Chocolate Marble Cake
Plus: An interview with Anne Byrn, author of Baking in the American South
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If you are still finalizing your Rosh Hashanah dessert menu, Anne Byrn has you covered with this week’s recipe: a soft and swirly Chocolate Marble Cake that has graced the tables of many Jewish households across the American South. The cake is included in Byrn’s newest cookbook, Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories.
Byrn is a food writer and cookbook author, and one of the leading authorities of American baking traditions, particularly in the southern United States. We first connected two years ago, when she reached out to ask if I would be willing to collaborate on a Mother’s Day crosspost for our respective newsletters. I happily agreed. (She shared her mom’s fried chicken recipe on The Jewish Table, and I shared my mom’s chicken and dumplings on her newsletter, Between the Layers).
Since then, I have had the pleasure of getting to know her better. And let me just say, in a media environment that feels increasingly saturated with food influencers and recipes designed to look sexy online, but that are devoid of context (and often don’t actually work), Byrn’s commitment to research and recipe testing is a refreshing delight. Byrn is the real deal—a food media veteran whose work feels just as vital today as when she got her first job at the Atlanta Journal in 1978.
Her newest cookbook, Baking in the American South, is a masterpiece of both baking and storytelling. It includes more than a dozen variations on cornbread, from a Molasses Cornbread inspired by literary great and native Alabamian, Zora Neale Hurston, and the cornbread served at the White House during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. You will find a recipe for “Featherlite Peanut Butter Pancakes” hand written by Rosa Parks on the back of a bank envelope, a Strawberry Icebox Pie that helped cool down swampy Louisiana evenings, the Buttermilk Biscuits once served in the dining cars on Southern Railway trains, and Byrn’s aunt Elizabeth’s epic Banana Pudding.
In between recipes, Bryn includes history from the American South. There are whimsical tidbits like where the name Chess Pie might have originated, and how Southern bakers used empty jelly jars as biscuit cutters. (That should sound familiar to anyone who has stamped out circles of hamantaschen dough with a juice glass!) She also includes essays that touch on the difficult aspects of Southern history: poverty, slavery, war, immigration, segregation. The recipes she shares are all the richer because of this context.
Byrn isn’t Jewish, but Baking in the American South includes several Jewish recipes and highlights the role that Jewish immigrants played in shaping the South’s cities and towns—like Gottlieb’s Bakery, founded in Savannah in 1884 by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Isadore Gottlieb.
Read below for my interview with Byrn, where she talks about her mother Bebe’s self-taught cooking magic, New Orleans’ beloved Jewish baker and caterer, Beulah Ledner, and how a story she heard on West Virginia’s NPR station sent her on a wild goose chase to find a gingerbread recipe.
How to Help After Hurricane Helene
Byrn lives in Tennessee—one of the states hit by flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene. I’ve been thinking a lot about the folks who woke up one morning with their lives intact and the next with everything under water.
On the micro level, I’m thinking about community resilience and what it means to help and support our neighbors. If you are able to donate, please consider supporting World Central Kitchen in their work of feeding folks impacted by the hurricane and the Red Cross or Beloved Asheville in their disaster relief work. Byrn also suggested supporting Second Harvest Food Bank and Mercy Chefs. If you know of other reputable mutual aid organizations helping on the ground in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, or Florida, please share them in the comments.
The hurricane also has me thinking on a broader scale about the increased frequency of climate-related natural disasters and how, when it comes to the survival of our beloved communities, the stakes of this year’s presidential election could not be higher. On November 5, we will choose between a leader who is already working to set us on a path towards climate resiliency, and a man who solicited 1 billion dollars from fossil fuel companies with the promise of gutting pollution and climate regulations if he wins.
Please check your registration status, register to vote, or encourage a friend to register at Vote.org.
And if you want to learn more, I found this recent podcast about climate organizations’ enthusiasm towards Kamala Harris to be a quick and worthwhile listen.
Interview: Anne Byrn, Author of Baking in the American South
You’re a fifth generation southerner. Can you tell me more about your family’s heritage?
I was born and raised in middle Tennessee, and both of my parents were born and raised here too. That’s an anomaly today. My father’s roots are Scottish and Irish and my mother’s side is the same with some English in there too. My mother was the youngest of five daughters, so she was never trained to cook. She taught herself. She was a very creative person who also taught herself how to arrange flowers beautifully, carve elaborate watermelon baskets, and just generally make things beautiful. I grew up with the idea that everything homemade tastes better, because that’s what I knew.
You started your career as a news reporter. How did you end up as a cookbook author?
I was hired in 1978 as the food writer at the Atlanta Journal. Up until then, I had never written a food story in my life. My beat was train wrecks, robberies, and obituaries. But they wanted someone who had deadline experience and felt the food part would come. During those years, I picked up so much about cooking and got to learn from the greats like Julie Child and Marcella Hazan.
In the 1980s I took a pastry course at La Varenne in France that really raised the bar for me. It gave me a more sophisticated approach to baking. I stayed with the Atlanta Journal until 1993 and then moved back to Tennessee to write for The Tennessean. Not long after that, I published my book The Cake Mix Doctor, and have been publishing cookbooks ever since.
One of the commonalities between Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine and Southern cuisine is that people from outside of those communities (and sometimes even within) tend to lump everything together, when there are actually so many regional differences in the cooking from place to place. I love how your book digs into the local and regional aspects of Southern baking.
