Welcome to my new website!
Food has been a major force in my life. From a young age, I was the one who smelled cinnamon rolls baking, who watched the groceries be unpacked on the kitchen counter and tried to guess what my mother was cooking for dinner. As a college student making visits home to Nashville, I would first stop in the basement to open the cavernous chest freezer and peek inside, hoping to find creme de menthe parfaits, chocolate layer cake, and yeast rolls, all frozen reminders of a great dinner party, church supper, or neighborhood potluck where my mother, as usual, had baked too much knowing it could be squirreled away for future meals and family treats.
Some families discussed the weather, crops, politics, or their history, but mine spent much time talking about meals. And the preparation of them. My mother, Bebe, was one of five sisters, and she welcomed company in the kitchen. She encouraged my sisters and me to roll out cookie dough on the counter, help her stir the chocolate fudge frosting, and to listen to hear when the chicken stopped whistling as it fried because this was a sign the moisture had cooked out and it was nearly done. Mother made white gravy for the chicken and rice, simmered turnip greens slowly with a ham hock the way my father liked them, fried corn hoe cakes in a split second, sliced sweet ripe tomatoes from the garden, and always had a dessert on the table – either peach cobbler in the summertime, or banana cream pie in the winter, and always strawberry shortcake for my sister’s birthday and special occasions in the spring when local berries came in. There were foods she whipped up with ease and love most every day.
Fortunately, my mother tired of her own recipes and wanted new ideas. We opened cookbooks for suggestions. The food editor of the Nashville newspaper would save cookbooks for me when I interned there for three summers. I was assigned the news desk, and I reported about fires, bank robberies, and even Elvis Presley’s death as I was the only reporter in the house on that August Sunday night. But at the end of the day, I walked down the hall to the Lifestyles department where the food editor Bernie Arnold had stacked a pile of cookbooks for me to take home. My mother and I tried out new recipes together like chicken breasts Cordon Bleu, chicken crepes with Mornay sauce, Irish soda bread, French cheese souffle and carrot cake, and if we really liked them, and after we had tweaked them to our liking, I wrote the recipes onto index cards and placed them in my mother’s brown recipe box, which I still have.
After college I was hired by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to write about food. Nowhere on my resume did I say I had experience writing about food, but as I explained to the managing editor who interviewed me, “I can write, and I can cook, so therefore I can write about food.” In reality, I learned every day on the job. For 15 years I interviewed hundreds of home cooks and celebrity chefs on everything from how to put up scuppernong jam to roll fresh pasta dough. The newspaper office was conveniently located around the corner from the old Rich’s Cooking School in downtown Atlanta. If Julia Child, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, Paula Wolfert, or other notables were in town and teaching at Rich’s, I was able to attend the class, thanks to the school director Nathalie Dupree. My hands-down favorite was Julia Child. She was larger than life, in her physical appearance but also in the way she commanded your attention. She was intelligent and kind and took interest in everyone who was passionate about food and cooking.
Inspired by Julia Child to learn how to cook French food, I talked my editor into granting me a leave of absence to attend La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine cooking school in Paris. Here I learned how to make genoise – the delicate French layer cakes – as well as puff pastry, croissants, cream puffs, classic French sauces, a proper omelet, vinaigrettes, pot au feu, and many other wonderful French recipes. My favorite moment was biting into my first French croissant, made with my own hands! My least was skinning a giant eel, which required three of us – one to hold the eel still, a second to slit the tough skin with a sharp boning knife, and a third to peel back the skin, which reminded me a little of trying to wrestle off a tight, wet bathing suit. An odd analogy, I know, but that thought has never left me..
After coming home from Paris, I just wasn’t the same girl. You can’t go to cooking school in Paris and come back to the South and cook the same way you used to cook. The bread didn’t taste fresh, the fruit preserves were too thick and full of pectin, the sauces at restaurants tasted packaged, not real. This new mode of French cooking affected me and influenced what I cooked and baked on weekends. It also made me critical of the food served in Atlanta restaurants. So I volunteered to review restaurants for the newspaper, but to be honest, the criticism soon got to me. I felt awful printing negative reviews about small mom and pop restaurants, when I would have much rather gone back into the kitchen and showed them what mistakes they were making and how to correct them. I went back to writing about cooking and helping readers of the weekly Food section cook well at home. We wrote about putting up food from the garden, how to create healthy meals on a tight budget, what wines go with what foods, and the growing ethnic flavors of Atlanta.
A decade later, I happily was back in Nashville, and I was in the midst of raising a busy family with three young children. I opened my pantry and reached for a box of chocolate cake mix on the shelf. My older daughter had to take cupcakes to school the next day. There was a family birthday dinner at the end of the week and I was assigned dessert. What if I could just make my life easier, I wondered, if I used the cake mix but didn’t follow the package directions and made my own frosting like my mother did when she got in a hurry. I reached for her brown recipe box and found my mother’s Apricot Nectar Cake and my Aunt Louise’s Darn Good Chocolate Cake recipes inside. I made chocolate cupcakes with a homemade chocolate pan frosting. And for the birthday dinner, I made the apricot cake using a yellow cake mix. So inspired by my new license to “cheat,” I wrote a story about that experience for the Nashville newspaper, and it was titled, “The Doctor is In.” Busy families, I concluded, had to take a few shortcuts in the kitchen, and that is OK as long as you do it well. That story and philosophy led me to write The Cake Mix Doctor (Workman) in four short months, with my youngest child in a high chair, I tested recipes in the daytime and wrote those recipes at night when my children were asleep. It began a crazy busy time in my life when I was wife, mommy, daughter, and the Doctor. But I loved meeting so many of you criss-crossing the country on book tour promoting the Cake Mix Doctor series of cookbooks. I shared my easy recipes, and you shared your stories.
Now I am pursuing another passion – food history. I have always loved the story behind the recipe, and as a journalist I am comfortable asking a lot of questions. I am researching the stories behind more than 100 of our best-loved American cakes. The book, which is tentatively titled American Cake, will be published in the spring of 2016 by Rodale. Follow my discoveries, recipe triumphs and failures, and all things American Cake on this website and blog.
Food is still is a major force in my life, and I love my job!