WHEN I MET CHEF AND COOKBOOK AUTHOR Edna Lewis in the late 1980s at Middleton Place, along the Ashley River north of Charleston, she was tall, silver-haired, elegant, and unpretentious. She spoke with a sweet but distinguished voice.
“Miss Lewis,” as she was addressed by the press and people who worked with her, was winding up a Low Country residency at this grand 18th-century home and gardens and living in the upstairs of what was called the “Rice House,” creating menus, selecting ingredients, and cooking for guests as she had done most of her life.
The setting must have been poignant for Miss Lewis, the grandchild of an enslaved Virginia brick mason. To be living and working on what had been a rice plantation built by enslaved hands with proceeds enriching four generations of old-line South Carolina, could not have escaped her.
Middleton Place was built in the early 1700s and acquired in 1741 by Henry Middleton, second president of the First Continental Congress. The estate would be the family’s home as Middletons played important roles in America’s history. Henry’s son Arthur was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Today the gardens, an inn, and restaurant are open to the public.
Born in 1916, one of eight children to Eugene and Daisy Lewis, Edna Lewis was raised in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community in the state’s Piedmont settled by freed Black people after Emancipation. The fertile land surrounding it had cranked out tobacco and then cotton.
Here the residents of Freetown built their own homes. Miss Lewis’s grandfather ran a school out of his living room and was a founder of Bethel Baptist Church in nearby Unionville.
And if you’ve read Miss Lewis’s 1976 cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, you know that church was the site of homecoming each second Sunday in August. One of my favorite menus from her book was the “Sunday Revival Dinner.”
As she writes, “Revival was in a way a kind of Thanksgiving. There was real rejoicing: The fruits of our hard labor were now our own, we were free to come and go, and to gather together for this week of reunion and celebration.”
The menu included Baked Virginia Ham, Southern Fried Chicken, Braised Leg of Mutton, Sweet Potato Casserole and Corn Pudding, Green Beans with Pork, a Platter of Sliced Tomatoes with special seasoning, pickles and yeast rolls, biscuits, both Sweet Potato Pie and Summer Apple Pie as well as Tyler Pie (custard pie to which she added coconut), Caramel Layer Cake, lemonade and iced tea.
When I read about the “special seasoning” on her tomatoes, I was taken back to my mother’s kitchen. Miss Lewis sprinkled over granulated sugar, fresh black pepper, and a “light touch of salt” and let the tomatoes marinate 10 to 15 minutes. “It was a marriage of flavors that needed no other touches except perhaps a garnish of chervil,” she said, “the common herb of my childhood.”
Edna Lewis left home at 16, traveled to Washington, D.C. and eventually New York City to find work as a seamstress. According to the New York Times, in 1948 her friend Johnny Nicholson, owner of Café Nicholson, became aware of Miss Lewis’s fine cooking and asked her to be the restaurant’s chef. Here she met the famous patrons who dined there—Truman Capote, Gloria Vanderbilt, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others.
Over the years she would design clothing and style Bonwit Teller store windows, run a pheasant farm, clean homes, work as a caterer, and write. She wrote The Edna Lewis Cook Book in 1972, along with socialite Evangeline Peterson, for whom she had regularly catered parties.
According to Sara B. Franklin in her book, The Editor, about the life and works of book editor Judith Jones, after being shown Miss Lewis’s first book, Jones wanted only Edna Lewis without Peterson in her next.
Miss Lewis wrote down her recipes and menus from memory on yellow legal pads, her 12-year-old niece Nina Williams-Mbengue typed up the pages, and they sent them to Jones who sensed something special about publishing this unheard American voice.
“The whole country was abuzz with discussion of what, 200 years into its existence, it meant to be American,” Franklin wrote in The Editor.
What I wouldn’t learn until I read Franklin’s book was that Miss Lewis’s time at Middleton wasn’t a PR stunt from her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to sell more books. It should have been because her second book, In Pursuit of Flavor, had just been published in 1988.
The work Miss Lewis did all her life—cooking, sewing, cleaning homes—isn’t the kind that guarantees much retirement income. She came to Middleton because she needed the work. And when she left, she didn’t feel compensated for her time, Sara Franklin discovered via conversations with Judith Jones. Middleton would continue to serve Miss Lewis’s recipes long after she was gone.
And as best as I can recall, the meal Miss Lewis and her staff prepared for myself and other journalists was smothered quail, spoonbread, fresh peas simmered with lettuce, and a cake with berries for dessert. It might have been her Sunday cake for which she was famous, a butter cake scented with nutmeg. You can watch it and other recipes being prepared on the PBS film called Finding Edna Lewis. Richmond culinary anthropologist and award-winning writer Debra Freeman produced and directed this documentary from the eyes of eight women who had been inspired by Edna Lewis. One of them was my friend Leni Sorensen.
On a recent trip to Virginia, my husband and I drove through the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Charlottesville, hoping to find Miss Lewis’s hometown of Freetown. We mistakingly drove to the wrong Freetown. Instead of finding the plaque that commemorates the post Civil War settlement of freed Blacks Miss Lewis’s grandfather helped found, we found what was left of another community of freed slaves founded under similar circumstances.
Fortunately, on the trip I was able to reconnect with Crozet, Virginia scholar and culinary historian Leni Sorenson via phone to talk about Edna Lewis and why she continues to matter today. Edna Lewis died in 2006 just shy of her 90th birthday.
Dr. Sorensen is an expert in 18th- and 19th-century cooking methods used by Virginia housewives and the enslaved, including those who cooked for Thomas Jefferson. She participated in the research that led to the restoration of the kitchens at Monticello, worked with chef Walter Staib for the PBS series A Taste of History, and has studied the life and recipes of Mary Randolph of the Virginia House-wife. She said Edna Lewis’s life bridged two very different worlds.
“The Taste of Country Cooking and her narrative of this community is so important,” she said. “Edna Lewis is writing it about her past but with a very present remembrance when she was 60 years old.
“She’s someone who has used wood stoves as well as microwaves and electric stoves so her perspectives as a young girl are very strong and detailed. I remember when I first read a copy of that book the year it was published. I was farming in South Dakota and cooking on a wood stove and milking cows and had a huge garden, and here suddenly is this book by a Black woman in a world I knew, and there had been none like it. I knew there were Black women out there who knew this stuff, but I wanted to find them.”
Arriving in Williamsburg, I made a beeline to the library at the College of William & Mary to see their collection of historic cookbooks. And there was Edna Lewis’s first book, out of print and hard to find. Judith Jones must have flipped through these same pages and as she read the words she heard Miss Lewis and thought America might be ready to listen to her, too.
And yet, they weren’t. Book sales were disappointing for The Taste of Country Cooking and editor Jones had to fight hard to get the book published, Sara Franklin writes in The Editor. But that has changed recently. In 2024, the New York Times said The Taste of Country Cooking was the most influential cookbook of the past 100 years. Now 50 years old, Taste is still in print.
I stopped on page 27 of The Edna Lewis Cook Book at the recipe for Poulet à la Crème, which is chicken in cream sauce. I made a copy, and brought it home with me. And last week I cooked Edna Lewis’s creamed chicken with fresh peas from my garden. It took me back to Middleton Place, to meeting this great American chef and writer, and to my own rediscovery of Southern cooking.
Poulet à la crème is beautifully old school just like Edna Lewis. It is rooted in technique and tradition, just like Edna Lewis.
Spanning the decades of her life, Edna Lewis remained grounded in timeless Virginia recipes of her homeland. And along the way, she changed how the world viewed Southern cooking, according to Debra Freeman.
There’s nothing trendy about chicken baked in its own juices, with seasonal vegetables, wine, and a splash of cream. But there is something profound and comforting about it, too, and it’s exactly the kind of food I am hungry for right now.
- xo, Anne
What’s your favorite Edna Lewis recipe or remembrance?
P.S. A FEW MORE TIDBITS… Watching the Edna Lewis film, I learned that Miss Lewis never addressed farm life as hardship. And while she grew up in a segregated world, she considered the food on her table beautiful. Miss Lewis had a saying about food, and I guess you can say this is true about many things, “if it’s good, it will be remembered.” And she thought having a ham on hand to season food was like having a basic black dress to wear. Classic.
Here are two other posts about Edna Lewis from my archives, accessible to paying subscribers:
Chicken and Dumplings - No. 188
THE RECIPE:
Edna Lewis’s Poulet à la Crème
From The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) is this lovely recipe. Whether you bake or simmer this one-pot meal, it is a good basic to have on hand for suppers or company. Use a whole small chicken, cut into pieces, or as I did with two large breasts, that I cut in two with sharp kitchen scissors. Really amp up the recipe with mushrooms if you love them, and don’t forgo the whole cloves. This is a lovely touch and adds a lot of flavor. At the end, I swirled in a couple cups of fresh spinach leaves from my garden and a half cup freshly shelled peas, both just to cook through, and no more. I added the bit of Parmesan to the cream to give it more flavor. Serve with rice, pasta, mashed potatoes—something cozy.
Makes 4 servings
Prep: 20 to 25 minutes
Cook: 50 to 55 minutes
1 2 1/2-to 3-pound chicken, cut into pieces, or two large bone-in chicken breasts cut in half or a mix of chicken breasts and thighs
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup coarsely chopped sweet onion or 6 to 8 small white onions, peeled
2 to 3 whole cloves
3 small carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
8 ounces Baby Bella or white mushrooms, sliced
1 to 2 bay leaves
2 sprigs parsley
1/2 cup white wine or dry vermouth
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup (6 ounces) heavy cream
2 cups packed fresh spinach leaves
1/2 cup freshly shelled peas (or frozen)
Black pepper to taste
Handful of good grated Parmesan to taste
Wash and pat dry the pieces of chicken.
Place a 10-inch skillet over medium heat, and add the butter. When the butter melts and foams, add the chicken one piece at a time, skin side down. Let cook a couple minutes to let the skin set, which Edna Lewis called ‘seizing,’ and she felt it made a more attractive appearance if the chicken had been sauteed at this lower heat so the skin doesn’t shrivel up and brown. Turn and repeat on the other side. (But I realize that browning adds flavor, so suit yourself).
Add the onion to the pan, the cloves, carrots, mushrooms, bay leaves and parsley. Pour over the wine. Place a lid on the pan, and simmer on low until the chicken is quite tender, about 50 to 55 minutes. Edna does not salt the chicken before cooking. But she adds the salt about 20 minutes before the chicken has cooked through. (I wonder if this is because salt can toughen meat and draw out the moisture.)
Meanwhile pour the cream into a small saucepan over low heat and let it come to a brisk simmer. Let the cream reduce by half, which takes about 10 to 15 minutes. (If desired, season with salt, pepper, and a handful of grated good Parmesan.)
Uncover the pan with the chicken and add the spinach leaves and the peas. Stir and let them cook a few minutes. Season with black pepper, and salt if needed. pour over the cream, and serve. (You can absolutely stir the cream into the sauce, but I stopped before doing that and let the cream cloak the top of the chicken.)
A SMALL POSITIVE THAT CAME OUT of the pandemic, besides having family back at home, was baking bread. I finally took the time to bake and show others how to make challah, one of my favorites.
No surprise that Japanese milk bread with its tall ascent in the pan and soft, squishy interior has been on my to-bake list as well.
But I wasn’t waiting until anoth…
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PEOPLE AROUND ME AT THE AIRPORT gate are scarfing down hot, dripping breakfast sandwiches, but I’m thinking nostalgically about the blueberry muffins I baked the night before.
I’m on my way to Austin to speak at the Bullock Texas State History Museum about great American cakes, and I’m wishing I had packed one of those muffins in my purse.
They were loaded with fat, juicy blueberries, and some of those berries had popped open from the oven’s high heat and trickled a little river of purple juice across the pan. They were crunchy, too, from the coarse Demerara sugar I sprinkled on top just before they went into the oven.
I froze most of the muffins to take to a family vacation this summer and left a couple on the kitchen counter for my husband to enjoy. Am pretty sure they’ll be gone by the time I return…
Why do I forget about baking blueberry muffins?
Why do I forget about writing about blueberry muffins?
They’re not some great American cake I’m going to talk about in Austin, but maybe they should be.
One of my favorite blueberry muffin recipes belongs to Martha Nesbit, a longtime friend from Savannah who uses fat Georgia blueberries. I shared that recipe in my book, Baking in the American South. But for this recent bake I wanted to look beyond the South.
I recalled a Boston blueberry muffin recipe being written about through the years. It came from the bakery in the old Jordan Marsh department stores, now no more.
So I did a little digging through old newspapers to see if Boston Globe food editor Gail Perrin, whom I had known professionally, had shared such a recipe. And there it was, in June 1974, back when a pint of blueberries cost just 49 cents.
