Interview: Anne Byrn's 'American Cake'

Baking expert Anne Byrn joins Holly to talk about the place of cake in U.S. history, from the early colonies right up to the modern era. The relationship between kitchen and culture is evidenced in Anne's research about sweet treats in America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Stuff Works. Once again, that's about hb X dot com
slash how Stuff Works. Welcome to stuff you missed in

(00:43):
history class from how stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Wilson Tracy.
I'm really excited. Do you know why? I do know why?
It's because today we have an opportunity to combine two

(01:04):
great things on the podcast, those two things being history
and baking. Uh. And to me, this fits really perfectly
into sort of fall discussions because it's the weather cools off,
baking gets a little more appealing. You don't mind so
much if your kitchen gets hot, and it also leads
into so many of the kitchen traditions of the autumn
and winter months. We're talking with writer and Burn. So

(01:27):
and Burn has written numerous New York Times best selling cookbooks.
Probably her most famous are the ones in the Cake
Makes Doctor series. She's also trained in Paris at La
vejun A Cold de cuisine and has even cooked alongside
Julia Child, which that's just awesome. Ann's educational background is
in journalism. She's the former food editor of the Atlanta

(01:49):
Journal Constitution, and that's supposed that she held for fifteen years.
But Ann's newest book delves into history and specifically the
place of cake in the United States, from the early
colonies in the sixt Dred's right up to the modern era.
And it's a combination of baking recipes and the history
that they reflect, and it's a really deep dive into
the relationship between kitchen and culture. So we're going to

(02:13):
hop right into my talk with and Burn. Hello, and
welcome to the podcast. Thank you, it's great to be here. Oh,
I'm so excited to talk to you. Uh. So, we
have already told our listeners about your new book. But
one of the things that I want to ask you
right out of the gate. You have written many cookbooks,

(02:33):
and I also have to give you a quick personal
thank you for the Cake Mix. Cake Mix Doctor bakes
gluten free. Uh. That's a big favorite of mine, so
so um because as everybody who has ever tried to
bake a gluten free cake knows, they often come out
really clunky and not delicious. But that makes it very
very easy to make really delicious gluten free cakes. But

(02:57):
but I'm wondering what made you want to shift a
little bit more back to your journalism background and write
about baking from a historical perspective. I think it's just
where I am in my life. You know. I wrote
The Cake Mix Doctor at a time when my three
children were young and our house was completely chaotic, you know.
I was looking for solutions every single day. Uh, and

(03:21):
and so for a cake for for me to open
up the pantry door and to grab a box of
cake mix and make it better. Um, seemed perfectly natural
and normal for my life. And I had no idea
that I would write this book that would sort of
resonate with other busy people across America like I did.
But you know where I am now. My kids are

(03:44):
mostly grown, uh, And I love to write, and I've
always left to write, and I've loved to research. Uh.
And my my my husband's a big history buff. And
you know, he was the one who actually was starting
to listen to your podcast and kind of told me
about them and to really you know, And I felt like,
also as a writer and as a journalist, when you

(04:04):
had questions about a recipe or the story behind a recipe,
the answers were not there. You know that you can't
google that and come up with the true story of
the real story. So I thought, you know, there's something here,
and I need to document the story behind all these
great kikes. Well. And you mentioned, uh in the acknowledgements

(04:25):
at the end of the book that as you are
writing it, you couldn't believe no one had ever done
this before, And I was having the same reaction paging
through it. I was like, why has nobody ever assembled
this before? It's such a fantastic read, as well as
having yummy things to make out of it, thank you.
You know, one you would have to be passionate about
k which I am who is it? Uh? And two

(04:48):
it took a lot of work. But you know, I
think that people who are interested in history and a
journalist who were accustomed to interviewing people and asking a
whole lot of questions, UM, we're totally comfortable with this.
And I loved um finding a lot of the people
that I've known throughout my career, um, you know, retired

(05:09):
on some ranch in California or whatever they're doing, and
they were there and they answered questions for me, and
it was wonderful. I have to wonder, because there is
so much research that went into this book, what your
most surprising revelation was that you turned up all doing
all that research? Um. You know, I think that I wonder.

(05:30):
I had a couple of them. One was when I
was researching the Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, which was really a
big force behind a lot of our great American cakes.
To find that there were two groups of people there
were cake bakers or pie bakers. I had no idea
that there was sort of a class system. That was
really interesting to me. Another one was researching, um, the

(05:53):
Edith Warner chocolate cake that was baked UM during World
War Two, when there really right before War two, when
when the scientists were out working on the Manhattan Project
and here was this, you know, school teacher from Philadelphia
moves out to the West for sort of a peaceful
life and realize that she's baking cakes for um, the

(06:15):
man who created the Adam bomb. It's just I don't
I felt like it was a continuous, just discovery of
amazing things that happened around cake. Well, and there are,
like I said, there are so many wonderful little discoveries
for the reader. Kind of I almost used the phrase
baked into the book, but even I'm not going to