Regionality and what is available locally definitely matters to Southern baking. The South has always been a region where many folks have had limited means, and use what they have to make delicious food. But people also take a lot of pride in local ingredients. Some people, for example, will only buy Alabama peaches from a particular orchard for their pies. I remember talking to a Memphis reporter whose mother only baked with Martha White Cornmeal, which originated in Nashville but was distributed in Memphis. There are regional brands for things like flour and molasses—and people are still quite loyal.
Tell me a bit more about researching the book’s recipes, which come from such a wide array of sources. Which came most easily, and which did you have to dig for?
There were lots of foundational recipes, like lemon meringue pie, that I knew I had to include. The book’s recipe is partly inspired by Beulah Ledner, a famous baker and caterer in New Orleans—who also happened to be Jewish. Her lemon meringue pie famously helped launch her career. She was also known for Doberge cake, which was her version of a Hungarian dobos torte, or seven layer cake. She replaced the typical buttercream layers with chocolate pudding because it held up better in the Louisiana humidity. I didn’t include that recipe in Baking in the American South because I already published it in my book, American Cake.
Some of the best recipes were the ones I had to go on a wild goose chase for. For example, I was driving from Tennessee to Connecticut to visit my daughter and listening to the local NPR station in West Virginia. A reporter began talking about her grandmother’s gingerbread, and I pulled over to start taking notes. I knew I had to find her. I tracked the reporter down through the radio station, assuring them I wasn’t some crazy stalker and was just seeking out recipes for a cookbook. She was so thrilled that someone wanted to learn more about her grandmother—a woman whose husband worked in the coal mines while she was a farmer, sold eggs for grocery money, and raised the children at home.
Baking in the American South features several Jewish recipes, including an apple cake from Baltimore and chocolate marble cake. Can you tell me about your own connection to Jewish food?
My connection to Jewish food began in elementary school. I had friends growing up in Nashville who were Jewish, and I remember eating blintzes and babka in their homes. I don’t have any other connections to Jewish baking other than writing about it through the years. I rely on people like Marcie Cohen Ferris (author of Matzo Ball Gumbo) and Rachel Barnett and Lyssa Harvey (co-authors of Kugels and Collards) who have opened up a whole new world for me about Jewish cooking in the South.
The American South is home to some of the country’s oldest Jewish communities. In 1800, more Jews lived in Charleston than in New York City. And there are Jewish community cookbooks that came out of places like Mobile, Alabama in the early 1900s. I am fascinated by how people preserve the legacy of their recipes in a new place. That is really what baking in the South is all about, and the Jewish cooks who baked the same recipes year after year for holidays are definitely a part of that. It is that repetition that keeps recipes and cultures alive, even with assimilation and adaptation.
Chocolate Marble Cake
“Marbling cake with some dark chocolate or spice batter is an old Eastern European and German technique to add visual interest, appearing in Jewish recipe boxes across the South. To create the swirls, you fold chocolate into part of the batter, dollop this alternately with the plain batter in the pan, and then run a knife through it.” —Anne Byrn
Serves 12
1/2 cup (50 grams) unsweetened cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups (500 grams) granulated sugar, divided
1/2 cup (120 ml) water
4 ounces (113 g) semisweet chocolate, chopped
16 tablespoons (2 sticks/227 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups (360 grams) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (240 ml) whole buttermilk (or 1 cup non-dairy milk mixed with 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, and allowed to stand for 10 minutes)
1. Make the cake: Heat the oven to 325˚F (160˚C), with a rack in the middle. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan and set aside.
2. Whisk together the cocoa, 1/2 cup of the sugar, and the water in a medium saucepan until smooth. Place over medium-low heat and bring to a simmer, stirring, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate until melted. Set aside to cool.
3. Place the butter and the remaining 2 cups sugar in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer on medium speed until creamy and light, 3 to 4 minutes. Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla, beating until smooth.
4. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda in a medium bowl. With the mixer on low, alternately add the flour mixture and the buttermilk to the batter, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.
5. Spoon about 2 1/2 cups of the batter into the saucepan with the cooled chocolate and stir to combine. Alternately dollop spoonfuls of the plain and chocolate batters into the prepared pan, overlapping the dollops. Smooth the top. Zigzag a dinner knife once through the batter to swirl it.
6. Bake until the cake is firm to the touch, 1 hour and 5 to 10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes, then run a knife around the edges of the pan and invert the cake once and then again so it cools right side up on the rack. Let cool 1 hour. Glaze, if desired, with the Chocolate Glaze below. Let the glaze set for 30 minutes, then slice and serve.
Optional Chocolate Glaze
2 tablespoons unsalted butter or vegan butter
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 tablespoons whole milk or coconut milk
3/4 cup (78 grams) confectioners’ sugar, sifted
Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat, 2 minutes. Stir in the cocoa, salt, and milk. Cook, stirring, until the mixture thickens and just begins to come to a boil, 1 minute longer. Remove the pan from the heat. Whisk in the confectioners’ sugar until smooth.
This recipe is reprinted, with permission, from Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories by Anne Byrn. Copyright © 2024 by Anne Byrn. Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen. Used by permission of Harper Celebrate.
Leah, thank you for this lovely piece. Your interviewing and writing skills are just wonderful. Thank you for including my new book in your newsletter!
It’s tricky to reduce sugar in cakes. Cut it back 1/4 cup but no more. It’s not overly sweet - promise! Hope you enjoy!