With warmth and exuberance, Gail wrote a weekly recipe swap column for the Globe called the Confidential Chat. And that’s where these Jordan Marsh muffins surfaced. What made them different from other recipes was how 1/2 cup of the berries were smashed and folded into the batter along with 2 cups whole berries.
Jordan Marsh department stores were founded in the mid-1800s in Boston. The flagship store at 450 Washington Street would be America’s first “departmentalized” store. In addition to everything under the roof, the brownstone offered fashion shows, concerts, and art exhibits.
After World War II, like many department store chains, Jordan Marsh expanded into the suburbs as the country moved in that direction, too. And then it went through the succession/bankruptcy period of over-construction and changing consumer habits. Jordan Marsh was sold to Federated Department Stores and turned into Macy’s in 1996. (There was also a Florida division of Jordan Marsh, but I don’t know if the Florida stores had bakeries or blueberry muffins.)
By the time my plane landed in Austin, a New York Times recipe popped into my inbox and with insane coincidence, it was none other than the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin.
Either the NYT and Google are tracking my online searches or this was just one of those great-minds-think-alike coincidences.
Cannot Make This Stuff Up
I did learn interesting backstory from the NYT email. In 2023 the newspaper heard from Mara Richmond of Burlington, Vermont, to say that her father, Arnold Gitlin, as executive food consultant for Allied Stores, had developed the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin recipe. She said he adapted the recipe from one in the 1847 cookbook, The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book, written by Esther Howland. (The book became a 19th Century regional favorite.)
Since the old cookbook is now digitized, I studied it online and found no blueberry muffins mentioned. No muffins mentioned. I’m not sure where Arnold Gitlin got the inspiration, but the first print mention of blueberry muffins wasn’t until 1891 in a newspaper syndicated column by Mrs. D.A. Lincoln of the Boston Cooking School. She had authored Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book in the same year (it’s now digitized) and shared a huckleberry cake recipe that could be made into muffins.
Word got out about the Jordan Marsh muffins, and people wanted to make them at home.
On Sept. 13, 1966, a small advertisement ran on page 9 of The Daily Item, a community newspaper published in Lynn, Massachusetts, 10 miles north of Boston. It was submitted by an entrepreneurial someone called “The Muffin Master.” If you sent $1 in a self-addressed envelope, the Master would send you the Jordan Marsh recipe.
Regardless of the blueberry muffin’s history, the mechanics of making them are simple.
In muffin making, less is more. Beat the soft butter and sugar until creamy using a hand mixer. But when it’s time to fold in the blueberries, do so lightly with a rubber spatula. Overmixing muffin batter causes the muffins to bake up tall and peaked instead of rounded.
Salt lovers might go with salted butter because it balances the sugar, but you can use unsalted as well. And you can flavor the muffins with vanilla or add the zest of half a lemon.
For ease in getting the batter into the pan, use a big scoop. For precise bakers, it’s about 1/3 cup batter per muffin well, or nearly to the top. One recipe makes 12 big muffins.
You want a hotter oven for muffins than cake to get them to rise up quickly, so thus 375ºF. Some recipes start at 400ºF to get the oven hot and then dial it back to 375ºF once you place the pan in the oven.
But whatever you do, use big paper muffin liners, the kind that are taller than the pan. It makes getting the muffins out of the pan so much easier.
Do you know the Jordan Marsh muffins?
The next time I talk about American cakes, I’m including homemade blueberry muffins. They’re easy. They’re in season.
They’re what you see at a bake sale, what you crave on an airplane, what you hope to find on a kitchen counter.
2026 may go down as one of the most frustrating and turbulent years as families struggle to put gas in the car, minorities feel estranged, and our president lavishly spends, sues, and spouts nonsense on social media.
I don’t know how anyone can sugarcoat what’s happening as America approaches its 250th birthday. But for right now, these blueberry muffins are taking my blues away.
- xo, Anne
P.S. If you need a restorative moment and plan on being in Austin, Texas anytime soon, visit the LBJ Presidential Library. The welcome video of LBJ standing before Congress in 1963 accepting the role of president after JFK was assassinated is powerful. It birthed the idea that America could be “a great society” including all peoples, fighting poverty and bigotry, ushering in the Civil Rights Act and Voter’s Rights Act. Carved into granite in the foyer is an LBJ quote: “A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.”
THE RECIPE:
Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins
As I mentioned, you decide salted or unsalted butter. You decide vanilla or lemon zest. And you decide if these muffins are all blueberry or a mix of blueberries and raspberries for a completely America-250 look. I believe the amount of sugar is perfect, and it allows for the natural sweetness of the blueberries to come through.
Makes 12 muffins
Prep: 15 to 20 minutes
Bake: 25 to 30 minutes
Tall paper liners for lining the muffin pan
1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted or salted butter, at room temperature
1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups (240 grams) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon table salt or 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup (4 ounces) whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or grated lemon zest
2 1/2 rounded cups (15 ounces) fresh blueberries
1 tablespoon Demerara or coarse sugar for topping
Place a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat the oven to 375ºF. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with tall paper liners.
Place the butter and sugar in a large bowl, and beat with an electric hand mixer on medium-low speed until creamy, 1 minute. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat on low until well blended.
Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl, and add to the batter alternately with the milk, beating on low speed. Add the vanilla or lemon zest, blending just to combine. Remove the beaters. Mash 1/2 cup of the berries with a potato masher or fork, and fold into the batter with a rubber spatula. Fold in the 2 cups whole blueberries until just combined. Do not over-mix.
Using a 1/3 cup dry measuring cup or an ice cream scoop, divide the batter between the muffin cups, filling them nearly to the top. Sprinkle the tops with sugar. Place the pan in the oven, and bake until lightly golden brown and the tops spring back when lightly touched, 25 to 30 minutes. Let rest in the pan a couple minutes, and then carefully remove the muffins from the pan and let cool completely on a rack before serving or freezing.
ON APRIL 20, WHEN MANY OF YOU were asleep, I landed in Tokyo and plopped down on the loveseat in my 14th-floor hotel room, gazing out the window at emerald green trees and a fire engine-red bridge crossing the peaceful koi pond. Then, the room moved.
The windows swayed, beams in the ceiling shifted, and at first I passed it off as jet lag or vertigo, but when the movement didn’t stop for what must have been 10 to 15 seconds, reason whispered to move away from the window and toward the hallway. I was greeted by my sister, who had just come out of her room, and we asked each other in unison, “was that an earthquake?”
It was.
We would learn a 7.4-7.5 Sanriku earthquake had rumbled along Japan’s northeastern coastline, but tremors were felt across the country.
Welcome to a land of beauty, sushi, Shinto, shrines, sake, satsumas, samarais, yakisoba, earthquakes, and at the moment, someplace everyone in the world wants to visit. Throughout our week in Japan we wondered if the faint tremors under our feet were for real or if it was just our weary traveling legs.
This wasn’t my first trip to Japan. I had traveled here in 1989. As food editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, I had been asked to judge Japan’s first national chicken cooking contest. As a special guest, I was picked up at the airport, whisked to the hotel, meeting rooms, event space, and fancy geisha dinners.
This time I was traveling with my sister who had promised a trip anywhere in the world to her five nieces and nephews when they graduated from high school. My son’s graduation had long passed, and life kept getting in the way of planning a big trip. My sister worried he would never get his dream visit to Japan.
So we found a week that worked for us to make a blitz trip—two nights in Tokyo, two in Kyoto, one in Kanazawa on the west coast along the Sea of Japan, and a final night back in Tokyo. It was fast, fun, food-filled, with plenty of gardens, culture, and woefully, crowds from everywhere on earth.
Our short trip kept us moving and sampling anything that passed our eyes, whether black sesame or melon ice cream at breakfast (yes!), tempura in the airport minutes before boarding, or sushi eaten from bento boxes on the trains. We ate, drank, walked, were soaked in rain, approached by curious Japanese who wanted to practice their English on us, but most of all charmed by a country that has held onto traditions and has much to teach the rest of us about manners and keeping things neat and tidy.
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IT’S BEEN FIVE GRAND YEARS since I started this newsletter on Substack. Since then I’ve been in motion with Tuesday deadlines, writing books, visiting family, planning and tending a summer vegetable garden, battling a bit of cancer, enjoying the company of a granddaughter, and sharing recipes and stories with you.
Busy people seldom pause for reflection, but this poignant anniversary seemed like a good time.
To me the joy of writing here in this space has been getting to know you, hearing your voices, listening to your perspectives, and being able to respond to what the world throws at us in conversation and community. And with good food!
In my first newsletters back in 2021, I didn’t know where to begin so I just wrote from the heart, and once I started writing, I couldn’t stop. In one of my first columns I proposed that my mother’s beloved Chicken Tetrazzini casserole didn’t need cream of mushroom soup anymore.
Truth be told, no recipe really needs it—it’s something we add out of tradition because mama made it that way. But mama made it that way because Campbell’s told her to. And I knew I could make Chicken Tetrazzini better with a homemade béchamel—white sauce. When the comments came in, I was surprised some of you were still quite protective this mid-20th century chicken classic as it was.
Don’t we update our wardrobes, cars, hairdos?
That little black dress or navy blazer you bought a half century ago is still classic if you can fit into it and the buttons haven’t fallen off. But most of the cake recipes that came out of the sugar-saturated ‘60s need a little adjusting for our palates and health. In the recipe I share today, for example, which is a beloved cake from Maryland, I could not bear to combine 3 cups of sugar in a saucepan with 12 tablespoons butter and a can of evaporated milk, stir until thickened, and pour that goopy mess over the top of a perfectly lovely cake.
Well, I actually made that frosting, but knowing it was not something I would share, I reimagined the cake, fine-tuned it, and fired the frosting. In its place is simply whipped cream, lightly sweetened and flavored with a smidge of good vanilla.
I make every recipe I share in this newsletter at least once or twice. And you better believe I scrutinize over them and tote leftovers to others to taste, too. My trusted guinea pigs are friends and family. My husband has taken his role as chief tester and reluctant editor quite seriously, and I am grateful.
What I didn’t plan on writing in Between the Layers was how current events would come to be interlaced with cooking. I realize now it wasn’t so much what was happening around me as what was happening to me as a writer. I was becoming more familiar with the page, and for once in my life I had the freedom to express my views with the same candor I might chat with a friend on the phone before dinner.
It started with the March 2023 school shootings here in Nashville, and with everything happening since the 2024 presidential election, it has continued. Truthfully, I never planned to bring politics or my perspective on world views into food stories. They just evolved as I did.
Once I learned how recipes are artifacts of our past, I see recipes differently. My mother baked pound cake, and when she wasn’t looking, I pinched off pieces of the crusty top as it cooled on the rack. I never knew pound cake was an emblem of the Civil Rights movement. I never knew that the Black community in the South regarded pound cake as a vehicle for representation, rights, and change until I began researching the food stories of the South.
Now I look at pound cake differently.
Some of my favorite recipe discoveries from the last few years have been:
Lessons in Chemistry Lasagna. The bomb.
The Only Ratatouille To Make, I wrote a “tomato diaries” last summer, creating a mashup recipe referencing the wisdom of Julia Child and a local organic farmer.
The modern redo of a retro cheese ball, thanks to Vivian Howard and David Lebovitz, has become a favorite holiday recipe.
His pancake he makes from not measuring is a family breakfast staple.
What’s been your favorite recipe/newsletter?
I met a friend for breakfast recently, and she’s a big-deal, busy lady. We’d tried for a year to get our schedules to mesh and finally had a date. I was on time, but to no surprise, she was already there and had secured our table.
Waiting for omelets, my friend Agenia told me her cake story. It happened after she had been named president of Fisk University here in Nashville, and in her honor, the school’s food service department was baking her a welcome cake.
Excited to be feted and with thoughts of childhood pound cakes coming back into memory and realizing this could be a moment to build community, she invited professors and students to join her in her office. But when the cake arrived, it was just a cupcake. And the absurdity of the moment was not lost on anyone.
Their shock turned to laughter, and they vowed to slice a really big homemade cake next time. One student offered to bake a pound cake and asked Agenia for a good recipe. She suggested Trisha Yearwood’s cold oven pound cake.
What my friend did was reimagine her role as a leader, and with the wisdom of a mother, invite everyone to her table.
Cakes can do that.
We can do that.
Five years later, I’m still happy to be here. Thanks to my friend Susan for insisting I give Substack a look, and thanks to my daughter Kathleen who set up my Substack account before I could chicken out.
I hope Tuesday is a day you look forward to when checking email. And to the moms out there…have a good day off with someone else cooking or baking for you!
- xo, Anne
P.S. Gas prices are insane but at least there’s one good deal out there—the price on my hardcover cookbook on Amazon. Take advantage of this offer for graduation gifts and Mother’s Day. Also, I made it back from Japan! Endured the long flights, and I’ve got some great stories - and recipes - to share next week with Paid subscribers. Join us!