(06:36):
be that funny um that I can see where that
would happen in the research process, Like I think it
would probably be a state of perpetual wonder. And one
of the things that I wanted to talk about is, uh,
you mentioned in the beginning of the book how the
basic ingredients of cake, so flour, eggs, butter, and sugar
have always been there, but they've evolved over time. Can

(06:57):
you talk a little bit about that evolution and how
it's changed what cake really is? Yes, definitely. You know,
an important interview I had was with Leney Sorenson, who
is an African American historian in Virginia and has been
a scholar of the Mary Randolph Virginia Housewife's books. And
I'm so fortunate to have talked to leney early in

(07:20):
their research and she set me straight. And she's sitting
and you have to look at this book, um as
the all about the ingredients and what were the ingredients
and who had access to them, because that really formed
the keg and really butter, eggs, sugar, flour, those are
the key components of a basic keke. Now, of course

(07:41):
we can add baking powdery in when it was invented,
but really it was those four. And so if you
look at them independently and say who had access to that,
what time of year was it, where the eggs laying
or the chickens laying the eggs were the was the
butter fresh? Did you have butter? Was it? War time?
Was but a ration? You know? Sugar? Who could afford sugar?

(08:04):
Did you use molasses instead? And flower flower was largely
regional and it was you know, milled locally and during wartime,
you know, Americans were not supposed to use a lot
of wheat flowers, but to save it for the troops.
So that's where you've had other types of flowers come in,
such as rye flour used in cake baking and wave

(08:27):
for that. Corn meal was used in the late well
early eighteen hundreds, uh, in pound cakes as a substitute
Indian meal. So at different times in our country's history,
these four ingredients have been different, have changed, and that
affected the types of cakes that were banked. And you

(08:49):
also talk about how in testing these various recipes. Uh,
some of the recipes and I quote you here left
a whole lot to the imagination. Uh, did you have
any disasters in the testing phase. I just picture some
horrible wonder happening. Oh. Yes, we always have disasters in
testing recipes. Um. One sometime when they come from chef

(09:13):
rather those recipes, and the other when they come from
historic cookbooks. UM. Yeah, it's because anybody who's ever picked
up an old cookbook knows that old recipes were essentially
just an ingredient list. You've got no method whatsoever. So
you kind of had to do a little research and
find out what what was the oven they were using,
what kind of pan would this have gone in? Um,

(09:35):
Quick ovens, you know, are a hot oven and It
really wasn't n til the turn of the twentieth century
that you know, standardized measures came into cake baking, and
and and then we found, you know, the smostats on
ovens a little bit lighter than that. So yeah, so
to to be a modern cook and interpret old recipes,
you have to do a little bit of digging, and

(09:56):
then you have to do some testings. Uh I'm imagining eating.
The evidence couldn't have been that bad most of the time, well,
especially the ginger The early gingerbread Let's just say that
gingerbread was a very loose term for a cake. It
encompassed everything from gingerbread cookie like a hard tack gingerbread cookie,

(10:20):
but actually was bought by sailors um and used to
sort of to ease their stomach on sea voyages because
ginger was a stomach settler. And then later than that,
cakey gingerbreads became a more respond version of gingerbread. They
had molasses in there in spice, but they also had eggs,
So gingerbreads, you don't know what you're gonna get. When

(10:42):
you see an old gingerbread recipe, you can kind of
look at the ingredients and have some idea if it's
got eggs in it, if the sugar ratio is pretty high,
it's going to be a cake youre gingerbread. But you
just have to send them well the good news is
even bad gingerbread, it's probably pretty good gingerbreads. You can
always dunk it in something. Actually. Uh. And you mentioned

(11:02):
in the section of the book that features recipes from
eight hundred to eighteen sixty nine that this is really
a period where cakes started to diversify a great deal
in the United States. Can you talk about the catalysts
for that phase of growth that really ultimately changed what
the word cake sort of meant? Definitely? You know, before then,

(11:23):
I think cakes had been very British. Um. You know,
you look at your water cake, your sponge cakes, your pancakes,
your fruit cakes, your tea even the tea cakes when
cakes were served very British. But you're right, there were
new directions in our country. There was an expansion of
our country and a really great example of sort of

(11:43):
a new American cake at that time would have been
the Cowboy keke um. And that was a cake that
was a frontier cake. People were taking ingredients with them
and moving west, and they were baking cakes in you know,
cast iron Dutch ovens, and oftentimes, you know, they couldn't
they couldn't take their hands with them to lay eggs.

