Episode 10
Yellow Cake, Biscuits, and the Legacy of Black Baking
In the final episode of Setting The Table, Deb Freeman speaks with:
Cheryl Day, owner of Back In The Day bakery and author of Cheryl Day's Treasury of Southern Baking
Carla Hall, chef and TV personality
Episode highlights
Cheryl shares how she develops her recipes from old recipe cards and oral accounts as well as utilizing community and church cookbooks to celebrate Black Southern baking
Church cookbooks are a great insight in learning how a community communicates through food. (Pro tip from Deb: Check out your local antique shop’s book section and you may find one!)
Southern cooking and baking are synonymous: Sweets and baked goods are integral to meals in the Black community
Black bakers still face systemic barriers that prevent them from being included in the conversation of baking, as well as undervaluing the work they produce
Carla Hall shares how after culinary school she began reverse engineering the recipes of the food her grandmother would make.
Do you know what a good biscuit tastes like? A question Carla explored with many New Yorkers after creating a biscuit recipe that is reminiscent of her grandmother’s.
Black bakers and ingenuity: Carla explains how Black people adapt to kitchen environments and experiment with different ingredients and how visual cues are extremely important in baking.
Stickies, a lesser known baked good similar to cinnamon rolls, are an example of Black baking that can be lost if not embraced, but there’s a rise in bakers exploring their roots.