THE RECIPE:
Chocolate Cream Cake
Nothing is better than chocolate cake with white icing, or at least, that was my favorite cake combination growing up. This Maryland cake recipe is something I am testing for my new book. I won’t tell you the original name of the recipe, but I will say, it’s a fabulous cake that I needed to tweak because you can’t always find German chocolate anymore, and the amount of soda vs buttermilk in the recipe was off, creating a soapy taste. I got that fixed, and I added the new frosting—whipped cream. This chocolate cake is perfect year round, for winter holidays but also summer, prepped ahead, and stuck in the fridge for a refrigerator cake. Its moist, dense crumb is very old-school, just the way I love cake! I’ve baked it in layers, but I am sure you could make it as cupcakes or sheet cake, too.
Makes 12 to 16 servings
Prep: 1 hour
Bake: 33 to 37 minutes for 8-inch pans, 30 to 35 minutes for 9-inch
Cake:
Vegetable oil spray, butter, or shortening, parchment rounds, and flour for prepping the pans
1 4-ounce bar semisweet chocolate (or German chocolate), chopped
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter
1/2 cup water or coffee
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups (350 grams) sugar
4 large eggs, separated
2 cups (224 grams) cake flour
2 tablespoons (10 grams) unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup whole buttermilk
Frosting:
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 350ºF with a rack in the middle. Grease the bottom and sides of two 8-inch or 9-inch round cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment, and flour the sides of the pans. Set aside. (Either size pan works. If you use the smaller 8-inch pans, you can split the layers in half and make a four-layer cake. They are a bit crumbly, but I scattered those crumbs on top of the cake as garnish.)
Place the chocolate, butter, and either water or coffee in a medium saucepan over low heat, and stir until melted, 4 to 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, and stir in the vanilla.
Place the sugar in a large bowl, pour the melted chocolate mixture over and combine with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon to bring down the temp of the chocolate mixture. Separate the eggs, and stir the yolks into the chocolate mixture with the spatula or spoon. Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Add this flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk, stirring with the spatula or spoon. Use a whisk if needed to smooth out any lumps. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, using an electric mixer, about 2 minutes. Fold them into the batter until just combined. Turn the batter into the two prepared pans, and place in the oven.
Bake until the layers spring back in the center, about 33 to 37 minutes for 8-inch pans and about 30 to 35 minutes for 9-inch. Place on wire racks to cool down 10 minutes. Run a small spatula around the edges of the pans, give the pans a gentle shake to loosen the cake layers, and then invert them once and then again onto the racks so they rest right-side up. Let cool completely, about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the frosting. Pour the cream, sugar, and vanilla into a chilled large bowl of an electric mixer and with the whisk attachment beat the cream until soft-stiff, about 1 1/2 minutes. Place in the fridge until ready to frost the cake.
If you want four layers, slice each of the 8-inch layers in half horizontally using a long serrated knife and transfer the top of each layer to a rack. Carefully remove the parchment paper from the bottom layers. Stack the layers on a cake stand, filling each layer with frosting, spreading frosting as you like it on the top, and using the rest of the frosting, spread it gently around the sides. If crumbs fall onto the counter as you stack the layers, use those to decorate the top of the cake. Place in the fridge until ready to serve. If it’s a birthday, go ahead and insert the candles, and then you can drape waxed paper over the top of the cake to partially cover it. Slice and serve with strawberry, coffee, or pistachio ice cream.
A TRIP TO ITALY MAY NOT be on your calendar this year, but two new cookbooks with distinct and refreshingly different Italian recipes just might take you there.
One is called Italian Cookies and written by Domenica Marchetti of Buona Domenica on Substack, and the other is Vegetables the Italian Way from Giulia Scarpaleggia, of Letters from Tuscany on Substack. These books couldn’t be more well timed as I am always looking for fresh recipe ideas for potlucks, dinners with friends, and just new things to bake. And let’s face it, everyone loves Italian.
Let’s start with the sweet stuff.
Domenica Marchetti is a Virginia-based writer, with a masters in newspaper journalism from Columbia who writes about her family’s U.S. and Italian kitchens. Her recipes and articles on Italian home cooking have been published in a variety of publications including Better Homes and Gardens, Cooking Light, Elle Décor, Fine Cooking, Food and Wine, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.
Domenica’s mother was a native of Chieti, Abruzzo, and her father’s parents were from Molise and Lazio. By the time Domenica and her sister Maria could reach the kitchen counter, their mother had them shaping gnocchi and ravioli. The family spent their summers traveling around Italy, and Domenica returns to Italy each year for work and pleasure, teaching cooking classes and leading culinary tours.
“A few years ago, my husband and I bought a small house in a hill town in Abruzzo. It’s halfway between the seaside and the Apennine mountains. We try to spend as much time as we can there, and our son and daughter join us when they can.”
I asked Domenica some questions about her new cookie book:
Anne: Why Italian cookies?
Domenica: The idea for the book struck me after I had had an especially memorable butter cookie from Liguria called the Canestrelletto di Torriglia. This was back in 2017 or 2018. It was so good that it prompted me to get in my car and visit Torriglia, the town in the hills outside of Genoa, where the cookie originated. I learned that it dates to the 15th century, and that it is extremely important to the identity of the town and even to its economy. I started broadening my research and discovered that there are many cookies in towns across Italy with incredible histories and lore behind them. I began to see Italy in a “new” way: through the lens of cookies.
Anne: What is your favorite cookie and why?
Domenica: In terms of what I crave most, it depends on the day. I could go with the canestrelletto because it’s the cookie that inspired the book. Or, I could go with my mother’s hazelnut crescents, which she made every year at Christmastime and which I have a strong sentimental attachment to.
Anne: Do you think cookie memories last longer if they begin in childhood?
Domenica: My mom, my sister Maria, and I turned out dozens and dozens of cookies every year for Christmas. I have the fondest memories of those days, even though my mom used to make Maria and me shell piles of walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds for her holiday bakes—I now realize she knew the importance of fresh nuts! On the other hand, I now find myself attached to many of the cookies in Italian Cookies because I know the stories behind them, I’ve been to the towns where they originated, I’ve spoken with the bakers who make them—many of whom are carrying on traditions that begun generations ago. I think you can fall in love with cookies at any age.
Anne: What is the least understood aspect of Italian baking?
Domenica: Like Italian cooking, baking is very much regional and seasonal. Hazelnuts and butter in the north, olive oil and wine in the south, almonds everywhere but especially in Sicily and Sardinia, as well as Puglia. And, also, just as with Italian cooking, the quality of the ingredients is everything, from the butter or olive oil in your dough to the freshness of the nuts.
Anne: Are Italian cookies mostly tied to holidays?
Domenica: It’s true that many cookies are tied to specific holidays or rituals or important occasions—Easter, Christmas, Day of the Dead, weddings and baptisms, feast days, and so on. However, some of these cookies have become so popular that they are now available year-round. Ricciarelli di Siena is one example. This is a lovely medieval cookie from Siena that is made with finely ground almonds, sugar, and egg whites. It’s oval or diamond-shaped and generously covered in powdered sugar. When you bite into it, it crackles a bit and reveals a tender center. Although this was originally a Christmas cookie, you can find it in every bakery in Siena at any time of year.
I baked the Sicilian Pistachio Butter Cookies (Frollini al Pistacchio) from Domenica’s book and loved them! I did not have pistachio flour, but I did have raw pistachios in the freezer, which I thawed and then pulsed in the food processor until fine like flour. The whole recipe is made in the processor, which makes assembly a snap.
Even though Giulia Scarpaleggia has an entire chapter on desserts featuring vegetables and she’s crazy about a white chocolate cake made with radicchio, I honed in on a zucchini and potato parmigiana that’s just become our new vegetarian dinner favorite.
Selecting just one recipe to try from Giulia’s gorgeous book was tough, and the photography from her husband Tommaso Galli is tantalizing. I especially like how the chapters are organized—Tossed & Stirred; Braised, Boiled & Stewed; Twice-Cooked; Sauced; Fried & Grilled; Baked & Roasting; Stuffed; Preserved; and Sweetened.
Giulia learned to cook from her grandmother Marcella and mother Anna in the countryside near Colle Val d’Elsa, a medieval town about one hour from Florence and half an hour from Siena. She still lives in the same house where her father was born and her grandmother was born, and next door to her parents. “So I’ve been living for all my life in the same spot!” Like Domenica, she teaches cooking classes.
In 2019 Giulia launched a blog called Juls’ Kitchen and through the years she has written about food, leaning into milestone moments like meeting her husband, their wedding, the birth of her daughter Livia, and what it’s like being a mom. In 2023 she moved that blog to Substack, which is where she revealed she’s a fan of the crime series and ‘80s music, so of course, that was the first question in our q&a:
]]>Anne: Which crime series and which ‘80s music?
Giulia: My favorite series recently have been Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer, but also Slow Horses. As for the music, I usually play mixed compilations, but I love Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Bon Jovi, Cindy Lauper, Kate Bush, Spandau Ballet, and Italian artists, too, like Gianna Nannini, Giuni Russo, Antonello Venditti.
Anne: What is most misunderstood about Tuscan cooking?
Giulia: Speaking of Italian food in general, I’d say the amount of garlic used. It is far less than you might expect. Speaking of Tuscan food more specifically, one might imagine that meat is a big part of Tuscan cuisine, but beans and vegetables play a more relevant role, along with our staple ingredient: stale bread. These ingredients are the foundation of many classic recipes like ribollita, or zuppa frantoiana (which is in the book).
Anne: What is your favorite vegetable and why?
Giulia: This is tricky. I might have at least a favorite vegetable for every season, but if I have to select just one I would say eggplants. I love them grilled and fried, and they are the main ingredient of a dish I would eat on repeat, eggplant parmigiana.
Anne: Were you destined to write about the food of Tuscany or is everyone in Tuscany just naturally inclined to talk food because the food is so wonderful?
Giulia: If you look back to my very first posts on my blog, from 17 years ago, they are about cupcakes, muffins, spring rolls, and fried rice... I was interested in everything that was NOT my everyday food. It took me about a year to shift my focus to Tuscan food, and this happened because I started blogging also in English, and everyone was curious about my food! So I can say I’ve always loved Tuscan food, the food I grew up with, but I had to look at it with fresh eyes to understand how fascinating, genuine, and delicious it actually is.
Anne: What was your greatest cooking discovery from this book?
Giulia: The radicchio and white chocolate cake from Chioggia, from the Sweetened chapter. I already knew torta d’erbi, the Tuscan swiss chard tart, but this very unusual cake from Veneto made with radicchio and carrots stole my heart.
I chose to make Giulia’s White Zucchini Parmigiana, and it is solidly Italian, but feels fresh and new, like everything in this book. Yes, the recipe makes enough for eight, but we’ve already proved that leftovers reheat well in a low oven. Pair it with a green salad with tomatoes, and drizzle the salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Something about the balsamic really pairs with the parmigiana.
HAD A COPY OF THE EDITOR not been on the bedside table when I visited my sister in Atlanta, I might have waited even longer to read it.
But that night, I opened the 2024 book by Sara B. Franklin and was swept up in the world of the late Judith Jones. She was editor to Julia Child, and also Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis, James Beard, John Updike, Claudia Roden, Anne Tyler, Langston Hughes, Madhur Jaffrey, Sylvia Plath, and many more talented writers. By bringing such an impressive list of books to publication, Judith Jones helped shape American culture.
In 1960, Judith saw something in the 800-page manuscript from Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck that many editors might have missed. Mastering the Art of French Cooking wouldn’t just teach Americans how to cook French food. In a post-World War II world where Betty Crocker was instructing women to put their feet up and savor conveniences, Judith saw women walking into kitchens and cooking perfectly roasted chicken to be more liberating.
Mastering was just the beginning of Judith’s impressive Alfred B. Knopf cookbook list that spanned a half century, from the end of World War II through the Civil Rights movement to the fight for women’s equality. She was the first editor to show a keen interest in the vegetarian movement by publishing Anna Thomas’s lovely The Vegetarian Epicure in 1972, followed by Kit Foster’s The Organic Gardener.
I was so drawn into her story that on the drive home to Nashville I couldn’t wait four hours to keep reading so I downloaded The Editor on Audible and listened to it while driving. The next day, I listened to it while gardening and while walking my dog. And when I didn’t listen, I read the book’s pages.
Judith Bailey Jones was born in 1924, the second daughter to Charles Bailey, a lawyer, and Phyllis Hedley Bailey, a socialite from an upwardly-mobile pharmaceutical family. She was raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a formal world where you ate quietly and appeared well-mannered. “I was told never to mention the food at the table,” Judith would tell biographer Sara Franklin in conversations beginning in 1988.