(12:06):
The eggs would not have survived the trip west, so
they had to make eggless cakes. And those are the
cakes that are what a lot of people call them
boiled raisin cakes, where you actually boil raisins down with
water until they're just caramel colored, and then you use
the liquid and the cake and then use that the

(12:26):
raisins in there and that provides um a lot of
the fat and the cake and it it makes the
cake moist for use, you know, without eggs. And people
continued to bake this type of cake all through American history.
It went by different names. It was often taught called
war cake. Um the wonderful writer MFK. Fisher writes about

(12:47):
war cakes that she remembers um and as a child
growing up. And they were the same thing as the
cowboy cake. So it was a cheap cake. Well, and
it's funny when I was looking through your book and
I noticed the cowboy cake and the picture it looks
so moist and delicious that I thought there has to
be a ton of butter in it, and then when

(13:09):
I was looking at the ingredients of like not a
disproportionate amount. No, it's just the moisture from all of that.
That reason it is it's a really fun cake for
anybody to make today. I love that cake. It's a
big hit, especially in cooler weather. And another example I
think of just the westward movement is are the cakes

(13:29):
that are made with nuts that are indigenous to America,
like the hickory nut cakes, the black walnut cakes. Because
if people traveled and as they pioneered new land, they
forage naturally from what was growing on that land. And
and I bet a lot of people can think about
recipes from the grandmother, great great grandmother that may have

(13:50):
had black walnuts in them or hickory nuts. It's so cool. Yeah.
And the jam cake is another important cake of that
period because that was German influence. And the Germans who
settled in the Ohio area and moved south into Kentucky, Tennessee,
North Alabama, and then over to the Carolinas, they brought

(14:13):
a very German recipe, a jam kake recipe with them,
and as while blackberries were growing, they would put up
the blackberries into jam in the summer, Tom and then
for the holidays, UM make a jamkake to celebrate a
spice kake that had the BlackBerry jam and the kake.

(14:36):
So I really like how she tracked the way that
that pioneer travel developed new kinds of cakes as people
got access to different ingredients. Yeah, it really does, as
she said, make you think about kind of backwards engineering
cakes that maybe have been in your family for a
long time, and think about, oh, that's why that ingredient
probably became part of our our kitchen's vernacular. And I

(14:57):
have to say, every time she talks about another kind
of cake as we were discussing, I just want to
run in my kitchen and try baking it because they
all sound amazing. Coming up, we are going to talk
about the place of chocolate cake, which is a favorite
of mine in the United States history. But first we're
going to pause for a brief word from a sponsor.
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the deliciousness you can handle. And now, as promised, chocolate
cake Talk, which is really quite fascinating, whether you love
it or not, it's a pretty interesting story. And there's
also some fun references to early cooking schools in America

(17:32):
as An talks about it. So let's hop right back in.
The Next thing I wanted to talk about was chocolate cake,
because today this is like a standard cake in the US.
It's in every American bakery, most restaurants have it on
their menu. It's one of those first cakes you bake
if you do any baking at home. But it really
didn't appear on the scene until the late eighteen hundreds. Um,

(17:56):
can can you talk about the genesis of America's sort
of love a fair and identity with chocolate cake? Yes, definitely,
because it's a personal passion of mine. Um. You know,
chocolate with really first years in candy making and in
um blazes on cakes, glazes and frostings and things. People

(18:18):
were not very adventurous in with chocolate in the beginning.
But enter you know Fannie Farmer and all those cooking
school teachers from Boston and Philadelphia, Well, they started experimenting
with chocolate for two reasons. One, it was just the
time that people were in. It was sort of a
scientific period of time, American time, and they were curious.

(18:39):
They had cooking schools that were very focused on measurements
and health and sanitation. Um. They were interested in feeding invalids. Uh.
There were a lot of invalids in our country, and
old cookbooks of that period of tom had chapters on
caring for invalids. So you've got these very scientific, health

(19:01):
focused women with this new ingredient chocolate, and what do
they do with it? They tell you to use it sparingly,
but that it has its benefits. It is going to
make you feel bader, it's going to stimulate your health
and give you energy. Uh. And then the chocolate companies,

(19:22):
the early chocolate companies in our country, hired these cooking
school teachers to develop recipes for them. So those like
the Baker chocolate recipes, Aurora Chocolate, they were these ladies
were sort of sidelining, um, you know, creating chocolate recipes
that today a lot of them are still on the

(19:43):
back of the Baker chocolate box. So and so chocolate
crept into cake baking very gently. One of the first
cakes made with chocolate we call it today a mahogany
cake because it is very pale in color and it
has that wonderful whippy seven minute frosting on it. Um.
But if that's that's how chocolate cakes used to look

(20:05):
very pale by comparison to the way chocolate is used
in big, deep, dark cakes today. And then I'm going
to jump forward a little bit because in the mid
twentieth century there was sort of another explosion of cake
experimentation and development of flavors. Um. Can you talk about one,
and I'm sure we could guess, but we need it

(20:26):
from the expert. One why that era saw such variety
in baking, and then too, how it was not just
the realm, which people might initially think of the boon
of stay at home wives, but also working women. Definitely,
are you talking just post war war before or during
the war period, I would say post World War first war. Yeah,

