Tag: Southern cooking

Categories
Food

Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake With Boiled Custard

Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake and Boiled Custard. (Rinne Allen)

In the foreword to “The Jackson Cookbook” (1971), Eudora Welty wrote that each Christmas she baked a white fruitcake from a recipe her mother had gotten from a friend.

“What took me so long to bake Mrs. Mosal’s fruitcake?” I wondered, as I chopped the candied cherries and pecans and reached to the back of the cabinet for the bottle of whiskey. I have adapted the recipe only slightly, keeping the red and green cherries but using fewer of them. What you get is a lovely and festive fruitcake drenched in bourbon, and after one bite, it will change your mind about fruitcake. Slice and serve with boiled custard.

Fruitcake has many faces. In “Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery-Book” (1871), Mary Elizabeth Porter mentions several kinds of fruitcakes: light (white), like this one, or dark (black), as well as Yankee (with butter and white sugar) or Confederate (with lard and molasses). Sally White fruitcake has coconut and almonds, and Japanese fruit cake isn’t really a fruitcake at all but more of a unique layer cake with a citrus and coconut filling popular in the Deep South.

Fruitcake making was once an annual affair, just like winterizing your house or putting chains on the tires of the car to prepare for snow days ahead. If baked and soaked in bourbon at Thanksgiving, the fruitcake would be ready for slicing by Christmas.

Plan ahead: Bake this cake several days to weeks before serving so it can soak in the liquor.

Prep Time: 40 to 45 minutes Bake Time: About 2 hours

Serves 8 to 10

  • Soft butter and flour for prepping the pan (see Note)
  • 1 pound mixed dried fruit of your choice (currants, raisins, dried apricots, dried cherries, or red and green candied cherries)
  • 2 cups (228 grams) pecan halves or chopped pecans
  • 2 cups (240 grams) all-purpose flour, divided
  • 12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks/170 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • 1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
  • 3 large eggs, at room temperature
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1/2 cup bourbon or brandy, plus more for soaking the cake

Heat the oven to 250°F, with a rack in the middle. Grease and flour a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan.

Chop the fruit into small, uniform pieces, 1/4 to 1/2 inch in size. Place in a small bowl. Chop the pecans into the same size pieces and place in a separate bowl. Toss the fruit with 1/2 cup of the flour. Set aside.

Place the butter and sugar in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. With the machine running, add the eggs, one at a time, and beat on low until incorporated. Add the vanilla and beat until blended.

Whisk the baking powder and nutmeg into the remaining 1 1/2 cups flour. Add the flour mixture alternately with the bourbon or brandy to the butter mixture, mixing on low until just blended. Fold in the fruit and pecans. Turn into the prepared pan.

Bake until the cake is firm and very lightly brown, about 2 hours. The interior temperature should be 200°F on an instant-read thermometer. Remove from the oven and, while hot, drizzle over additional bourbon or brandy. Let the cake cool in the pan for 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edges of the pan, then invert the cake once and then again so it cools right side up on the rack. Let cool completely before serving, about 1 hour.

To store, wrap in clean cheesecloth. Place in a metal tin and store covered in a cool place for up to a month. Each week, pour another 1/4 cup bourbon or brandy over the cake, if desired.

Note: Back when my mother and grandmother baked fruitcakes, they would grease the loaf or tube pans with butter and then line them with brown paper. I remember seeing the paper peeled off the sides of the baked fruitcake and my mother telling me it was to protect the cake from overbaking and keep the edges soft.

Eudora Welty (1909–2001), American novelist, wrote about small town life in the Mississippi delta, 1962. (Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo)

Boiled Custard

I grew up with boiled custard on Christmas Eve, served in punch cups with fruitcake and pound cake. It was a Middle Tennessee holiday tradition, a gentler version of eggnog, and you can make it without any alcohol, as I am sure my Presbyterian grandmother did.

You’re not going to find it in every Southern cookbook because it is so regional. But you will find it in Tennessee and Mississippi cookbooks, and the recipe I settled on is from “Being Dead Is No Excuse” (2005) by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays. They call it Bourbon Boiled Custard, but as I said, not everyone puts bourbon in it. But if they do, it’s gonna be good, especially with Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake, baba au rhum, Christmas black cake, and festive cookies.

Prep: 20 to 25 minutes Cook: 10 to 14 minutes Chill: At least 4 hours

Serves 8

  • 1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 4 large eggs
  • Big pinch of salt
  • 3 cups whole milk
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup bourbon (optional)

Place the sugar and flour in a large, heavy saucepan or in the top of a double boiler (see Note). Whisk in the eggs and the salt until smooth.