Educated at Bennington College in Vermont in the early 1940s, Judith chose the school for its progressive ethos. She would intern at Doubleday & Co. during winter breaks and make connections that would last a lifetime.
At Bennington students were asked to spend time gardening because the campus had once been farmland and the U.S. government was urging everyone during World War II to grow more food. Judith would write her father that she was being “uncooperative at the farm because I flatly refused to kill chickens.”
You’ll have to read the book to find out how and why she moved to Paris, how she learned to cook in Paris, how she left her purse (and passport) on a seat at the Tuileries and missed her flight home…so she stayed in Paris a while longer. How she met newspaperman Evan Jones, who would become the love of her life, how they settled in New York City. How she would adopt two children, juggle work and home life like so many parents, weather ups and downs in her marriage, and finally find her home for good on a tranquil Vermont farm called Bryn Teg, Welsh for “fair hill.”
What took me so long to read about a talented, dogged woman who didn’t make vice president and get the Knopf corner office for 50 years? Someone who was no more than five feet tall but quietly powerful? Someone who didn’t fit the mold her mother wanted for her daughter but who saved The Diary of a Young Girl (published in the Netherlands in 1947) from the rejection pile while working in Doubleday’s Paris office?
(Her Doubleday boss didn’t think Americans would find the diary of an 11-year-old Jewish girl interesting, but Judith did. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was published in 1952 and was a massive success. It has never gone out of print.)
And mostly, as I have written about food for more than four decades, how could I have not known Judith Jones represented all of us who write and cook. “For a long time, the women—and they were usually women—who wrote about food were treated as second-class citizens,” Judith said in 2015. “All because they cook!” And just like the cookbook writers patronized by the literary world for writing technical manuals (that actually sell), Judith was similarly treated for editing them. To her, cookbooks were “vessels of story, memory, and voice.”
One surprise when reading The Editor was discovering that my book editor, Rux Martin, is in the book. A fellow Vermonter, Rux knew Judith. Rux was the young Burlington Free Press newspaper reporter who interviewed Judith in 1984 when she and her husband Evan first came to Vermont. Years later, Rux would know Judith as a contemporary when Rux became executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“She was deft in the way she communicated and made it seem like it was coming out of your mouth when it was Judith,” Rux said via telephone. She liked active verbs in recipes and brought specifics to the instructions, making sure her authors added information as to what the recipe looked like when it was done.
“Above all, Judith would see that something needed to be published, and she fought against push back,” Rux said. “The fact that she understood immediately that Americans needed Julia Child at that time was just extraordinary.”
Judith Jones was a visionary.
When the Mastering manuscript revisions were finished, Julia and Paul Child had moved from Paris to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the couple took a short vacation to Maine, Judith delivered the manuscript to the printer, and before publicity departments became a thing, she plotted how to get the word out about the book.
In the summer of 1961 she cold-called Craig Claiborne, food editor at The New York Times, and agreed to set up a scene for food photography on the roof of her apartment. He wanted to write an article about how she and her husband would climb out their apartment window, set the table, and throw summer dinner parties for friends. She said she’d pose for the camera as long as he took a look at Mastering when it was released. Claiborne and the rest of the world embraced Julia.
Rux said you’ve got to be dogged if you want to be a great editor.
And then there’s Edna Lewis. Judith Jones worked alongside her and her niece Nina to record recipes and stories in the creation of Taste of Country Cooking, which was published in 1976, 50 years ago.
Judith was Edna Lewis’s advocate and friend. When Knopf didn’t see the value of putting money behind marketing a cookbook written by an unknown African-American cook, Judith made some noise. She sent copies of Edna Lewis’s book to her more famous authors like Julia and James Beard and encouraged them to cook Edna’s recipes, and if they liked them, talk up the book, which remains one of the best examples of food storytelling that’s ever been published.
In our world today where creativity and originality are being cast aside for AI, when we can’t tell if photos are real or fake, or emails legit or suspicious, books like The Editor remind us it doesn’t have to be this way. And in our callous world, where profanities come out of what should be a prestigious White House, good books and true stories bring solace, grace, and escape.
Cheers to Sara B. Franklin for shining a bright light on Judith Jones.
And cheers to all the editors. We writers appreciate you.
- xo, Anne
P.S. Judith Jones died in August of 2017 at 93. If you haven’t watched Julia (16 episodes) on HBO Max, starring Sarah Lancashire as Julia Child and Fiona Glascott as Judith Jones, what are you waiting for? It’s a fascinating, fun romp into Cambridge in the 1960s and explores not only the behind-the-scenes of the second volume of Mastering but the hard-fought creation of Julia’s PBS television series. Sadly it was not renewed for a season three! And also, for the Edna Lewis story, watch Finding Edna Lewis on PBS.
What’s your favorite Judith Jones cookbook? What’s your favorite story or recipe from a cookbook?
THE RECIPE:
Schrafft’s Butterscotch Cookies
For people who don’t gravitate to chocolate and would rather have a sugar cookie or an oatmeal cookie, this favorite cookie of Judith Jones is for you. It is butterscotch-flavored from the butter and the milk powder. The story goes that Judith was such a fan of this recipe she wanted to include it in her memoir/cookbook, The Tenth Muse (Knopf, 2007). She writes in the headnote that when she was a child growing up in Manhattan, one of her favorite treats was going to Schrafft’s restaurant for a milkshake and these butterscotch cookies. “Then Schrafft’s disappeared, and I despaired of ever tasting them again. But when we were working on the revised Fannie Farmer Cookbook, I asked Jim Beard if he remembered those butterscotch cookies so we could include them, and not only did he remember them with the same affection, but he called up the president of what remained of the Schrafft’s company and got them to give him their recipe.”
Makes 32 cookies, about 2 to 2 1/2 inches
Prep: 25 to 30 minutes
Bake: 8 to 10 minutes
14 tablespoons (7 ounces) salted butter, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups (184 grams) dark brown sugar, packed
2 tablespoons nonfat dry milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups (210 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup finely chopped pecans
Preheat the oven to 375ºF, and set aside two baking sheets.
Place the butter and brown sugar in a large mixing bowl and beat with the electric mixer on medium speed until well blended, about 2 minutes. Add the dry milk and vanilla, and beat just to combine. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Reduce the mixer speed to low and spoon the dry ingredients gradually into the butter and sugar mixture, beating just to combine. Add the pecans, and blend 30 seconds more.
Heap 1 tablespoon of dough - a 1-inch scoop - spaced about 2 inches apart on each baking sheet. Bake for 8 minutes, then open the oven and press down on the cookies gently with a fork, close the oven door, and bake until just set and crisp around the edges but still soft in the center, about 1 to 2 minutes more. Let the cookies rest on the pans until they release, about 2 to 3 minutes, then transfer to a rack to completely cool. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Store in an airtight tin for up to a week or freeze for up to three months.
I WALKED INTO A CREATIVE writing class last Thursday, something I’ve been taking for the last two years, and on the table were back issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine.
I knew those covers. Anyone who lived and cooked in 1980 recognizes the iconic covers with still-life food paintings so beautiful they could be framed or at least collected for future reading. Indeed, back issues are sold today on eBay.
And on the pages inside, Cook’s had equally serious recipes that appealed to both beginners who needed hand-holding and more seasoned cooks who reveled in details. I’m guessing every family has at least one cooking nerd who has subscribed to Cook’s.
In the early ‘80s I studied spoonbread in great detail for a Cook’s magazine assignment, perfecting a basic recipe and then going off in different directions to see if the recipe would allow a handful of cheese, shaved fresh corn, shredded zucchini, or chopped ham to be incorporated. (The answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes.)
But those old magazines weren’t at my class to help me venture down memory lane. One of my fellow writers is Nashville artist Elizabeth Brandon who painted Cook’s covers from 1999 to 2007, and she had brought them to share. Elizabeth said she submitted a watercolor or oil sketch to art editor Amy Klee for approval and then created the oil. “She made some crops to fit the vertical format of the magazine image when needed,” Elizabeth added. “We always did a red cover for December which is what Chris wanted.”
Chris is Christopher Kimball, the bow-tied founder of Cook’s, who at 28 was enough of an entrepreneur to know that if he was interested in the how-to of cooking—not just recipes—other people might be, too. He had worked with a small publisher in New York and presented marketing seminars before founding a food magazine combined with direct mail catalog in 1980 in the basement of his Weston, Connecticut home.
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SINCE IT’S EASTER WEEK, and the connection is too much to resist, I’m writing about my mother’s impeccably dressed, refreshingly avant-garde next-door neighbor and confidante, Donna Easter.
They telephoned late at night and rehashed bridge games and the comings and goings of their not-so-sleepy street. It was a world away from what Nashville seems like today. Up a secluded cul de sac, a country music star’s mistress moves into the house on the other side of Donna. Let’s just say my mother did her best to get dinner cooked and cleaned up so she could phone Donna and catch up on the drama.
Donna was everything my mother wasn’t. Tall, thin, brunette, a Democrat, a decade younger, half-Jewish, and a lifelong Episcopalian.
She was born into the political world of Washington D.C. and never lost that glamour, accessorizing with the flair of Jackie O. Her daughter-in-law recalls never seeing Donna without a silk scarf tied elegantly around her neck.
To fit her long, narrow feet she ordered custom Ferragamos from New York. And she displayed Vogue magazines on the coffee table of her living room which was painted chartreuse green to accentuate the Paul Gaugin-like Tahitian scenes she had painted on the window shades. I recall a visit to Donna’s house was like stepping into a modern art gallery.
Donna taught art history, Spanish, and French in Nashville’s public schools for decades, and she was full of spunk. In 1976 she took her French class on a canoe trip down the Duck River and then staged a picnic lunch on an overturned canoe. The food editor of The Tennessean came along and wrote about it. When Donna turned 70, she returned to her childhood summer camp and swam across the lake.
Thirty years ago when my husband and I moved back to Nashville and lived briefly with my parents after the birth of our second daughter, Donna saw restlessness in the face of the four-year-old big sister. So she invited Kathleen over to play cards on her porch. They became friends. Donna was intuitive like that.
A little earlier, in 1983, my mother and Donna had come to shop at Atlanta’s Gift Mart and stayed with me. We grilled salmon over charcoal and peeled the stems of fat, fresh spring asparagus before steaming and dipping them into a mustardy mayonnaise. We drank white wine on my screened-in porch, and Donna lit a cigarette. I’ll admit it was a side of my mom I hadn’t known.
After my mother died in 2001 I’d see Donna around town and wave, but our shared loss was too raw to discuss. When enough time had passed, about 10 years, and both Donna and I were able to talk about my mom without tears, we met for lunch. Our visits continued until Donna’s house was too much for her to handle and she moved in with her son and daughter-in-law. Donna died in her sleep at 86 last August.
To bake a cake in her memory and take to her funeral, I pulled down my A New Take on Cake book and turned instinctively to Susan’s Lemon Cake. That Cake Mix Doctor classic is the obsession of actress Jamie Lee Curtis, too.
It calls for a box of cake mix, is bright yellow from lemon Jell-O, and contains oil, eggs, and some lemon zest for good measure. So in some ways it is very much a pantry cake. It has that 1970s ease and bright citrus flavor in the glaze that’s welcome most any occasion, whether happy or sad.
And it is the perfect last-minute Easter cake if you haven’t decided what to bake. For a twist, fold in a cup of fresh blueberries. Like Donna, it never goes out of style.
Maybe it was their shared love of bridge. Maybe it was my mother’s inviting Donna to be a part of her bridge games. Maybe it was Donna’s open ear and discretion. Or the fact she was fun! I am not sure how their friendship took hold and blossomed.
But opposites do attract and often meld into beautiful friendships. It’s a hopeful Easter message of rebirth and renewal that in life we get fresh starts and come across people not like us with whom we celebrate living.
Happy Easter!
- xo, Anne
Don’t bake with a mix? I heartily recommend Torchio Lemon Olive Oil Cake. What are you baking for Easter or Passover?
Don’t miss my very first Substack Live with the delightful Chris Kimball of Milk Street! Tomorrow at noon EST! Here’s the link to join us in the Substack app. And bring your baking questions!
One of my favorite interviews about Baking in the American South was with Chris Kimball of Milk Street. The guy knows food. But he’s new to Substack, so ever the professional, he’s hosting me in a live conversation at noon EST April 1. Click on this link tomorrow to join.