(20:48):
so that brought a lot of change to not only
homes and kitchens, but also the way cake was portrayed.
I did not Knowdge researching this book that after WORL
War two, a lot of the gas were given um
um sort of just given scholarships to attend culinary academies
and to uh study pastry making. And that was the

(21:09):
boom in commercial bakeries that came after World War two.
And that's when we kind of think of the white
sheep cake with the whippy you know, bakery, vegetable for vegetables, shortening, frosting,
that's from that era, that's when that came to be.
Before World War Two, cakes were small. Cakes were very small,

(21:29):
and in fact cupcakes. The first cupcakes were baked during
World War two wartime, when women who were in the
factories working would make small, unfrosted cakes called cupcakes and
bring them in to the factory and share them with
their coworkers. But after World War Two, everything got big.
You know, suburbs got big, cards got larger, and so

(21:50):
cakes got larger. Um Cake mixes were sort of developed
and experimented with during World War World War two, but
it was after World War too, when we had the
stay at home moms and the more baking, more entertaining,
that you saw more cake mixes being used in all
kinds of convenience products, really in the American kitchen. And

(22:14):
then those big you know, I think in the late
fifties we think of, you know, the the big popular cakes.
The red velvet cake was a big one. I think
the pineapple upside down cake, even though that's the nineteen
twenties cake that was really still popular. Um, you know,
Hershey bar cake was a popular period. Fruit cocktail cake,

(22:37):
German chocolate cake came out of that period. But it
was that the early sixties changed even those again because
we had the influence, the French chef influence of Julia
Child and the Kennedy's in the White House, and that's
what changed cake baking one more time, and it gave

(22:57):
us the flowerless chocolate cake that we loved day and
then I could say later in the sixties, the whole
California movement. UM. I interviewed Lindsay Sheer, who was the
first pastry chef for Alice Waters at Schapanese. Shapanese opened
in Berkeley in nineteen seventy one, and I really I

(23:18):
believe that that restaurant, in the way those pastry chefs
were cooking there, changed the way that we bake cakes
today because the cakes were more rustic, they were largely unfrosted,
they were more Mediterranean in style. It's really fun to
see that connection. Yeah, it's it's such a again. I mean,

(23:40):
this is obvious because this is really what your book
is about, but it is fascinating to watch how cakes
develop in stride with cultural changes. That are going on,
they they so reflect the time. And I have to
laugh when you are talking about this era of development,
just personally, because I think back and those are all
of the cakes that my mom made. I was born

(24:01):
in the very early seventies, so she had learned those
when she was at that age and in that era.
And then those are the cakes that kind of carried
her forward in life that she was baking. So when
you talk about and those are cake, yes, the German
chocolate cake, the Italian cream cakes. Think about the cakes
that we still baked today. If you looked at a

(24:23):
period in time that probably was that gave us. Are
a lot of our legacy cakes in America. It's probably
from nineteen fifty the nineteen seventy five. And you reference
and write about in this book numerous historical cookbooks that
you that you worked with. Do you have a favorite

(24:44):
among those? Oh? I love them. I love the housewife cookbooks.
And that there's a there's actually a big box in
the book on the original housewive. Um tried to have
a little fun with it, you know, because there was
the Virginia Housewife, Mary Randolph, the Kentucky house Life, and
the Sarah and the South Carolina Housewife among and then
even before that there were German housewife books written in

(25:08):
German u with the whole idea that you you it
was not just cooking and baking, but it was making
a home and it was a lot of household sort
of primer advice on how to set a table, how
to how to be married, how to how to be happy,
how to raised children. I love reading those old books.

(25:29):
There were a lot of fun. Uh. This is one
thing that just piqued my interest when I was looking
at the book. Will you tell us about mayonnaise cake?
You know, mayonnaise cake is is a good example. Let's
just say it's possibly a depression ere a cake. It's

(25:50):
a hard times cake, as so many of our cakes
and other foods like casseroles were because people were trying
to make do so some them with a mayonnaise cake.
You've got you're using mayonnaise and the cake which has
both the eggs and the oil. It became sort of
a short cut cake, an economizing cake. Um the nineteens,

(26:12):
there are probably an idea that came out of the
nineteen thirties that then became part of pop culture. In
food largely helped by food manufactors who would put the
recipe on the back of the container. Have you ever
made a mayonnaise cake. I have made a mayonnaise cake,
and uh, and they're they're incredibly moist. A lot of

(26:36):
people love them. They are a little salty for me.
That's my own little thing, mayonnaise. I think commercial mayonnaise
has a lot of salt in its. Possibly if you
made a mayonnaise cake with homemade mannaise, which sort of
defeats the purpose, um, you know, you wouldn't have that.
But I find them alito salty from my taste because
that by the time you add baking powder, which has

(26:57):
salt in it, and um, you know, maybe some salts
in the cake. That's just a little personal. Uh. Was
there any other ingredient that you came across in your
research that either made you blanch or wonder why anyone
would put it in a cake? Well, there's the chocolate
sauer Kraut cake. That's um. You know. That was when
I was writing for the Atlanta newspapers way back when

(27:21):
I remember receiving a chocolate sauer Kraut cake recipe from
the Sauer Kraut Growers of America or something and thinking, okay,
well that'll wind up in the trash. And then I
received another one and we ended up writing sort of
a column on the wacky recipes that we received from
food manufacturers, and that was one of them. So I
actually baked it and it was pretty good. It's pretty good.

