A couple of years ago Foy Allen Edelman had one of those brainstorm ideas that make you go, “why didn’t I think of doing that?” and perhaps more to the point, “can you get paid to do that?” She decided to explore the food traditions of North Carolina by visiting every county in the state and collecting traditional recipes from each one. Traditional dessert and candy recipes. There are one hundred counties in the state. The book has over two hundred recipes. So I guess Foy Allen Edelman has found a way to have her cake and eat it too.

It is one of the quirks of my character that I love to bake, but am not that fond of sweets. Although, it would be more accurate to say that I like sweet things, but a little goes a long way. This is problematic for a baker who lives alone, because as much as I adore the taste of peach pie, I know I will never be able to eat more than a slice or two. Cookie recipes usually makes dozens of cookies, not three or four. And cakes . . . well, cakes in the South can cause cavities just by reading the recipes.

So, I give away a lot of what I make, because it seems a sad fate never to bake a cake just because you know you can’t finish it off yourself. And my neighbors are, I think, somewhat grateful for my current fascination with Ms. Foy Allen Edelman’s book.

Recipes are arranged by type, (cakes, cookies, pies, candies) not by county, which is a mercy. But every recipe is credited and many of them are storied:

I think that my family’s tradition of using fresh food from the land began with my great grandfather, a country doctor in Anson County,” Lucie Lea Robeson told me. “It was an era when he was grateful to be paid in fresh eggs, chickens, pecans, or fresh vegetables.

Somehow, I’m thinking my health insurance company wouldn’t be so grateful if I sent them a basket of cucumbers instead of my monthly premium. They might go for Lucie Lea Robeson’s Orange Rum Cake, though, which is currently baking in my oven. I’m making it for my neighbor-who-brought-me-the-corn, because bless her heart, she went and did my lawn with her riding mower this morning. I’m pathetically grateful, since the yard is huge, and uphill, and I only have a tiny push mower and did I mention that it just sits in the nineties here in the South in July? I’m making it up to her in fresh bread and baked goods.

And that right there is the reason that I love to bake. Baking is neighborly. It’s social. Ted and Matt Lee and Mr. John Besh all know how to lay a good table and put on a great family get-together. But it’s all come-to-dinner food. Baking is pass-it-over-the-fence and drop-it-off-next-door food. It’s not an invitation, it’s a gift.

When I first moved South, I used to have these extravagant Christmas parties where I’d bake up a storm and the price to get in the door was an ornament for the tree. I don’t do that anymore (a tree can only hold so many ornaments) but I wish I had something similar now because the pie chapter alone in Sweet Carolina is sending me into insulin shock. And there is an entire chapter on icings and cake fillings. An entire chapter!

Because this is as much a book of oral history as it is a cookbook there are some oddities, like Fats Marr’s Potato Candy, which was invented by a guy really named Fats Marr during the Great Depression, when potatoes was all there was to eat. And there are some recipes that, try as I might, just didn’t seem to work. I utterly failed at Imogene Tomberlin’s Never-Fail Candy. I consider this a flaw in myself, however. I am quite a good baker, but absolutely unpredictable when it comes to making candy. This is a source of great distress to me, because I love fudge, but can’t make it with any reliable success. Still, there are over two hundred recipes in this book, and only about five of them are fudge. read full review