I was unable to participate in the NO KINGS march last Saturday because I was en route home after a TED talk in Athens, Georgia. (Many of you have asked how to view my talk about recipes and their power to connect us, and I will share the link when it goes live in about a month.) Sincere kudos to the more than 8 million people who participated in the largest protest movement in America’s history. Here are two photos that BTL subscriber Susie Ries took at the Nashville event and posted on Instagram:
THE RECIPE:
Susan’s Lemon Cake
This cake has been a favorite of so many Cake Mix Doctor readers. I’ll never forget the morning when a friend called frantically, instructing me to turn on the television at once. Jamie Lee Curtis was on Rachael Ray’s show holding up a copy of my book saying it was her favorite cookbook. I caught up with Jamie Lee later to thank her, and she said her absolute favorite cake was Susan’s Lemon Cake, a cake even a novice baker like herself could bake. The recipe originally came from my sister Susan, who truth-be-told, got the recipe from her neighbor Sally Roy. (Sort of the way all good recipes make their way to you.) And if you were to look at this recipe list you might wonder why so many folks are crazy about a cake with so few ingredients. And that’s the answer. It’s a snap to make, has a moist texture, a distinctive lemon flavor, is suitable any time of the year, and everybody loves lemon. No matter how busy you are, don’t skip the glaze.
Makes 12 servings
Prep: 15 to 20 minutes
Bake: 30 to 35 minutes
Vegetable cooking spray or shortening, for greasing the pan
All-purpose flour, for dusting the pan
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 to 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar, or as needed
1 (15.25-ounce) package yellow cake mix
1 (3-ounce) package lemon gelatin
3 large eggs
2/3 cup hot tap water
2/3 cup vegetable oil
Place a rack in the center of the oven, and heat the oven to 350ºF. Grease and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan. Set the pan aside.
Place 1 teaspoon of the lemon zest and the lemon juice in a small bowl. Whisk in enough confectioners’ sugar to create a pourable glaze. Thin with a little water if needed. Set the glaze aside.
In a large mixing bowl, stir together the cake mix, gelatin, and remaining 1 teaspoon lemon zest. Add the eggs, water, and oil. Beat with an electric mixer on low speed until blended, 30 seconds. Stop the machine, and scrape down the side of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Increase the mixer speed to medium and beat until the batter is smooth, about 1 minute. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with a rubber spatula.
Place the pan in the oven and bake until the cake is golden brown and the top springs back when lightly pressed in the middle, 30 to 35 minutes.
Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 20 minutes. Run a long sharp knife around the edges of the cake, shake the pan gently, and invert the cake onto a wire rack or cake plate. If you are using a rack, slide a piece of wax paper or parchment under the rack to catch drips. Pour the reserved glaze over the cake. Let the cake cool at least 20 minutes. Slice and serve.
HELLO spring! It is SO good to see you.
The flowers are blooming, Easter is near, and I can finally shove the dark, drab winter clothes to the back of the closet.
It’s time to brighten up meals and our moods. And merge great recipes and see what happens…like combining a Melissa Clark New York Times recipe with one from my daughter Kathleen.
When Kathleen’s…
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I DON’T NEED ST. PATRICK’S DAY to remember my Irish heritage. I don’t need St. Patrick’s to drink green beer because I don’t drink green beer anymore. And I don’t need St. Patrick’s to revel in cabbage and potatoes because I love them all year long.
On St. Patrick’s with the wearing of the green, anyone can be Irish for the day. Anyone can revel in song, drink, and traditional fare like cottage pie.
Just reading about the excessive spending, particularly on food, by America’s Defense Department confirms just how out of touch this administration is when consumers are struggling to put food on the table and gas in the car.
According to a report from Open the Books, a government watchdog group that has monitored Pentagon spending for the last decade, under the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in March, May, June, and October 2025 combined, the Pentagon spent $7.4 million of our tax dollars on lobster tails.
In September of last year alone, the Pentagon spent another $6.9 million on lobster tails, plus $2 million for Alaskan King crab, $15.1 million for ribeye steaks, $124,000 for ice cream machines, and a staggering $139,224 for 272 orders of doughnuts in what appears to have been a high-cholesterol blowing of the budget.
Late night host Jimmy Kimmel had the best line: “What is this, My 600lb Defense Department?”
In the unsettling atmosphere of this moment—the war with Iran, rising grocery and oil prices, no domestic commitment to a green energy policy and so continued dependence on foreign oil, and a sinking feeling that America is backpedaling under this president, cottage pie is a comforting distraction and won’t break your budget.
Strained economic and political times have always called for humble cooking that often begins with a well-loved skillet and an onion.
Cottage pie is a two-layered affair, on the bottom a savory meat and veg mixture, and on top, a smothering of mashed potatoes all browned in a hot oven until golden and gorgeous. What is not to love?
Named after everyday people who lived in cottages in late 18th Century England, cottage pie is adaptable to what you have—ground beef, lamb, turkey, or even chopped fresh mushrooms if you are vegetarian. With lamb it often goes by the name shepherd’s pie. It often goes by shepherd’s pie if it contains beef, too. But the Irish are not sticklers for details, and it’s a universally loved sort of recipe across Ireland and the British Isles, no matter their histories of not getting along.
As with any recipe, it’s the little things in cottage pie that improve it. The meat and gravy layer underneath is downright boring in flavor unless you add garlic, pinches of salt, Worcestershire and seasonings, even a good glug of Guinness.
Likewise, the potato topping can be dry. But now I’ve Iearned to begin with Russet (baking) potatoes for fluffiness and to fold in an egg yolk to enrich it. I scatter a little shredded cheddar or Parmesan and bits of butter on top at the last of the baking, too.
In the end, I cleaned out my fridge for this recipe. I added half a leek, finely chopped, to the veg saute for the filling because I had it. All I needed to buy was a pound and a half of ground round and some fresh thyme because it’s been too cold in Nashville for my herb garden English thyme to spit out its green leaves.
I come to a love of all things Irish honestly.
My Byrn ancestors traveled from the mountains of County Wicklow, Ireland, and they sailed from the port of Dublin to Philadelphia in 1782.
I don’t know why they left Ireland or why Tennessee was their ultimate destination. They homesteaded land and operated grist mills, so my father wrote in his diary. And he said their living conditions weren’t easy. Many died young, and one son named Larry (named after his father Laurence) was orphaned at two and raised by foster parents in Middle Tennessee.
Larry would marry and have 11 children, and he sent one son to Philadelphia for medical training. That son came back home to be a country doctor along the Little Harpeth River, not too far from where I live today. When the doctor’s eyesight began to fail in his advanced years, his nephew—my grandfather—helped run his farm. And that’s how our family came to call Tennessee home.
What’s your immigrant story? What’s your favorite budget-friendly recipe?
War seems to be front and center on this administration’s mind, and our tax dollars are supporting a steady diet of bombs and lobsters.
But this was not how America was fed.
If you flip through old cookbooks, you’ll see oats in meatloaf, corn instead of oysters in fritters, crackers masquerading as apples in pie, potato cooking water religiously saved to enrich breads and cakes, and in lieu of white sugar, a whole gamut of sweeteners from molasses to sorghum to jams and jellies from the pantry shelf, and when that was gone, a search for wild honey.
Some of the best recipes in America don’t need to break the budget. They just need to feed people and welcome us all to the table.
- xo, Anne
THE RECIPE:
St. Patrick’s Day Cottage Pie
This makes enough for six to eight, so you could assemble two casseroles and freeze one before baking. Or bake the whole pan and know you’ve got plenty of leftovers. That’s a nice feeling! Serve with peas and a green salad. And for a dazzling presentation, spoon on the potato topping and create pockets and swirls with the back of the spoon which is where the butter will pool deliciously. For vegetarians, substitute finely chopped mushrooms for the meat and the saved water from cooking the potatoes for the broth.
Makes 6 to 8 servings
Prep: 45 to 50 minutes
Bake: 20 to 25 minutes
Potato Topping:
3 large baking potatoes (2 to 2 1/4 pounds), peeled
1/2 cup whole milk
4 tablespoons salted butter (I used Kerrygold)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 large egg yolk
Meat Filling:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup finely chopped onion
1/2 leek, thinly sliced crosswise, optional
2 medium carrots, peeled and finely chopped (1 cup)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 pounds lean beef, lamb, or turkey
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 cup chicken or beef broth
1/2 cup Guinness, or more broth
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
3/4 to 1 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup grated sharp white cheddar or Parmesan, if desired
1 tablespoon salted butter, if desired, for topping
For the Potato Topping, cut the peeled potatoes into 2-inch pieces and place in a medium saucepan. Cover with cold water, and add a big pinch of salt. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and let the potatoes simmer until tender, about 15 minutes. Drain the potatoes, (reserving the water for the filling if you do not have broth.) Meanwhile, warm the milk in a saucepan. Add the butter, salt, and pepper to the potatoes. Pour in the warm milk and mash until smooth. Make a well in the center of the potatoes, and drop in the egg yolk. Stir until well combined and set aside.
Preheat the oven to 400ºF.
For the Meat Filling, pour the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, leeks if using, and carrots. Saute, stirring often, until soft, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic, and stir to combine. Crumble the meat into the skillet and cook until it is cooked through, about 4 to 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with the flour and toss to coat. Add the tomato paste, broth, and Guinness if using. Add the Worcestershire sauce and fresh thyme. Stir to combine. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer until the filling thickens, about 10 to 15 minutes. Fold in the peas.
Turn the meat mixture into a 2- to 3-quart casserole, or your favorite rectangular pan. Or leave it in the skillet if it is ovenproof. Spoon the mashed potatoes on top of the filling and spread nearly to the edges but not all the way. If the potatoes have firmed up while resting, stir in a tablespoon or two of milk. Using a soup spoon, dip and swirl the potatoes to create a decorative effect. Place the pan in the oven and bake until the topping browns, 20 to 25 minutes. At the last 5 minutes of baking, scatter the cheese and butter over the top and return to the oven to finish cooking and let the butter melt and cheese lightly brown. Garnish with some fresh thyme leaves, then serve.
HAVE YOU EVER TRAVELED TO SO MANY cities in so little time that you’re not sure where you woke up? That was my life this past week.
I began in Richmond, Virginia, flew up and back to speak to the Tuckahoe Woman’s Club, and then jumped into my car for a drive south to Monroeville, Alabama to be part of a literary festival honoring homet…
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ORANGE CAKE HAS ALWAYS GOTTEN MY ATTENTION. Up against fruitcake and chocolate cake at Christmas, orange cake has held its own. And in the late 1960s an avant garde orange cake piqued everyone’s curiosity. It was the whole-orange-in-the-cake recipe popularized by British food writer Claudia Roden.
Roden wrote A Book of Middle Eastern Food (Knopf, 1968), which was the first time anyone had really thought about adding a whole orange—rind and all—to a cake.
So when I flipped through London pastry chef Helen Goh’s gorgeous new cookbook, Baking & the Meaning of Life (Abrams), to no surprise I was preheating the oven for her Favorite Orange Cake.
A trained psychologist who collaborated with superstar London chef Yotam Ottolenghi for 10 years on nine restaurants and two award-winning cookbooks called Sweet and Comfort, Helen has now written her first solo book. She blends her baking know-how and her degrees in psychology to give us, the reader, not only beautiful, unusual recipes for cakes, pies, treats, and breads, but deeper context into how baking makes our lives richer.
Her orange cake falls in the chapter called “Remembering & Continuity,” because she once baked it daily at a cafe in Melbourne, Australia. It is dense and moist from the peel and juice of the orange, and to Helen, “it’s perfect to bring along when visiting friends.”
Each chapter in Helen’s book illustrates a way that baking improves our lives. These chapters include not just Remembering, but also Giving, Receiving and Sharing. Nurturing. Celebrating. Community & Belonging. Ritual & Tradition. And Learning, Growth & Achievement.
When you stop and think about it, what we bake and why we bake falls into one or many of these categories.
Helen Goh just took the time to think and write about it.
Born second-generation Chinese in Malaysia, Helen was raised in Melbourne, Australia, where her parents thought she and her four siblings would find better educational opportunities. It wasn’t easy uprooting their family and moving to a place where her mother would find the English language difficult.
“She started as a seamstress at quite a young age, having left school after her father died because the family needed money,” Helen said. “My father was an up-and-coming businessman, having also left school at a very young age for the same reason, but managed to make his way in the world. He needed business suits and my mother was his tailor.”
When the family moved to Australia when Helen was 11, cooking was her mother’s “way of showing she was a competent person.”
Helen’s life would flourish in Australia, with a university bachelor’s degree in science and a master’s in psychology, and when her professors said she was too young to get a job in the field right out of school, she worked briefly for a German pharmaceutical company. Which is where she found more pleasure planning the doctors’ lunch menus than talking to them about the drugs she represented.
“I saw it as a sign,” Helen said.
She dabbled in the restaurant world, opening a cafe with a friend and learning to bake from the cooks they hired. In the end, she followed a boyfriend to London, married him, and started her own family. Her two sons are now nearly 15 and 11.