(27:42):
So when I was doing the research on this book,
I realized that it kept popping up again in older
cookbooks in Idaho at out west, and I didn't want
to forget that part of the country. Um, so we
did include it. And it was an early German cake recipe. Okay,
they had the sauer kraut. They realized that sauer kraut

(28:03):
made the cake more moist, and they were baking with chocolates.
Germans have always cakes. Germans have always loved to bake
with chocolate and with spices. So that's a really nice cake.
But another cake I think that is important and sort
of like that is the apple sauce cake. Yeah, but
that's why I actually called the recipe in the book

(28:24):
the nineteen seventeen apple sauce Apple sauce cake because it
is a classic World War One recipe when people were
trying to do without eggs, baking without baking out, without fat,
without eggs. So they found that they could actually cook
down make apple sauce out of their own apples, or
you could purchase apple sauce then at the grocery, and

(28:45):
it was a shortcut cake. And there were a lot
of the US government recipe brochures that were provided to
people on ways to bake during times of war, and
apple sauce cake was one that was baked universally and
it still is today. Great egg So of course it
makes absolute total sense that a lot of the more

(29:07):
unique cakes that we have were born from trying to
make things work with various ingredients that were sparse during wartime.
I hadn't really thought about that with cakes before, but
we have talked about that general theme on the podcast
before when we talked about spam making its way into
wartime cuisine, especially in places that had a high, high
percentage of American gies. Yeah, it's one of those things.

(29:29):
When I asked her about mayonnaise cake, I asked because
I thought it was so funny. But then when she
talks about, oh, it's because they were trying to make
up for, you know, not having eggs and oil readily available.
I'm like, oh, duh, I feel fool well, and I
think I think angel food cake came from the dilemma
of like, what do I do with all these egg whites?
I needed all the yolks for this recipe? What do

(29:51):
I do with all this egg white? Now? I didn't
ask her about that, although I have heard that before.
And coming up, we're actually going to talk about Mardi
Gras and kincake. But before we do, let's pause for
a quick break and we will talk about one of
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I have stuck them somewhere that I cannot remember. Uh.
And Tracker makes this absolutely a thing of the past. Normally, previously,
in the pre Tracker world of my life, if if

(30:33):
I misplaced my keys somewhere in the house, it became
this lengthy ordeal of tearing things apart trying to find
my keys, and like texting my husband to say, have
you seen my keys? And if he's busy, then I
get more frustrated that he's not answering me at my
demand to tell me where my keys are when it's
not his responsibility to find my keys. Uh, this is

(30:53):
no longer an issue because of Tracker. Uh. There in
the Tracker app there's a and that you can press
that will make your tracker make a noise. And so
you can just press that button in your house and
your keys will ring at you and you can go
find them. So I mean, Tracker makes losing things a
thing of the past. It's this coin sized device that

(31:14):
lets you find your keys, your while, it's your bags,
your computer, anything in seconds. You just pare it to
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is super, super easy. If you lose your phone, you
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(31:35):
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(31:59):
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is the Tracker dot Com Perromo code history. Now we
will get back to our story. So you may or

(32:20):
may not know that the king cake that you're probably
getting from your local bakery is not really like either
of the original styles of king cake served here or
in France, and we're going to talk about that with
Anne Burne as well as presidential cakes in this next segment.
Next is a little bit of a selfish topic because

(32:41):
I love Mardi Gras and the cake that most of
us are eating today and calling kingcake that we get
from bakeries is really more of a Danish. But you
have in this book a couple of other versions of
king cake that are a little more authentic to France
and New Orleans in an earlier time period. Will you
talk about those a bit. Yes, definitely. I have two

(33:02):
kincakes in the book. The first one, which is in
the first chapters, the oldest, and that is New Orleans kincake.
That is a Brioche style cake. So it is a
it's like a bread cake because it has yeast in it,
but it's sweet. And that came to New Orleans. We're
thinking about seventeen eighteen with the Basque settlers in New Orleans.