Place the milk in a separate saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat, letting bubbles form around the edges of the pan, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the cream.

Ladle 1/2 cup at a time of the warm milk mixture into the egg mixture and whisk to combine. Place the pan with the eggs over low heat or over simmering water in the double boiler. Stir with a flat spatula until the mixture creates steam and thickens enough to coat a spoon, 10 to 14 minutes, or 170 to 175°F on an instant-read thermometer.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour the custard into a glass bowl. Stir in the vanilla and bourbon, if desired. Place in the refrigerator to chill for at least 4 hours. Serve as a beverage in small cups or as a sauce.

Note: If you have a heavy copper pan for making sauces, it’s perfect for this recipe because it’s thick and will protect the eggs from heating too quickly. But if you do not, use a double boiler—or what’s known as a bain-marie—where you place a bowl or insert on top of a saucepan filled with simmering water.

The trick is to keep the water at a simmer, not a boil, and to make sure the water is not touching the bottom of the bowl or the insert holding the custard. It takes a little longer to thicken with the double boiler, but every pan and stove is different. You are looking for a just-thickened custard that coats the spoon. It will thicken more as it cools.

Recipe reprinted from “Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories” by Anne Byrn. Copyright 2024 by Anne Byrn. Photographs 2024 by Rinne Allen. Used by permission of Harper Celebrate. 
Categories
Lifestyle

Southern Holiday Recipes That Have Stood the Test of Time

Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake and Boiled Custard. (Rinne Allen)

Southern baking, writes veteran cookbook author Anne Byrn, is “quite possibly the first and finest style of baking America has ever known.” She makes the case for it in her latest tome of a cookbook, “Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories.”

A fifth-generation Southerner, Byrn looked far beyond her home state of Tennessee. She researched each of the 14 Southern states, interviewed locals, and dug into library archives to find the best recipes and stories, both present and past. “I took a big-picture, step-back look at the South and considered how railroads, poverty, isolation, slavery, migration, and many other factors affected what people baked,” she said. “It was an ongoing project for more than three years. It consumed me!”

Anne Byrn is a best-selling cookbook author and the former food editor of The Atlanta Journal- Constitution and The Tennessean. (Draper James)

There was also plenty of another kind of consumption: the rigorous testing and tweaking of historical recipes for modern home cooks. “What was considered delicious in the 1930s might seem spartan today,” she noted. Part of the challenge was finding modern equivalents for old ingredients and translating measurements—or lack thereof. “Grandmother likely had her own flour scoop and knew how she measured a cup, level or rounded, or possibly she didn’t measure at all!”

Her perseverance was rewarded. The final collection, which includes entire chapters on cornbreads and biscuits, and sweets from obscure regional pies to famous Christmas cakes, tells a story of Southern baking, tradition, and culture. The recipes’ stories are woven into the lives of generations of Americans. Byrn shared three gems just in time for the holiday season.

(Harper Celebrate)

How to Bake Like a Southern Grandmother

Anne Byrn shares five timeless tips from bakers past:

Repeat favorites, especially for the holidays. People remember recipes that are repeated annually. And grandmothers were good about that.

Bake with your senses, using touch and your sense of smell to determine if a cake is done.

Let little people come into the kitchen and watch and help.

Don’t scrimp on ingredients. I was told stories of baking during the war years and using precious white sugar. I was told about how people of Appalachia would save money to bake a cake to bring to a holiday supper. People have scrimped and saved in order to bake something nice for the people they love. You should, too.

Tell the story about the recipe. Pass on family stories so they will be remembered.

(Rinne Allen)

My Christmas Family Tradition

Byrn and her grown children have a Christmas tradition of getting together to decorate sugar cookies and take family photos, “the tackier the sweater or apron the better,” she said. Some details have changed over the years: “Our mugs of cocoa have gravitated to flutes of bubbly.” Others are constant: her grandmother’s crescent cookies, punch cups of boiled custard (an old-time Tennessee specialty), and freshly baked yeast and sweet rolls, all putting a Southern stamp on their festivities.

RECIPE: Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake With Boiled Custard

From Nov. Issue, Volume IV

Categories
Features

Cooking Close to the Heart

(Photo by Jamie Robbins)

To chef Jake Wood, who began his career cooking at top restaurants in Raleigh, North Carolina, his grandmother remains the best chef ever. Growing up down the street from his grandparents’ house in rural North Carolina, Wood remembers many family meals featuring his grandma’s “country soul cooking.”