New in London, Helen needed to wait four months before she could begin doctoral work in psychology. So to pass the time, she applied for a job to work on recipes with Yotam Ottolenghi, an up-and-coming talented Israeli-British chef who was opening a new cafe. Theirs became a symbiotic relationship—she learned Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking and baking from Ottolenghi. And Helen brought a diligence and deep love of baking that came to define Ottolenghi’s recipes in restaurants and bestselling cookbooks.
Helen knew the power food has to bring people together. She has one brother and three sisters who still live in Melbourne. They are a typical Chinese-Malaysian family—“tight-knit and full of drama and misunderstandings and cultural clashes with extended family!”
Last week, Helen and I Zoomed early in my morning and midday in hers from London. Dressed in bright red, with an even brighter smile, she was in the middle of writing one of her food columns for the Guardian (London) and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). It was a Mother’s Day-themed recipe and she wanted to use raspberries but was in a quandary about whether the berries should be fresh or frozen. When you write for audiences in different hemispheres, she said, these are things you must consider.
Anne: Helen, why this book now?
Helen: The Ottolenghi concept as I learned it is outward looking. Cakes have got to look nice in the window. You have a customer to appeal to. But I wondered what about the small inward moments of baking, those moments when I think about cakes and who they are meant for.
Anne: What do you say to people who remark, I don’t bake. Are they missing something in life? Or is everyone just not cut out to be a baker?
Helen: I hear many people say baking is their therapy or their nemesis. Baking requires a kind of focus and attunement that takes you away from white noise in the head, a worry that you’ve said something wrong the day before, that sort of thing. But for the person who finds it stressful to follow the rules of a recipe or focus, well, baking isn’t something they might enjoy. You can talk to your mother on the phone and cook onions, but try to weigh flour and talk to someone at the same time!
Anne: How is restaurant baking different than what we do at home?
Helen: At a restaurant you can put carrot cake on the menu. It would be loaded with flavor and texture and be homespun. But there is pressure in restaurants to be seen as being clever because it’s competitive. With Ottolenghi, if we put the cake out there we must seduce from the window with color and visual appeal. I am less attentive to that when I’m baking at home. When I bake a chiffon cake at home I don’t want a buttercream on top, but that wouldn’t sell at Ottolenghi. Home baking isn’t competitive. It’s where baked things just need to taste good.
Anne: What flavors do you feel are fashionable in baking right now?
Helen: In Australia, certainly Korean, Japanese, and fusion baking. New colors, new flavors. Purple yams, pumpkin cakes, chocolate chip cookies with glutinous rice flour to make them chewy. Here in London, using Japanese milk bread to make French toast is smart because you introduce something new to something known.
Anne: Many people might call your decade of experience with Ottolenghi as a lucky break. But as a trained psychologist, what do you call this?
Helen: I got my doctorate in existential psychology, which is how to make the best of your choices in life. We all make little choices in life and they add up. Ordinary moments add up to an extraordinary life. Ottolenghi was an amazing experience for me, but now I’m focusing on my interior life and what baking says about me.
Helen’s book was originally published in the United Kingdom and Australia. For the American edition published by Abram’s, Helen worked with a San Francisco recipe tester who converted recipes with self-raising flour to all-purpose, adding the appropriate leavening. Having lived and baked in England, I can say that American flour is different than what’s available in the UK, and so are the baking pans. I brought back with me deep 8-inch cake pans that are more like a springform pan, and they have removable bottoms so getting the cake out of the pan is simpler.
I used this pan to bake Helen’s orange cake, and it was perfect. But I realize not everyone has this pan. So if you have a springform pan, use it in the orange cake recipe. Or portion the batter into two 8-inch regular cake layers and bake a little less time for a layer cake. You can even bake this cake in a 13- by 9-inch pan.
I love this orange cake, and its texture is even nicer the next day. Dollop the frosting onto a cooled cake, or if you’d like more of a glazed look, spread it on while warm, which is what I did after snapping the photo.
Helen admits she’s having a little trouble perfecting this cake in London. It always worked in Melbourne. Well, it worked in Nashville, too.
Hope you enjoy a beautiful cake from a beautiful person.
Thank you, Helen!
- xo, Anne
P.S. What a crazy week! I will have been in Richmond, Virginia; Monroeville and Mobile, Alabama; and Tallahassee, Florida with book events by the time this newsletter is published. My schedule is nothing to compare with the chilling, rapid-fire news of the day, however. When I left home, the drama was circling around the USA men and women’s gold-medal winning hockey teams, and always I am impressed with the grace and grit demonstrated by Katie Couric. Go Katie! And now a war in Iran? What happened to bringing down the price of eggs? And where the heck is Congress?
THE RECIPE:
Helen Goh’s Favorite Orange Cake
Love this recipe and you will, too. You need to find the right pan in which to bake it, which means the pan is deep enough for all the batter. If you have an 8- or 9-inch springform, this will work. While the recipe says the cake will be done in one hour, it took 20 minutes more for me. Baking at 375ºF will cause the top of the cake to brown, which I loved. If you don’t, tent it with aluminum foil once it gets to the color you prefer. I used a big naval orange in this recipe, and it was perfect. Just the right size, plus it felt heavy in the hand, which means lots of juice. I scrubbed it well knowing I was going to eat the entire orange! After the orange cooked, I trimmed off the stem end and the navel-y end before pureeing. Needless to say, you must use a seedless orange in this recipe, too. When I bake this cake again, I might reduce the baking soda to 1/4 teaspoon, and I might try it in a sheet pan because I will pour the frosting over the cake while it’s still in the pan and hot so it forms a glaze!
Makes 12 servings
Bake: 1 hour, 20 minutes, or until done
2 medium seedless oranges or 1 large orange (about 12 ounces/340 grams total weight), best if heavy and thin-skinned oranges like navels
2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (330 grams) all-purpose flour (I used Gold Medal)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks/170 grams) unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces and left at room temperature
1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (330 grams) sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup (6 ounces/170 ml) whole milk
Frosting:
1/4 cup (half a stick/60 grams) unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces and left at room temperature
1 1/2 cups (180 grams) confectioners’ sugar, sifted
Finely grated zest of 1 orange
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon whole milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
For the cake, place the orange or oranges in a small saucepan and cover with cold water. Place over medium-high heat and when it comes to a boil, reduce the heat to low and partially cover the pan. Simmer for 1 hour or until tender. Poke a small knife with a sharp point into the orange to make sure it slides in easily and is cooked through.
Lift the orange or oranges out of the water onto a plate to cool. Discard the water. Cut the oranges into 8 pieces each and place in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Puree until smooth. Measure out 1 cup for the recipe, and discard the rest.
Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Grease the bottom and sides of an 8- or 9-inch springform pan or grease a deep (at least 3 inches) 8-inch layer pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.
Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl.
Place the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat on medium speed with the paddle until pale and combined but not fluffy, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the 1 cup of orange puree and mix until combined. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, and turn the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean, or the temperature registers 200ºF on an instant-read thermometer, about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Place on a wire rack to cool 20 minutes, then run a knife around the edges of the cake and loosen it. Remove the sides of the springform pan. For the layer pan, turn the cake out once and invert it back to right-side up to cool completely on the rack.
While the cake cools, make the frosting. Combine the butter, confectioners’ sugar, and orange zest in the bowl of the electric mixer and beat on low with the paddle to just combine, 30 seconds. Increase to medium and beat 3 minutes until fluffy. Add the milk and vanilla, and increase the speed to high and beat until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes more. Spread the frosting onto the top of the cooled cake, or spread thinly onto the top and around the sides. Slice and serve.
ONE SUMMER, TO CELEBRATE my 50th birthday, we rented a villa outside Lucignano, Italy with our good friends, the Pattersons. It was called Villa Sara, and I had no expectation other than it would be in Tuscany, and there was a pool so my son would be happy.
We were all happy. From my three small bedroom windows each about the size of a shoebox, I could see a real-life landscape rising before me and at the top, a Medieval hill town. If you exited our front door, walked down the drive, turned right and hiked up the hill, you reached Lucignano.
Along the way you would pass green-gold grapes in the vineyards, silvery olive trees that rustled in the breeze, and maize-colored houses and apartments, each with a burnished terracotta roof. Cypress trees poked like tall pencils into a deep blue sky.
Lucignano was quaint with few tourists, mostly older residents, like the men who gathered for a game of cards and coffee on the square. If you went out to dinner, you’d better plan on spending the evening. Nothing was rushed. And children came along for dinner no matter the hour. There were no iPads, no babysitters to whisk them away, they just nibbled bread sticks while waiting on pasta and then gelato, and then came the walk back home fortunately, down the hill.
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I’m passing the saucepan this week to my longtime newspaper colleague Susan Puckett. You might remember her from the Schaum Torte a couple years ago? She’s been telling me about a wonderful tomato soup she simmered up after learning about her mother’s obsession with Panera tomato soup. It’s made with basic pantry ingredients and offers bright bold flavor and color on cold February days. Hope you enjoy the story and recipe! - Anne
By Susan Puckett
DAYS BEFORE THE RECENT WINTER storm wreaked havoc through the South, I called my mom to see if she needed anything from the outside world should the roads turn to ice.
“Not that I can think of, dear,” she said. “As long as I have my soup.”
Panera Creamy Tomato Soup to be precise. “Vine-ripened pear tomatoes pureed with fresh cream for a velvety smooth flavor accented by hints of red pepper and oregano and topped with black pepper and sea salt croutons,” as it is described on Panera’s website.
She’s been eating it almost daily for months, ever since I spotted it in the deli section of the grocery store and brought her that first container. She’s become such a huge fan, our family teases her that she should become its national spokeswoman.
“The taste is spectacular — just like homemade!” she declares. Plus, the plastic covering is easy to open — a big deal for arthritic joints.
I’ve tried to tempt her with other varieties—Chicken Tortilla, Broccoli Cheddar, Lobster Bisque.
Not interested.
Mama’s almost 91 and has always been a longtime supporter of my food writing career. She’s loved tagging along with me on dining escapades, being a guinea pig for cooking experiments, and pitching in with holiday meals and dinner parties.
She came along on my book tours through Mississippi, where we lived when I was growing up. In promoting my 2013 cookbook/travelogue, Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler’s Journey Through the Soul of the South, she chatted up attendees and helped me prep chocolate chess pies for TV demos. And she’s told me countless times it was one of the most thrilling experiences of her life.
Blessed with no health issues other than the usual aches and pains that come with age, Mama keeps up with family and current events. She excels at Wordle. But there’s limited space in her efficiency apartment, which makes meal assembly a challenge.
Thus her love of Panera tomato soup and a good grilled cheese sandwich.
Americans’ longstanding affinity with the combo of tomato soup and cheese sandwich is well documented through history.
Eliza Leslie included several recipes for tomato soup in her 1857 classic, Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Cookbook. And tomato was among the first flavors of condensed soups Joseph Campbell rolled out just before the turn of the 20th century. It eventually became a top-10 shelf-stable grocery store item.
During World War II, tomato soup was served alongside a griddled sandwich made with a newly patented processed “American” cheese and became the practical, economical staple of mess halls and school cafeterias.
Between the frigid weather, tomato soup research, and my mom’s exhortations, I was now craving tomato soup, but not from Panera—homemade.
I decided to make a batch that bested Panera’s and invite Mama over to be the judge of the two.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” she said when I told her my plan. “I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings. I don’t see how you could make it any better.”
I assured her I would brace myself for an honest assessment.
Before I searched for copycat “Panera Creamy Tomato Soup” recipes online, I bought a container of it to try for comparison.
Most copycat recipes vary only slightly and adhere closely to the ingredients on the package: tomatoes, heavy cream, onions, sugar, garlic, olive oil, spices. I also turned to one of my favorite cookbooks, Simply Tomato, by Martha Holmberg, for inspiration.
Martha’s version of the classic is elevated with a hefty dose of fresh basil along with a carrot and a touch of ginger for complexity, which I loved.
She also offers brilliant suggestions for embellishment that I couldn’t resist trying like homemade sourdough croutons coated in olive oil and lots of Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese.
I blended elements from all the recipes and tinkered until I felt I’d nailed it. My husband and I tasted a small cup of my soup alongside one of Panera’s, and his review was this:
“Panera’s is actually pretty good,” Ralph said, but “pales in comparison to yours.” We proceeded to scarf down big steamy bowls topped with Martha’s addictive cheesy croutons and grilled cheese sandwiches, then stuck the rest of the soup in the freezer.
The next week when the weather warmed up a bit, we brought Mama over for the final verdict. I asked her to taste my soup plain first and then with some garnishes.
“I can’t believe it!” she said, slurping down the first spoonful. “Yours is even better than Panera’s!”