(33:23):
So New Orleans was was just a fascinating place. Is
still a fascinating place I think in America for food,
but we tend to think of early American um cakes
and cooking just from the colonies. There was so much
going on in New Orleans with with the French and
the Spanish and the Basque and the Haitians and just

(33:43):
all that sort of melting pot that created the Creole
and the Cajun cuisines that we love today. So that
was the first one. A yeast a yeast face. And
then in the seventies um there became popularized a cake
that is made in a lot of home in New
Orleans and it still is today for mardy gras or

(34:04):
to be served on Epiphany, and it is the French style,
which is puff pastry, So that those are the two
distinct styles. And and the puff pastry version was popularized
in the seventies. What was Pepperidge Farm, you know, Frisen
puff pastry being available. But what you have served most
of the time to tourists, uh during mardy Gras is

(34:27):
a dank like you said, you're right, is a Danish.
And that is because those bakeries, um could get commercial
Danish from Cisco or whatever, you know, distributor pre made
and then they turn it into kincake. That's not true. Kinkake.
Kincake is either brioche or puff pastry. Well, and I

(34:48):
imagined the Danish stuff ships a little more easily, and
I know there is huge business around shipping out from
New Orleans at this point. Very true, but for fun
makes the French kincake all of them. Another thing that
I wanted to mention was this really darling chart that

(35:09):
you have in the book with presidents and their favorite cakes.
Did you come across any information in your research about
whether presidential preference made a cake more popular during his
time in office? You know, I looked for that, and
you would think that it might, but probably the one

(35:29):
cake of all cakes, and it's in the book as
the Mary Lincoln white almond cake was the cake that
was most associated with a president, and unfortunately, I think
that's because, you know, President Lincoln was assassinated, and so
this recipe Mary Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln's recipe, which is
a Lexington, Virginia recipe. It's essentially a pound cake with

(35:52):
almond's and it's lovely. UM was a cake that she
begged for President Lincoln when they courted, and it became
aim the cake that memorialized Lincoln after his death. So
it was baked and served at banquets UH to honor
President Lincoln. UM. A little the same the Washington cake

(36:14):
is baked throughout history. Not so much anymore, but pick
up an old cookbook and you're gonna find a Washington cake.
And it's kind of a one size fits all cake.
If it's a pound cake, you can call it a
Washington cake. If you want to grate some linen vest
in it, it's a Washington cake. It was just a
way of you know, celebrating George Washington. But in more

(36:35):
recent times, I don't think so we've got you know,
the I've got a Sarah Poke uh, wife of James K.
Poke her hickory nut cake in here. But a recent time,
you know, Resid Doodle Roosevelt was linked all over to
clothes cake, which is the molass of spice cake. A
lot of references there, And I remember of stories always

(36:57):
saying that Lyndon Johnson loved so umer fruit. But they
call in Texas summer fruit cake. And I was so
curious about what makes a summer fruit cake in winter?
But that is the cowboy cake. Now does it have
additional fruit in it in addition to raisins? Or is
it still just to know? But it's just it would
be a hot weather it would be a well a

(37:18):
cake you would bake, a fruit cake you would bake
in the summertime, as opposed to the one that you
made during the holidays, winter holidays that had a lot
of expensive fruits in it and maybe with soaked and
bourbon and wrapped up in cheese cloth, and you know,
served when the weather was cooler. A summer fruit cake
was lighter, so it would have been more like a
boiled raisin cake. And then you know, more recently, Jimmy

(37:41):
Carter has always said they love the Lane cake. I
always thought that was interesting. This Coast Carter is from
you know, Plains Georgia, home of peanuts. You would think
it would be something like the peanut cake, but it's
actually the Alabama steak keke, which is the lane cake.
But now in that part of the country, I do
know because I lived down there for a while. Um,
you know much of the many of the cakes that

(38:02):
are baked and beloved in in in Alabama are actually
loved by you all in Georgia. Because well, I'm back
and forth. Cake has no borders in my book. Um,
I like it from anywhere. Uh. For listeners who are
perhaps interested in exploring baking with recipes from history, but
might be a little trepidacious about which ones are good

(38:23):
to start with, do you have any advice for them? Yes,
I would try the Lazy Daisy cake. Um, it's a
one pancake. It's a it's a typical on nineteen thirties cake.
It's got a great story. It's just a yellow cake
baked in a nine by thirteen pan. But then you
make this fabulous OUI gooey topping of cream and brown

(38:43):
sugar and coconut, and you pour it over and then
throw it under the broiler. Uh. It makes a great
cake for a party or for a birthday, and you
just cut it into squares. It's super easy. Um. The
others of the James Beard huckleberry cake, you can use
blueberry is in that instead. That's a great one for
kids to make. It's just a very simple keke. It's

(39:05):
easy to put together, and you bake it in a
square pan. Uh. And both of those give you historical
baking bragging rights, which is great. Um, that's right. Were
there any historical techniques that you came across that we're
surprising that might make good tips for modern bakers? Wow?
So interesting. I came across some odd ones, um, like

(39:25):
like on the this you know this supposedly the shakers
um would whip egg whites with a peach branch because
it imparted the peach flavor into the egg whites, which
we know cannot be possible. It's just a branch off
of a tree. Uh. I love that one, and the
I love I'm literally making the shock face over here.

