An interview with "Cake Mix Doctor" Anne Bryn, who will make a pit stop in Durham on her tour for "Baking in the American South."

An Evening With Anne Bryn | The Durham Hotel, Durham | Monday, Oct. 14, 6 p.m.

Anne Byrn, the cookbook author who gained national prominence in the early 2000s for teaching people how to gussy up boxes of Betty Crocker with add-ins like sour cream and Sherry, still embraces her "Cake Mix Doctor" moniker.

But Byrn's more recent cookbooks have seen her take less of an advisory role and more of a narrative, archival one. Out this month, her latest book, Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories, only includes three of her own family's recipes. The rest are sourced from department stores, school cafeterias, mills, and churches across the South; drawn from people like "country ham king Allan Benton" and 1930s-era boardinghouse owner Ma Hoyle.

A Nashville native and a fifth-generation Tennessean who spent years as a food editor at The Atlanta Journal and the Tennessean, Byrn brings a sense of both familiarity and curiosity to the rigorously researched, effortlessly written Baking in the American South, which features recipes from her home state, plus 13 others.

"If you bake a vast deep-dish fruit pie, in most places in the South, you've made a cobbler," Byrn writes. "But in Surry and Wilkes Counties in North Carolina, the same dish is called a 'sonker' ...Sonker was the invention of Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrants, who began settling in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina in the early 1700s. The word traces to the Gaelic songle or sonkle, meaning 'little mess.'"

Ahead of her October 14 event at The Durham Hotel, the INDY chatted with Byrn about the research that went into Baking in the American South, the future of hyper-regional recipes, and the most iconic baked goods to come out of North Carolina.

INDY: While you were working on this book, how much were you on the road versus doing research and calling on sources from throughout your career?

BYRN: It was about 50/50. It started as a project that might have been more on the road. But I think because of COVID, the research came first. It was a matter of educating myself about, or trying to figure out: What was the Southern region? If I wanted to include these states, how did I learn about them? Who did I contact in that state? And then, who did I talk to for really broad cultural topics? I wanted to learn about railroads and slavery and rice cultivation and all these topics that had come up.

It really feels like a work of journalism as well as being a functional cookbook.

It was like walking on railroad ties, straddling back and forth between the two.

Why did you decide to take this sort of 'reported' approach?

It's just the way I've always been. I've always been curious. I've always asked a lot of questions. I'm a newspaper journalist. I came to cookbooks via newspapers. So I've never left that interest in digging out answers and finding people that nobody's ever heard of, because that would be the type of stories that I would want to report on if there were still newspapers like there used to be.

I am not a historian, but I am a curious person, and I have always loved the South, and I've always loved to bake, and I brought that real keen interest, and I have the time to dedicate to find people. I found out about a fabulous resource here in Nashville. The Vanderbilt Medical School has one of the largest cookbook collections in the country. There's just so many resources. With ancestry.com and newspapers.com, anybody could dig into the story if they wanted to. If you didn't believe the first 25 pop-ups from your Google search. Set those aside and then go really look.

Something that stood out to me in the introduction to the book was you saying that recipes in the South "became hyper-regional because their people were," but also that recipes transcended state lines; you wrote, "A small town in southern Kentucky was a hub connecting rail lines north and south, allowing imported bananas to travel from docks in New Orleans and Mobile clear up to New York and Philadelphia, which might explain why there are so many banana pudding recipes embedded in Kentucky cookbooks." Do you have thoughts on whether we can still be hyper-regional in that way -- if there are still siloed communities that are coming up with hyper-regional recipes?

That's a real powerhouse of a question. There are some quirky recipes, like the Lane cake and the sticky lemon cheesecake, that are real deep, deep South. I had never heard of those when I grew up in Tennessee. Those recipes stuck in certain communities in part because they were a lot of trouble. They were written about in local cookbooks, but probably because of their expense and the time it took to make them, they just didn't go everywhere.

Those are also the types of recipes I have some fear about dying out. The Lane cake -- and the smell of the whiskey on the counter that goes into the cake -- is mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's only sort of just referred to. The Lane cake is also Jimmy Carter's favorite cake. He's about to turn 100, so anyone in their 30s may not know, may not really care, that that was Jimmy Carter's favorite cake.

