Kelly Fields - A Revival of Biscuits, Cakes, and Cornbread

Text copyright 2020 by Kelly Fields

Photographs copyright 2020 by Oriana Koren

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Lorena Jones Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

Lorena Jones Books and the Lorena Jones Books colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fields, Kelly, 1978 author. | Heddings, Kate, author.

Title: The good book of southern baking : a revival of biscuits, cakes, and cornbread / Kelly Fields with Kate Heddings.

Description: California : Lorena Jones Books, 2020. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020003835 (print) | LCCN 2020003836 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984856227 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984856234 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, AmericanSouthern style. | Baking. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX715.2.S68 F45 2020 (print) | LCC TX715.2.S68 (ebook) | DDC 641.5975dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003835

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003836

Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to reprint Classic Yellow Layer Cake from Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts by Stella Parks, copyright 2017 by Stella Parks. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Hardcover ISBN9781984856227

Ebook ISBN9781984856234

Prop styling by Kashara Johnson

Food styling by Michelle Gatton

rhid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

Contents

Introduction

Im going to get right to the point: I wrote this book to bury yall in cornbread and biscuits. Not just ordinary cornbread and biscuits, but the best dang ones youve ever had. Ive spent twenty years figuring out how to perfect every dessert in my repertoire, and its high time I share those honed recipes. My cornbread? Its made with a mix of cornmeal, corn flour, and buttermilk that sits in the fridge overnight, which plumps up that cornmeal and makes a killer moist and supremely corny-tasting loaf. And my biscuits are made with Italian-style 00 flour. I know thats not Southern, but damn, that flour creates some of the flakiest biscuits you will ever taste.

While Ive worked in pastry kitchens under amazing chefs, Ive also learned a lot from plain old trial and error. And even the absolute disasters were fun. Thats cause baking is meant to be fun. I took two and a half years to get my chocolate chip cookie just right, and now I sell more than ten thousand cookies a week at my New Orleans restaurant and bakery, Willa Jean. Baking doesnt need to be laborious or scary, yall. The pastry of the American South was born out of ingenuity, simplicity, and intuition. A handful, a dollop, and just a pinch are how ingredients have been measured for centuries, and Ill be damned if that hasnt worked, and worked deliciously. Its a beautiful thing to get to know your ingredients well enough to just feel them, to know instinctively that you need a splash of this or another pinch of that. Its how we do it in the Southand I personally rejoice in the beauty of it. Calm down, put your phone away, take a deep breath, get your hands in the flour, and let them do the work.

How did I get here? It was a long and winding road that began when I was a kid growing up on the water in the low country of South Carolina. That was a pretty idyllic place. My mom had a beautiful garden and grew most of her own produce, which we used for baking, canning, and jammingmy mom treated preserving like an Olympic sport. We also regularly went to farmers markets and pick-your-own fruit farms. My mom baked everything, from fruit pies and cobblers to biscuits, cakes, and cookies. The door to our house was never locked, and neighborhood kids came and went, grabbing cookies along the way. We were kind of the neighborhood cookie factory. My mom was also known for her cakes. She made carrot cake (it took me years to understand why anyone would want to put vegetables in a cake), Mississippi mud cake, and even a better-than-sex cake (a sweet concoction of chocolate, cream, caramel, and coconut). Let me tell you, when my two siblings and I first had that cake as little kids, we were all like, ooohhhh.

My moms mother, Audrey McDowell, was also a great baker. As far back as I can remember, every time we visited, she would make her apple cake, which was super, super moist and had a perfect pure apple taste. My bakery, Willa Jean, is actually named after my fathers mother. She was a terrible cook, but she was sassy and stubborn and sarcastic, and she was my biggest cheerleader and life coach. (I get my personality from her.) Whenever I was a pain in the ass, my dad called me Willa Jean Junior, which stuck as my nickname. I always thought it was a compliment, and needless to say, my grandma got a real kick out of it.

After high school, I moved to New Orleans and started working in bakeries and pastry shops. I went to work for Susan Spicer, who back then had a gourmet shop called Spice Inc. It took two years for me to realize that I could actually make baking a career. I really didnt know it was a valid choice until I went to work for Susan, where I saw a successful woman doing something she loved to do, and it was a real oh shit moment. Grandma Willa Jean and I started talking, and she told me that if you find something you love to do that much, dont look anywhere elsego do it. Grandma paid my rent while I was working for Susan, supporting my desire to dive right into the industry and work for the best chef, the one I would grow to emulate. Grandma Willa Jean also made me promise never to tell my cousins that she was footing the bill!

At a staff meeting in late 1999, Susan announced that she was closing Spice Inc. to open Herbsaint with chef Donald Link. I took that as an opportunity to go to culinary school. I went to Charleston to attend Johnson & Wales University, again with Grandmas support. In 2002, not long after graduating from school, I went back to NOLA and applied for a job in the pastry kitchen at Restaurant Augustas the pastry chef! When I started, I was in way over my head; I should never have been in that position. It was sink or swimand I swam.