She went on to clean her bowl. I couldn’t ask for a higher compliment.
Of the 17 soup choices offered by Panera Bread, tomato ranks number three behind broccoli cheddar and chicken noodle.
But tomato soup—whether homemade or Panera’s—has something to offer that most other soups don’t. Versatility.
Mama reminds me of this when, along with her usual grocery requests, she adds salsa, pesto, and blends of shredded cheeses to her list.
“I like to stir them into my tomato soup to give it a different flavor. Every day, I think about what I’m going to do with my soup. It’s like my new hobby!”
As she talks, I realize that for Mama, a humble container of pre-made soup is more than a convenient meal solution. It’s a bright, blank canvas to spark cooking creativity that’s faded over time.
Could it be that tomato soup, not chicken, is the true elixir of our souls?
What’s your take on tomato soup? Are you Panera or homemade?
A note from Anne: I said I wouldn’t mention the-ice-storm-that-shall-not-be-named again, but honestly, how can you move on when driving down any street in Nashville, you see the memories piled up. Brush, fallen limbs, and decapitated trees have been dragged to the street ready for city pickup and mulching. It’s been such a distraction that I nearly forgot today is Mardi Gras! So from the archives, paid subscribers can access two of my Fat Tuesday favorites, how to make authentic red beans and rice and the formula for the best Dutch baby (oven pancake). Laissez les bons temps rouler!
THE RECIPE:
Better-Than-Panera Creamy Tomato Soup (and Parmigiana Croutons)
This belly-warming recipe conjures the cozy memories you may recall from childhood but elevates it several notches. It’s not quite as easy as opening a can or to-go container, but, rest assured, the extra time will be well spent. Serve the soup as is or fortify it as I did with cheese-crusted croutons, white beans, seared and sliced Italian sausages, or fresh basil or spinach leaves. For a vegan version, add more olive oil in lieu of butter, use vegetable stock, and swap coconut milk for the cream. The croutons recipe is adapted from Simply Tomato, by Martha Holmberg (Artisan, 2023). To make it vegan, substitute nutritional yeast for the Parmesan.
Makes about 2 quarts (6 to 8 servings)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 medium carrot, peeled and coarsely chopped
Salt and black pepper
1 tablespoon minced garlic (3 or 4 cloves)
1 teaspoon minced or grated fresh ginger
Pinch red pepper flakes
2 (28-ounce) cans San Marzano tomatoes, undrained
2 cups vegetable or chicken broth
½ cup coarsely chopped fresh basil leaves (plus extra leaves for garnish)
2 or 3 sprigs fresh thyme or ½ teaspoon dried thyme
2 to 3 teaspoons sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream, or to taste (plus extra for garnish)
Parmigiana Croutons (recipe follows)
Heat the olive oil and butter in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat until the butter is melted.
Add the onion and carrot, along with ½ teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of pepper; cook and stir until the onion is translucent and very soft, but not browned, reducing the heat slightly, if necessary, about 8 to 10 minutes.
Add the garlic, ginger, and red pepper flakes and cook and stir until softened but not browned, a minute or two longer.
Add the tomatoes with their juices, breaking them up with a wooden spoon, then add the broth, and the basil and thyme. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes are fall-apart tender and the soup has reduced by about 25 percent, 30 to 40 minutes.
Puree the soup with an immersion blender. Or allow it to cool slightly and puree in batches in a blender or food processor, then return it to the pan. Add the cream; cook and stir over low heat until heated through.
Ladle into bowls and garnish as desired.
Parmigiana Croutons
Makes about 2 cups
2 (1-inch) slices sourdough or other artisan-style bread
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ cup finely grated Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat the oven to 400ºF. Cut or tear the bread into roughly 1-inch chunks (raggedy edges are fine).
Place the bread in a large bowl, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with the cheese, and season lightly with salt and pepper. Toss until the bread absorbs the oil and the cheese is evenly distributed.
Spread out the croutons on a sheet pan and bake 7 minutes, or until lightly browned on one side. Then flip and continue baking 5 minutes longer, or until the bread is browned and crisp all over but still somewhat chewy on the inside.
Drain the croutons on paper towels and let cool. Then store in an airtight container and use within a couple of days.
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I AM DEEPLY TOUCHED BY YOUR COMMENTS after the recent Nashville ice storm. I know many of you were affected as well.
On day five, still stubbornly living in our frigid house with no heat (not wanting to leave the old house, not wanting to relocate the old dog) I hope for a text message saying, “Your outage has been assigned.” Better yet, help is on the w…
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SINCE WE ARE FOOD-LOVING PEOPLE here at Between the Layers, I’ll share a recent Threads comment from bestselling cookbook author Sarah Keifer.
She’s the one who created the viral pan-banging chocolate chip cookie recipe. And she’s also a Minneapolis resident who posted that she finds it hard to write about recipes when her town feels like a war zone.
It reminds me of how after Nashville’s March 2023 Covenant School shootings, I couldn’t write about strawberry cake and instead told you what was in my heart at that moment. I lost paid subscribers being vocal about the tragedy and gun laws, but we writers know speaking up comes with a cost.
Sarah felt Minneapolis isn’t being supported by the rest of the country and said, “People don’t want to think about what doesn’t affect them.”
At the time, I knew she was right.
And I still know she’s right, even after an ice storm slammed into my town 10 days ago. From the dangling power lines and trees snapped in half like pencils, Nashville looks like a war zone, too. I am still without power.
Hundreds of thousands of people in middle Tennessee lost power due to a combination of unprecedented weather—the perfect storm, exponential growth of Nashville as the “it” city, and what feels like ill preparedness on the part of our local utility, Nashville Electric Service (NES).
All I can think about right now is that I am cold. I am uncomfortable. I am hopeful NES will fix my busted transformer soon.
But if you weren’t in the path of this storm, you probably don’t stress about it.
So my reply to Sarah is two-fold:
Humans are wired for surviving the “now.” We are built to handle what is in front of us, or like my mother used to say, what’s on our plate.
To the people of Minneapolis, we want you to know we are still with you.
Without power, I remain horrified at the brutal, unlawful murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. That will not go away. I am grateful five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father have been released from ICE custody. I am in awe of how in spite of freezing weather and the risk involved with protesting, Minneapolis has shown up to support its neighbors. I am incensed at the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort while they were following the news.
But this past week we have experienced beauty as well—frozen landscapes that glitter like diamonds, breathtaking sunsets emitting warming rays in our direction, and generosity of spirit. We have had many people open their warm homes and hearts to us, and that comforts us more than you can know.
We can’t open up our homes to the people of Minnesota, but we can open up our hearts.
So today I honor the North Star State in a way its people might appreciate. I cooked a variation of their beloved recipe—the hotdish—in my gas grill in sub-freezing temps.
The soul food of the North
Pre-storm, I had purchased the ingredients for a proper “hotdish”—spelled as one word and often as two. It’s the hearty Upper Midwestern version of what the rest of the Midwest, South, and East call a “casserole.” (Not sure about the West, so please weigh in.)
They are one and the same, both layered, both feeding a crowd, but they couldn’t be more different. Hotdish is about tradition and change.
From what I researched, there are as many hotdish variations as there are people in Minnesota. Some involve tuna, others chicken or sauerkraut, some just baked beans, and the one I explored is so beloved it has its own acronym—TTHD—the Tater Tot Hotdish.
After the power outage, I prepped the recipe with daylight, simmering the meat sauce and creamy cheese sauce on top of the kitchen gas stove I lit manually.
Then I layered the meat sauce, frozen peas, cheese sauce, and tots in a grill-friendly Lodge cast-iron casserole pan. (To be safe, I placed that pan atop a cast-iron griddle so the underside wouldn’t burn. Heat from a covered grill comes from the bottom only compared to a conventional oven baking on top and below.)
Hotdish or casserole?
Myself layered up, too, in snow boots, heavy coat, and wool cap, I stayed at the grill most of the hour-plus needed to bake the pan consistently at 350ºF (a little tricky when it’s cold outside. Your inside oven keeps a more constant temp!).
And you know, it was a beautiful, bubbling, hot, cheesy sight to behold. Patrice Johnson, a Minneapolis tv personality, cookbook author and teacher of Nordic cooking classes in the Twin Cities, has written about the humble hotdish in The Minneapolis Star Tribune.
A hotdish recipe, she says, is a window into someone’s soul—the soul food of the North.
Not long after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate for the 2024 Presidential election, the world was introduced to hotdish. Walz had won the Minnesota Congressional Delegation’s Hotdish Competition in Washington, DC in 2013, 2014, and 2016 for his Hermann the German Hotdish, Turkey Trot Tater-Tot Hotdish, and Tim’s Turkey Taco.
Patrice judged that competition in 2019 and noticed that in spite of a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and racist rhetoric across the country at the time, the hotdish entries embodied the immigrant story. The winning hotdishes were Hmong and Liberian-inspired recipes. Patrice says Hmong hotdish recipes have become economical ways to feed a family of 10 with just one pound of meat.
“You learn a lot about a person when you eat their hotdish. To sit down together at the table has always symbolized an understanding and even a certain intimacy.” - Patrice Johnson.
Food is the equalizer
Baking hotdish let me to forget discomfort and marvel in a new recipe.
It’s good solid food and welcome on a cold evening. I put my own spin on the recipe, making a jazzed-up red sauce with ground turkey, a from-scratch cheese sauce with the block of cheddar I needed to use, what was left of my frozen peas, and all but nine Tater Tots from a two-pound bag. Eating hot bowlfuls in front of the fireplace was a kind of empathic experience that should be basic training for ICE, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and all of the White House.
I hope Minneapolis knows that even though we can’t join them in person, we admire their strength. We can make their recipe and open up our hearts.
Enjoy the hotdish and keep warm,
- xo, Anne
P.S. Many thanks to Between the Layers paid subscriber Karen S of Minneapolis for help with this post!
THE RECIPE:
Minnesota Hotdish from a Southern Kitchen
To come up with this cozy-as-a-sweater recipe, I researched hotdish recipes. While many of the gooey, creamy sort of recipes called for a can of cream of mushroom soup—and I was raised on the stuff so am not going to be a canned soup snob—I wanted the sauce from scratch. So I read Molly Yeh’s post about hotdish and scanned her recipe. What I liked was the homemade sauce and the use of frozen peas, but it looked too meaty and bland. We like a bit of spice in the South. We were raised on homemade creamy sauces and gravies and know how to pull them together and season for the occasion. The fresh nutmeg added just the right touch. This essentially was the sauce my mom made to pour over freshly steamed cauliflower. The layering of Tater Tots was so fun. A two-pound bag was perfect to top a big 13-by 9-inch pan of hotdish. This feeds eight really hungry people at dinner or 12 at a potluck. It’s an adaptable sort of recipe—you can use the ground turkey or opt for beef or go meatless, which would be fabulous. Substitute 1 pound of Baby Bella mushrooms, chopped as if to resemble the ground turkey. With the frozen peas in the casserole, you’ve covered the bases, but if you want to round out the meal, I’d suggest a green salad. Or Jell-O, which would be very Minnesotan.
Makes 8 to 12 servings (or cut the recipe in half and assemble in a 2-quart baking pan)
Meat Sauce:
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound ground turkey
1 medium onion, chopped
3 medium carrots, peeled and chopped
3 ribs celery or 1 large or 2 medium zucchini, chopped (I used zucchini because I was out of celery)
4 cloves garlic, sliced
1 jar (24 ounces) pasta sauce
1/2 cup red wine, if desired
A little heat and spice, such as pinch of cayenne pepper, oregano, basil, how you would season red sauce
Creamy Cheese Sauce:
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup chicken broth
Salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
Big pinch freshly grated nutmeg
Big pinch spicy Creole seasoning salt
1 1/2 cups (6 ounces) shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 to 1 1/2 cups frozen peas, however many you have
1 bag (2 pounds) frozen Tater Tots (if you can’t find where you live, use frozen hash brown potatoes)
Extra cheddar for sprinkling on top, if desired
For the meat sauce, pour the oil into a large heavy pot over medium heat. Break up the turkey into the pot, and stir and cook until cooked through, about 5 to 6 minutes. As you stir, use a potato masher to mash down on the clumps of meat to make them smaller and more uniform. Reduce the heat to low. Add the onion, carrots, celery or zucchini, and the garlic, and stir and cook until softened, about 4 minutes. Pour the pasta sauce into the pot, and pour the wine into the empty jar and swish it around, then pour the wine into the pot. Season as you would for red sauce. Cover the pan and let the mixture simmer so flavors come together, about 30 minutes. (If you are in a rush, you can simmer 10 to 15 minutes.)