Whereas something like the banana pudding you mentioned, crosses racial lines, economic lines, and state lines, because it's affordable, and because people who lived near the docks in coastal cities like Mobile and New Orleans had access to bananas that fell off of the bunches that didn't get loaded onto the train. I think a lot of it has to do with access and availability and being able to cross lines. I know that's a mishmash of an answer.

It was a mishmash of a question.

It's a good one to ponder, for sure. I'm going to keep thinking about it this weekend when I'm at the book festival in Arkansas. Of all the states that had quirky recipes, it's Arkansas. I'm actually doing a demo at the festival, and when I asked them what kind of recipe they wanted, I was praying they would not say something from Arkansas. Their eyes fell on this pie from Kentucky -- it's a brown sugar meringue pie, and actually, it's a great one, because it's a farm recipe, it's a fast recipe; you don't have to caramelize sugar. Anybody can make it. They've got these weird recipes -- possum pie, cherry nut pie, circe chocolate roll -- that you just don't see anywhere else in the South. And I wonder why.

I'm thinking about how you said that you found a lot of these recipes in print archives. I feel like probably even the super niche, quirky recipes are online somewhere, but there is definitely something to having a curator, someone to dust them off and put them all in one place and platform them.

And test them. A lot of those quirky ones; they weren't really interesting. The cantaloupe cream pie is a real outlier. We tested that a dozen times to get it right because the flavor was fantastic. It tastes like ripe cantaloupe. I have never seen anything like it. And it spoke of the railroads, it spoke of the ingenious nature of this cook to be able to take this mystery basket of ripe cantaloupe and say, 'What the heck am I going to do with this?' and then he makes his pie on a railroad car.

So it's like, 'We're gonna get this recipe right.' It took a while because you need the juice of the melon to make a custard for the pie. If you have a really ripe melon, you could just squeeze the heck out of the juice or throw it all in the food processor and then strain it. But if you don't, we figured out a way to actually microwave the slices of cantaloupe, to soften them, and to kind of change the cell structure a little bit. Then you throw it in the food processor and strain the puree.

Could you talk a little bit about recipes in the book with origins in North Carolina?

North Carolina is such an interesting state. You have probably birthed more interesting recipes than Tennessee has, but we have something in common in that we're kind of long and narrow. You have your mountains, and you've got your midlands or whatever, and you've got your coast, and I think that is very similar to Tennessee, where we have the mountains in the east, the farmland in the middle, and then the Delta in Memphis.

One of the revelations that came out of the mountains of North Carolina is cathead biscuits. I really looked for the story on catheads, because the name is often kind of tossed around just to mean a big biscuit the size of a cat head. It was the research I did into the old logging camps of North Georgia and western North Carolina that I could really place cathead biscuits from that area.

Then there are recipes [that trace back to] the influx of people that came into the middle part of your state (the Moravians, the Germans, the Scots): the sonker, the shortnin' bread, the Moravian sugar cake. And there are a couple in here that were inspired by Bill Neal, who was the chef in Chapel Hill: the persimmon pudding, the lemon meringue pie. Those are classic Bill Neal because they're old, and yet they feel very new and modern.

From the coastline, I think of Bill Smith with the Atlantic Beach pie.

Another great North Carolina recipe is Ma Hoyle's double-crust blackberry cobbler. That came out of Gastonia. It's a boarding house recipe, a type of recipe that would have been common throughout the South, a big pan of cobbler. But what makes it unique is the way she makes it with double-crust. Her story was that she started a boarding house because she had to support her children, and started renting out rooms in her house and cooking. Boarding houses sprang up around railroad lines and railroad stops, and that's where people would stay before there were hotels.

The South was largely rural. It was isolated, and it was poor. This story, I think, feeds into that. Also, blackberries grew wild throughout North Carolina. Recipes like the cobbler that have blackberries tell you that people were foraging for what they had.

They were using wild foods in creative ways. And women who could bake could elevate that. They could elevate the ordinary ingredient.

The book really emphasizes all of the contributions that Black women have made to Southern baking. How did you navigate sharing recipes and stories that aren't from your own culture?

I tried the best I could. When I finished the manuscript, I said, people are just gonna love it, or they're gonna find a million things wrong with it. I put a lot out there. It was very humbling to be able to tell these stories. When it felt like it was getting too difficult when I felt like, 'Should I be talking about this?' I just reverted back to the recipes, and I let the recipes do the talking.

I really wanted to set right out in the very beginning that this is not a book about me. I knew I didn't want it to be Anne Byrn's Southern Baking. I wanted it to be about the South.