's something about the chemistry of this platting of the batter into the pan that gives you that incredible surface all the way around.
Love that. Turning to recipes, the preserving and pickling chapter is really wonderful. I always think about preserves and pickles as being so linked to Southern foodways. I know that I'm drawn to candied jalapenos. They're relatively easy to make and easier to eat and people love getting little jars of those red and green nuggets. But I'm wondering if you can think of another recipe that is delicious but has a story to tell, maybe the watermelon rind.
Well, we love both of those recipes because of their focus on women. In the case of the jalapenos, it's actually a young girl who is the creator of that recipe. But in the case of the watermelon rind pickles, we tell the story of Abby Fisher. She is the author of what we now know to be, the second cookbook published by an African American woman in 1881. That book was called What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking .
What I love about Abby Fisher's story, which makes us want to make watermelon rind pickles even more, is the fact that when she was no longer enslaved in the south, she and her husband moved to the Bay Area in California and began a pickles and preserves manufacturing company.
So again, we hear these stories that African American women were not intelligent, they didn't have proficiencies, and yet, making pickles is a chemical process that requires some bit of knowledge or you could harm yourself and the people who consume your product. And here, Abby Fisher won state fair prizes for her pickles and preserves, and she published a book in 1881 to validate her existence and remind us that she had been here.
"When Southern Women Cook: History, Lore, and 300 Recipes with Contributions from 70 Women Writers" celebrates the women who laid the foundations of Southern food and their innovative torchbearers. Photo courtesy of America's Test Kitchen.
I love that story so much. So, Toni, let's end with some sweetness. The Celebration Suites chapter is so enticing. Would you like to pick a cake to share with us?
I would love to share with you one of both Morgan and my favorite cakes in the book. It's called the Porter Plum Pudding Layer Cake. This cake is an adaptation of a recipe created by a free woman of color in Charleston who had her own catering company. Her name was Eliza Seymour Lee , and she was so successful that her home is still standing and occupied on Trad Street in Charleston, and she was known for her plum pudding.
Her recipe actually still exists. One of her descendants, Robin Griffith, is in possession of this recipe, and I knew Robin, and met with her to talk about the possibility that we would adapt this recipe for modern use, and that's an important thing for us to talk about.
When we think about these stories, they're not just a look back at history or an opportunity to feel nostalgic, but what we really wanted was for people to engage with the history as well as the food. So we brought Eliza's plum pudding recipe into our test kitchen, and one of our test cooks adapted it into a layer cake that will remind you of carrot cake. It's dense, it's coated with a beautiful cream cheese frosting, and it has a plum porter glaze that is drizzled around the edges to give it just an additional decadent sweetness, if it wasn't already sweet enough. It is spectacular on a holiday table. We just absolutely love this cake, absolutely at the holidays, but any time of year in celebration of Eliza Lee.
Most people in the South will know these Pat-in-the-Pan Biscuits as a cream biscuit. Photo courtesy of America's Test Kitchen.
Pat-in-the-Pan Buttermilk Biscuits
Makes 9 biscuits
Total Time: 1½ hours
When chef Virginia Willis did a demonstration at Cook's Country in August 2018, the Southern cookbook queen left us with characteristically beautiful words: “Biscuits are like people; they are better when they rise together.” More than poetry, though, this sentiment referred to her preferred technique of baking biscuits touching each other on a baking sheet so they physically push each other up in the oven for a higher rise. Her demo inspired our own recipe for pat-in-the-pan biscuits.
Following Willis's lead, we use low-protein cake flour for tenderness, and baking powder and baking soda for lightness and lift. We pinch bits of cold butter into these dry ingredients; the butter pieces melt in the dough during baking, producing steam that creates a fluffy interior crumb. We follow a tried-and-true Southern method for patting biscuit dough in a pan and scoring it so these biscuits can also rise together.
We developed this recipe using Softasilk cake flour and a metal baking pan. This recipe can easily be doubled to yield 15 biscuits: Use a 13 by 9-inch baking pan and extend the baking time by about 15 minutes.
Ingredients
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
4 cups (16 ounces) cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons table salt
2 cups buttermilk, chilled
Instructions
Cut 10 tablespoons butter into 1/2-inch pieces and freeze until chilled, about 15 minutes. Let 1 tablespoon butter sit at room temperature to soften. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 450 degrees. Grease 8-inch square baking pan with remaining 1 tablespoon butter.
Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in bowl. Add chilled butter to flour mixture and smash butter between your fingertips into pea-size pieces. Gently stir in buttermilk until no dry pockets of flour remain. Using rubber spatula, transfer dough to prepared pan.
Lightly sprinkle extra flour evenly over dough to prevent sticking. Using your floured hands, pat dough into even layer and into corners of pan. Using bench scraper sprayed with vegetable oil spray, cut dough into 9 equal squares (2 cuts by 2 cuts), but do not separate. Bake until golden brown on top, about 30 minutes.
Let biscuits cool in pan for 5 minutes. Using thin metal spatula, slide biscuits onto wire rack. Brush tops with softened butter. Let cool for 10 minutes. Pull biscuits apart at cuts and serve warm.
Recipe courtesy of America's Test Kitchen. All rights reserved. |
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