(39:45):
That's fantastic. Weird. That was that was pretty crazy. And
then the old old recipe in the front of the book,
the water keg. That was really a fun I've never
heard of a water cake. Well, that was a sponge
cake that back when sugar was not granulated and it
was old and cones and you snipped off what you needed,

(40:06):
you had to dissolve it in hot water and boiling
water before you could pour it into the cake batter.
So they used to call those water cakes. UM. But
I think as far as looking at old recipes and
learning something from them, I think that we've over I
think today's cakes, modern cakes are over frosted. We put

(40:29):
way too much frosting. So if if a hundred years
from now, the historian was doing this project and looking back,
they would probably say of this era and especially all
the cupcake era and the tall frousting, that this obviously
was an atomic economic boom, that we had a plenty
of everything, that the portions were too large, the sugar

(40:50):
too much. Um. And I think we could look back
on the old cakes and say, you know, they had
something right. They were baking in an eight inch pan,
they didn't put they didn't use a lot of frosting.
Maybe what frosting they did use they just piled on
top of the cake, or they made a wonderful filling
of a custard or a lemon curd that went between

(41:13):
the layers. They used local blackberries or strawberries on top
of the cake, or they made homemade ice cream to
go with it, and it was just a pancke. It
was very simple. So I think that we could maybe
look at how the portions and how cake was presented
going forward and sort of rethink, do we need six

(41:37):
layers and frostings? Sometimes? Sometimes we do. Sometimes I have
to ask you the Sophie's choice question, do you have
a favorite cake? I'll give you two because these are
two that I was not raised on, and that's why
I think they're my new favorites. It might change six
months from now, but I love the Chaponese almond for

(42:00):
it because it is it's just so elegant, homeless, perfect
for a birthday dinner party. And that's the ship that
is the Lindsay Year Interview. I did that and I
love it. You make the whole thing in the food
processor and poured in the pants. It's dead easy. Um.
I love that cake. And I also love the Wealthy

(42:21):
Fudge cake because if you want a bang up delicious
chocolate layer cake, that Wealthy fudge cake. And and I
was not raised on it growing up in Tennessee, but
everyone I talked to in New England was raised on
the Wealthy Fudge Cake and loved it. Um, And I
can see why it's a dandy. Uh. There are so

(42:44):
many cakes in this book that I got ridiculously excited about.
I am totally making cinnamon flop for my husband at
some point, because he's a big cinnamon and I actually
did try my hand. There is a recipe and I'm
blanking out. There's it's an adjacent recipe to the cinnamon
flop cake that features a caramel icing. And I did
make that and it was magnificent. Um, so super yummy.

(43:07):
I was excited at your Brown Derby cake was in there.
The grapefruit cake. I love that story of Harry Baker,
that traveling salesman turned pastry shots. Yes. Well, and you
you probably know this that Disney World serves that cake
in their version of the Brown Derby. That's right, it's
actually it's quite good. I have to say it is
quite it's good. And and and this recipe, we it

(43:30):
took a while to get this one right because we
boy getting those grapefruit. You know the sections the grapefruit
and where to put them and how to arrange them
on the cake so that when you sliced into it,
they just didn't fall out. And it's a beautiful cake there. Well,
and it's it's surprising to me how much I love
that particular cake because I'm not really a citrus fan,

(43:51):
but there's something about the lightness of it combined with
the citrus that makes it not It doesn't do to
me what other citrus does, which is usually I just
find the flavor a little overwhelming, but it's really delicious. Um.
You also have an amazing blog, and I have to
thank you for the cheese date cookies recipe that you

(44:14):
posted not too long, but thank you that with my
grandmother's recipe, we made that for a reunion. It is
such a wonderful and unique thing. And it's one of
those things that I think if you haven't experimented much
with baking, uh, you may see those some of those
ingredients together and go what, but oh, it's beautiful counterpoint.

(44:34):
So for our listeners, with the powdered sugar, did a
little a little powdered sugar, Okay, I didn't go crazy
with it, um, which is shocking for me, but it's oh,
it's so beautiful. So for our listeners, one, I encourage
you go read this blog but too. It's a date
wrapped in this cheddar cheese based dough. It is amazing,

(44:56):
It's so amazing. Um, it's the best. So, speaking of
your blog, where can people find you online if they
want to find out more about you can? Well, not
blogging website is and burn dot com a N N
A b y r n dot com, this' rep blog
and talk about my cookbooks. Um so yeah, and then
you know as far as um my, I've got I'm

(45:19):
all on on all social media, so Facebook as well,
Facebook it's the cake mix Doctor, and Instagram is and
burn so it kind of in Pinterest is and burn
as well. So yeah, I'm all over and enjoying fine
consistent naming. It's so fun and it's such a delight

