Come on in

I’m either in the kitchen or the garden…

I’m Anne Byrn, food writer and author. I love baking biscuits and chocolate cake, slicing garden tomatoes on a sandwich, and listening to a good story. I love dogs, my hometown of Nashville, traveling to new places, and reading. I ask a lot of questions.

I write cookbooks that tell stories. The kind of book you can read like a novel if you want to—never even setting foot in the kitchen. My newest book, Baking in the American South, is filled with untold stories. Hopefully, I make you hungry and you want to heat the oven, crack the eggs, and start cooking.

Decades ago, I pulled up a stool in my mother’s kitchen and watched her fry chicken and stir chocolate fudge icing on top of the stove. I was the child who smelled cinnamon rolls baking and couldn’t get to the breakfast table fast enough. I flipped through cookbooks while my friends read teen magazines. I volunteered to cook dinner for my sisters when our parents went out, and I worked for my hometown newspaper in high school and college as an intern. One day I wanted to write about food.

That day came when I got the job at the Atlanta Journal, a place where I grew up and learned that to excel at food writing you must understand what the reader needs to know. And you’ve got to be able to cook. So I took a leave of absence to study classic French cooking in Paris—yes!, it’s true—and then I returned to the newspaper to write restaurant reviews in a city that was absolutely exploding with growth. I married. I had three children. And then I got an idea for a book that wasn’t gourmet at all, but it appealed to me at my stage in life.

I had secretly been hoarding cake mixes in my Nashville pantry for those last-minute desserts, and this book would be full of creative ways to bake cakes that begin with a mix but are slathered with homemade frosting and presented so beautifully no one would doubt they were made from scratch—The Cake Mix Doctor.

The irony is that The Cake Mix Doctor’s success and travel came in the midst of raising children and my parents becoming ill. It was a time in my life that was both bitter and sweet. I adored traveling on book tour, appearing on morning TV and QVC, and meeting all of you. But even more, I loved returning home to my young family at the end of the crazy week.

With this new book, I’ve been able to circle back to the South, the region in which I’ve spent my life. I’ve been able to dig into its stories, many of them complicated. I’ve learned about people and places I never knew. What I’ve learned as a writer, wife, cook, mother, sister, friend, and daughter is woven into the recipes. You might think my books are just recipes, but really, they are about life.

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