“In my memories as a kid, those times with all of our family, and just all of us coming together over food, was something that was always special,” Wood said in a recent interview. Today, at his Durham, N.C. restaurant, called Lawrence Barbecue, those flavors and memories inform the menu.

(Photo by Tennet Rich)

For example, his grandma’s favorite snack is hominy with pork cracklings. Jake’s restaurant does a version of that dish with buttered hominy. His family also cooked a whole hog over open fire coals every Thanksgiving Eve. Wood draws on those recollections to serve up North Carolina-style pulled pork, alongside some Texas-style brisket, at Lawrence Barbecue.

Even the dishes that he didn’t enjoy as a child, he now recalls with fondness. Some things that Jake would kind of turn his nose up at were, for example, “when she cooked turnip greens. That would stink the whole house up. But now it’s like that smell is reminiscent of my childhood. It brings back memories.”

Soul Cooking

After years of working in the fine dining industry, Wood wanted to be cooking something familiar and approachable at his own restaurant. “Southern cooking is close to my soul, my roots, and my family’s roots,” he explained. “So, it feels good to be in a position to have a shop where we’re serving food that’s close to my soul, with my family’s name on it.” Things have just come full circle, he noted. “This is where I wanted my hard work to pay off.”

(Photo by Tennet Rich)

He is grateful that he can still visit his grandmother’s house regularly, and draw inspiration from the meals she cooks, asking about her recipes and how she has perfected them or retained their traditional renditions. Many of the daily specials that Lawrence Barbecue serves come from those cherished conversations with his grandmother, Wood said.

Meanwhile, the restaurant is named after his late grandfather, Allen Lee Lawrence, who inspired the base sauce for pulled pork. Before he passed away, he was developing a sauce along with Wood, incorporating vinegar and the cayenne peppers he grew in his garden. He called it “Peak of the Heat.” When Wood’s son was born in July 2019, Jake and his wife decided to name him Lawrence, also after Wood’s grandfather. The restaurant’s logo is a small baby in a diaper, straddling a smiling pig.

Wood also noted that many of the techniques treasured in Southern fine dining today, such as pickling, canning, and smoking, are actually ways of cooking that rural communities have long adopted. Through talking to his grandparents, he realized their cooking philosophy was: “You live off the land to not only feed your family, but to make a living as well,” meaning that what they ate often depended on what they had growing and what they had on the farm and had access to, by way of their own farm or neighbors who lived on the land close by. One neighbor had cattle or hogs, he explained, “or a cousin or an uncle would bring fish back from the coast in coolers.”

(Photo by Tennet Rich)

Though Wood cut his teeth on elaborate plating and complex chef techniques, he now hopes to have a restaurant with a familial, homey atmosphere.  He said they “just worry about the food being as delicious as possible and being here ready with a smile on our face every time somebody comes to our window. We’re always going to make that the base of what we do.”

A Community Comes Together

The restaurant opened in June, after a long delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Wood called the change of plans “a blessing in disguise.” In 2020, pandemic-related restrictions devastated the hospitality industry. Wood was able to operate a ghost kitchen out of his restaurant space, with patrons picking up food orders from the premises. With the proceeds earned during the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, Wood served 500 free meals to people in the industry who were furloughed from their jobs. He said they just wanted to do their part “to provide any help that we could to some of our friends and fellow business-owners in the industry,” Wood said. Back in 2018, the local community had similarly rallied together in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which wreaked havoc on the Carolinas. Wood, along with top chefs in the South, took part in a culinary event that helped raise over a half million dollars for small businesses to rebuild or recoup their losses.

(Photo by Jamie Robbins)

Later in 2020, Wood partnered with a local pub to serve his menu offerings as the restaurant space was being finalized; and he also did pop-ups, catering, and other collaborations with restaurants in the South. Through these events, the word was getting out there about Wood’s future restaurant. He realized that the tight-knit hospitality industry in the Raleigh-Durham area looks out for one another.

Wood is also very thankful that patrons continue to support Lawrence Barbecue. He said: “We know that people have a choice when they support a local business and when they go out to eat. And people put that trust in our hands every single time they come to us. It’s your money with us. And it’s our job to create memories for them and make sure that we’re doing our best every time. Because without them, we’re not here.”