(45:39):
to get to speak with you. I really just delighted
in this book because thank you so much. Well, I'm
so glad you like it and and you appreciate all
this the stories behind cake. I mean there's a whole
chapter on icings and frostings. I love this book. Um,
thank you. Yeah, it's wonderful. And I think for any

(46:00):
that likes baking and particularly likes incorporating a little bit
of history at home on a daily basis, it's a
perfect way to get into that. And I will say
I was a little fretful because I'm a little bit
I love to bake, but I can be a lazy baker.
So it was really nice. I had that that concern that, oh,
these will all be very difficult and have a cajillion steps,

(46:20):
but it's really not nearly so tricky as I had anticipated,
so I was delighted. Yeah, it's always a good bet
too if you feel that way, to look for the
recipes that are the shortest. Um, and thank you so
so much for sharing your incredible depth of knowledge about
history and pastry with us. Uh. I feel so fortunate

(46:42):
that we got to spend some time with you today. Well,
it was just such a treat to be on your show.
I just love it. Ah. Well, that is a ridiculously
delightful compliment. I never feel like I deserve those, but
I'm happy to have them. Uh. Thank you once again,
and for our listeners, all of the information she just
mentioned will be sure to include in the show notes. Uh,

(47:03):
and everyone can get to historical baking right away, Holly,
I think you and I agree that, uh where we
can't totally get behind this cutback on frosting opinion, right,

(47:24):
I'm I'm like, ah, some sort of insect. I really
am big on the sugars. Whenever there's cake at the office,
I'm like, can I get a corner piece with flour
on it? Yes? Thank you. But I really do encourage
any of our listeners to kind of test out a
little bit of historical baking. And I will say the
the caramel icing that I mentioned when I was speaking

(47:48):
with her that I made from her book is really
really delicious and it will satisfy just about any sweet
tooth and you don't actually need very much. Once again,
Ann's book, American Cake is a lovely way to connect
with history in the kitchen. And I just want to
thank Anne so much for spending time with us and
sharing her incredibly vast knowledge of cake history. She knows
so much about cake. We were talking on Twitter last

(48:09):
night as I was reviewing this, and she called herself
a cake nerd, and I found that terribly enduring. Well,
and I was so glad you were able to do
this interview because coincidentally, one day when I was in
the office and you were not, which is never like
that very rare, an incredible rarity, I happened to be
the one who opened the mail and there was a
review copy of that book, and I was like, this

(48:31):
is for Holly Holly's thing because I like cake, but
like you, I knew that was totally year ball game. Well,
and I it's not in the interview. We talked about
it after the fact that when the book first came
and I was I was like, how on earth is
this gonna work? It's cake in History? And then I
opened it and was like, I'm in so much trouble.
I'm so deep down a rabbit hole because there is

(48:53):
so much great history mixed into the book. You know.
It's not like here's a little brief bit of history
and then it's all recipe. It's really a lot of
history and the recipes are phenomenal, and I want to
make them all. Yeah. Well, and there's definitely cake history
and the rest of the world too, So yeah, maybe
someone will will write books of international cake history. That
sounds fine to me. I will also read those books, um,

(49:18):
and now I have a little bit of listener mail.
I'm gonna keep it kind of brief because that episode
runs a little bit long because I could not stop
talking about cake. But I have two postcards. One is
from our listener Jesse, who says, Dear Tracy and Holly.
By complete chance, I found myself recently in Bingen, Germany,
and thanks to your recent podcast on Hildegard von Bingen,

(49:39):
I knew the story of the city's well known abbess.
The church features uh on the front of this Oh,
the church featured sorry on the front of this postcard
is home to an altar which portrays Hildegard's life as
a long time his listener. Thank you for the hours
and hours of entertainment over the years. So it's a
lovely photograph of the church where that that alter sits.

(50:02):
And then we got another really cute postcard from Grace
Uh and she just writes a very sweet brief thank
you on the back for the podcast. But what I
really really liked is that this postcard is from Tokyo
Disney Resort, and it's very cute. It is of the
seven Dwarves from Snow White, but what's really charming is
that they are holding bamboo shoots, which are not normally

(50:25):
part of the snow White story. But they're very sweet
and it's an absolutely beautiful postcard. So thank you to
both of those listeners and everyone who writes us. We
appreciate it so much. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast. At
how stuff works dot com. You can also find us
pretty much across the spread of social media as missed
in History. UH. If you would like to learn a
little bit about anything that is on your mind at

(50:48):
the moment, you can go to our parents site, how
stuff works dot com. Search for that thing that's on
your mind in the text bar, and a ton of
content will churn right up for you to explore and
get lost in, much like I got lost in the Cakebook. UH.
If you would like to come and visit us, you
can do that at mist in history dot com, where
Tracy and I have put all of the episodes of

(51:10):
this show from way back before we were on it
up to the present day, as well as show notes
from the times that Tracy and I have been hosting,
and occasional other goodies. So we encourage you visit us
at Misston history dot com and how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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