Southern Regional Cookery: Desserts

The southerner’s sweet tooth is legendary. The desserts, candies, pastries, cakes, puddings, pies, cobblers, cookies, creams, ices, meringues, fruits, and nuts of the South have differed from the sweets in more urban settings because they are made by home bakers. Any southern cookbook devoted fully half its pages to sweets, especially cakes. The Southern Heritage Cakes Cookbook, published in 1983 by the editors of Southern Living, includes two hundred cakes, all indigenous to the region. The long growing season and bountiful produce of the region, plus various sweeteners such as cane and sorghum syrup, have broadened the southern baker’s repertoire. Nowhere else in America are traditional desserts made with beans and loquats. Variety has always been a key to southern sweets: visitors are offered both cake and pie. The oldest recorded uses of pineapples, bananas, and coconuts in America are southern; tropical produce arrived in the old port cities like Savannah, Georgia, and Pensacola, Florida, a mere four days after their harvest in Cuba. Dozens of varieties of berries grow wild throughout the South; they fill cobblers, tarts, and dumplings. Fried sweets reflect the French heritage of the coastal cities of Charleston and New Orleans, and Mississippi’s “Confederate soldiers,” twice-baked and packed for travel during the Civil War, are Italian biscotti by another name. Many of the sweets are based in country English and French traditions—puddings, charlottes, meringues, sweet breads, and fruitcakes; many more are simply the South’s own: divinity, Lady Baltimore cake, peach leather, sweet potato pie, pecan pie, peanut butter cookies, benne brittle, and shortenin’ bread.