Meanwhile, using a medium saucepan, make the cheese sauce. Melt butter over low heat, and whisk in the flour until it thickens but does not brown, about 1 minute. Whisk in the milk and broth until smooth. Season with salt and pepper and also with mustard, nutmeg, and seasoning salt. Taste. Continue to simmer and whisk the sauce, and fold in the cheese until melted. Remove from the heat.
Preheat the oven to 350ºF to 375ºF depending on your oven. Mist a 13- by 9-inch pan (3-quart) with vegetable oil spray. Spoon the meat sauce into the bottom of the pan. Scatter the frozen peas on top of the meat. Spoon the cheese sauce over all. Line up the Tots in rows on top of the sauce, using 9 per row, with the Tots positioned lengthwise down the long side of the pan. They will fit snugly. If desired, scatter a little shredded cheese on top.
Bake until bubbly, about 1 hour to 1 hour, 20 minutes, depending on your oven (or gas grill!). Serve hot (it’s called a hotdish, right?). Serve ketchup to the side, if desired.
Dear readers,
When I was living in England in March 1994, my father sent me a detailed letter about the horrific ice storm that had taken down hundreds of trees on our hillside home. My parents in Nashville stayed in the house for the duration of the storm and were without power for two weeks.
My sisters and I always felt that ice storm took him down, too. I am trying not to let it get to me although now I am experiencing ice storm madness as well.
So this letter will be brief. The trees started crashing down in the wee hours of Sunday before daylight. You could hear heavy limbs slam into the icy ground with sonic thuds, and flashes in the sky told us electrical transformers were on their way out, too. I don’t have internet or power. So I am texting this message to my daughter who will upload it to Substack. (Pssst, you’re welcome, Mom.)
Please feel free to comment and give us a weather report where you are.
Nashville’s ice storm may end up affecting more people than my dad’s storm. It is currently 12ºF outside and 42ºF in my house as I write this letter in my mom’s old mink coat at the kitchen table. Today is day three.
We knew it was coming, but do you ever know how bad it will be?
We have two gas fireplaces, which keep us a little warm. Faucets trickle in upstairs bathrooms so the pipes don’t freeze. And people ask, why don’t you go to a hotel? One, we can’t get down the icy driveway past the fallen trees; two, we can’t leave this old house and have the pipes burst; and three, I’ve heard you have to drive an hour south of Nashville just to find vacancy.
On the bright side, we still have eggs, bread, oats, tea, and coffee for breakfast. No toaster, obviously, but we’ve got a six-burner gas stove, and griddled bread in a skillet is lovely. I spotted a loaf of cranberry walnut bread in the freezer, and it was already half-thawed. How wonderful!
And I found some solace in a retro sort of recipe, but I’ve forgotten the name. Not toad in the hole because there’s no toad (sausage) and instead just an egg. You cut a hole in a slice of bread with a round cutter. Place the slice (and the round) in the skillet and once it sizzles in butter, crack an egg into the hole of the bread. If you like your egg soft, cook it a few minutes, and for those who prefer a more well-done egg, flip it, and cook on the other side.
Serve with jam. We spooned over Damson plum preserves and orange marmalade. With the kitchen now colder than my fridge, many ingredients stay on the counter. And the food that needs colder temps is outside in the Yeti cooler with the lid propped open.
We’ve got ripe bananas. I’m thinking of making mashed banana pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast tomorrow. The bacon in the freezer should be thawed by then! Last night, after a day of moving tree limbs and charging telephones in our cars, we treated ourselves to warmed-up fudge sauce poured over the last of the peppermint ice cream.
For keeping warm, I pulled out the real-deal Irish cardigan and a heavy brown plaid blanket that belonged to his grandmother. Growing up in Montana, she knew the value of a good, heavy woolen!
But mostly, these few days of frontier life have been about conserving battery and making good use of daylight. I cooked dinner at 2:20 pm yesterday. Love the rechargeable table lamps we can carry safely like candles come nightfall.
With no Netflix, Instagram, email, you might wonder what is one doing with all this free time away from screens? Reading and working on a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle when there’s light. Catching up on texts with friends and family midday if we’re outside and find cell service. Playing trivia after dinner by the fireplace. And thinking.
About how when we remodeled this nearly 100-year-old house my grandfather built, we were attempting to carry it into the 21st Century. Now, ironically, the house has dragged us back even further. At least we have running water—it’s cold, but we have water.
I’m glad I’ve had the chance to experience an ice storm.
It reminds me how we need people. A neighbor dropped off kerosene for our heater. She wouldn’t take cash, so we handed her a bottle of good red wine.
Here’s hoping the world improves by the time our power returns, that ICE leaves Minneapolis, and maybe it has already left, I have no idea. The saddest thing about being cut off from the world is being cut off from the world.
Take care of yourselves,
- xo, Anne
P.S. Once my power is back on, I’ll share this week’s recipe and story, and it’s a tribute to Minnesota.
How are you coping with snow and ice storms? What did you wish you had stocked up on? More patience, kerosene, dry shampoo?
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IN TODAY’S WORLD OF QUESTIONABLE “facts,” echo chambers, info spinners, and history revisionists, it’s refreshing to search for truth.
One of the ways I find truths and primary source material for my books and this newsletter is at a local library. Primary sources are materials “directly related to a topic by time or…
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WHEN JANICE AND BILL VARLEY MOVED to Chicago from Long Island and opened Torchio restaurant in the River North neighborhood in 2019, Janice knew they needed an amazing olive oil cake on the menu.
Mostly because olive oil cake feels Italian, but for practical reasons, too. The cake is easy for a restaurant kitchen to assemble and bake, improves with flavor, and retains its moisture so the texture three days later stays as fresh and nice as the day it was baked.
Janice had always loved to bake cake, starting at 10 years of age with boxed mixes. Her mother died just before her sixth birthday, so her paternal grandparents moved in to help raise her and her two siblings.
It was a bittersweet situation, she recalls. Her grandfather had just retired prior to her mother’s death. “They had all these plans and were living in Queens, but they moved out to this little town on Long Island to help us. My German grandmother taught me how to bake.”
Janice and Bill, married for 40 years, had recently retired from careers in engineering (Bill) and human resources (Janice) before opening the restaurant. Bill had loved cooking at home and owning a restaurant had been a dream. Although the timing wasn’t perfect—with Covid closing Torchio from March 2020 until July 2021–it turned out to be a big success.
Bill is the younger brother of Jolene Handy who writes Time Travel Kitchen here on Substack. My friendship with Jolene brought me to Chicago and to Torchio for dinner. And that’s how I tasted Janice’s lemon olive oil cake.
Torchio, which means a fresh pasta “press” in Italian, is bubbling with conversation, life, and of course, pasta. Families assemble here, couples cozy up at the copper bar, and if you’re a tourist and fortunate enough to snag a table, you will be surrounded by locals—your new best friends.
It’s as if the Cheers gang took a big trip to Italy and came back with an Italian nonna and her favorite recipes. The night I was there, the place was jammed. Jolene ordered fried artichokes as well as orecchiette with spicy sausage and broccoli rabe for us to split. We ended with lemon cake so soft it must have been freshly pulled from the oven.
Actually, in 2017, Janice and Bill did go to Italy to research the menu for their restaurant. They tasted a lemon olive oil cake in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast and remembered it.
“I had made a lemon and orange olive oil muffin before,” Janice says, but not a cake. She baked several recipes, including one from The New York Times, but they didn’t have enough lemon flavor so “I modified it, tripled the zest and doubled the juice.”
Janice says the most important thing about this recipe—really, it’s the only important thing because the cake is a snap to make—is to get the olive oil right.
“The olive oil we use is mild and grassy while a lot of the oil we tasted was more peppery. That’s not a good idea for cake.”
Just after my visit, Janice was told the restaurant’s distributor could not get any more of the Zaytun brand of olive oil she was using. It was pressed from Greek olives in Palestine, and to no surprise, the conflicts there have stopped olive oil production. She called together the kitchen team for a tasting, and they selected Cento Italian evoo to use going forward in the cake.
For my testing, I reached for my house olive oil, a Spanish extra virgin oil from Costco. The big plastic jug has a red label saying “Spanish extra virgin olive oil.” But after baking this cake two times, I ran out, and dashed to Costco for more oil. Without a doubt, the third and fourth cakes I baked using the fresh bottle tasted better than those made with the bottle previously opened.
And so you might be wondering, this is really the best lemon cake I’ve ever baked? Better than lemon layer cake or lemon pound cake?
Hands down, best lemon cake.
I’d like to thank Janice for sharing her wonderful recipe and giving me the opportunity to bake something nice while the news blares distressing reports and images.
From the shooting and killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis to the setting fire in a historic Jewish synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, it’s been a tragic week.
But we can bake cake to show that in the end, love wins. And this cake is one lovable, versatile cake. It can be baked in a Bundt, springform, or loaf pan for breakfast, afternoon tea, or dessert. I’ll bet you could make amazing muffins from the batter, too.
You can glaze it (recipe below) or not.
“Bake love” may just be my mantra for 2026. And this lemony cake is a start, showing that crumb by crumb, we can bake a better place.
Take care of yourselves!
- xo, Anne
P.S. Speaking of olive oil, at the end of December I drove through pine-forested southeast Georgia to see how olives are being grown and pressed into luscious green-gold oil. About 12 years ago Tracy and Curtis Poling founded Woodpecker Trail Olive Farm outside Glennville on land that had been in Tracy’s family since 1854. If you drive by the modest ranch farm houses of this rural area, with fields of Vidalia onions sprouting green tops and convenience markets selling deer corn to hunters, it in no way resembles Italy’s Tuscany. But for some strange weather reason, this little pocket of Georgia called the Magnolia Midlands has a near-perfect microclimate for olive trees. And what the Polings press from those olives each fall has won top awards. It’s too peppery for today’s cake, but it’s perfect for winter salad greens and citrus.
THE RECIPE:
Torchio Lemon Olive Oil Cake
Janice Varley assembles the cake batter as the NYT recipe suggested when shared by Samantha Seneviratne. But after baking one cake her way, I simplified the process the next go-around. She sprinkles 2 tablespoons sugar over the cake before it bakes, and I omitted that. I beat the batter for less time, too. Also, I reduced the milk slightly (Janice uses 1 1/4 cups). As olive oil is a natural emulsifier, which means it pulls the batter together before your eyes, you don’t need a big KitchenAid. An electric hand mixer will do, as will a whisk! And while Janice uses bleached flour, I have baked it with unbleached and bleached and noticed no difference. Do let the cake cool on the rack before wrapping for storage. If possible, Janice says, serve it the next day. Yet, I don’t have that kind of willpower and sliced it still a little warm. Excellent! You can bake this cake in pretty much any pan you like and serve it alone or with fruit, ice cream, lemon curd, whipped cream, or just a cup of tea.
Makes 12 servings
Bake: About 40 to 45 minutes for a springform pan, 50 minutes for a Bundt, and 1 hour for a 10-inch loaf pan
Olive oil and flour, plus parchment, for prepping the pan
2 cups (240 grams) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups (300 grams) sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest (from 3 medium lemons)
1 cup good-quality extra virgin olive oil
1 cup whole milk
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (from 2 lemons; reserve third lemon for glaze if desired)
Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Lightly grease the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan or 10-inch loaf pan with olive oil. Place a parchment round in the bottom of the springform or line the bottom of a loaf pan with parchment. Lightly grease the parchment and sides with olive oil and dust with flour. Or grease a Bundt pan with olive oil and dust with flour. Shake out the excess flour. Set the pan aside.
Whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda, and set aside.
Place the sugar, eggs, and lemon zest in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until very creamy and light, about 3 minutes. Dribble in the oil while the mixer is running, and continue to beat until thick and well combined, about 2 to 3 minutes more.
Stir together the milk and lemon juice. Add the flour mixture and the milk and lemon juice mixture alternately, beating on low speed, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Scrape the sides of the bowl, and pour the batter into the prepared pan.
Bake until the cake springs back and tests done, about 40 to 45 minutes for a springform. About 1 hour for the loaf pan, and about 50 minutes for a Bundt. If you use an instant-read thermometer, insert it gently in the center of the cake and it should read 200ºF. Remove the pan to a rack and let the springform cake cool in the pan 20 minutes, and let the Bundt and loaf pan rest 30 minutes.
Run a knife around the edges of the cake, unclamp the sides of the springform, and let cool 1 hour. For the Bundt pan, run a knife around the edges, give it a good shake and invert onto the rack to finish cooling. For the loaf, run a knife around the edges, invert the cake but carefully return it top-side up to finish cooling.
To ice the cake: Whisk 2 tablespoons milk and 1 tablespoon lemon juice (from the reserved third lemon that you zest for the cake) into 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted, until smooth. Season with a pinch of salt. The glaze needs to be thick enough to drizzle down the cake but stop.
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