Authors offer updated looks at baking cookies, canning

‘American Cookie: The Snaps, Drops, Jumbles, Tea Cakes, Bars & Brownies That We Have Loved for Generations’ by Anne Byrn

Nashville-based Byrn has many talents.

A former food editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she honed her cooking skills at Anne Willan’s highly regarded Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris. Later, this prolific author wrote a best-selling series on how to turn ordinary store-bought cake mix into something fabulous. (See the “The Cake Mix Doctor” series.)

Though we worked in the same office for years at the AJC, I really didn’t know her well back then. It’s only through her recent cookbooks, including the splendid “American Cake” (Rodale, $29.99), that I’ve become acquainted with Byrn’s baking prowess. I now can say without prejudice that she’s one smart cookie.

Like many of our best food writers, she seems more interested in historical integrity than fashion. Where did our well-traveled, wellloved iconic baked goods come from? What are the origin stories? Journalist that she is, Byrn digs and sifts.

With each little bite she puts forth in “American Cookie” — about 100 recipes altogether — Byrn annotates ingredients and methods with history and anecdotes.

Lady Bird Johnson’s peanut brittle. Katharine Hepburn’s brownies. Emily Dickinson’s rice cakes. Her grandmother Dee’s cheese date cookies, which the hardworking matriarch baked every Thanksgiving.

With recent books like Dorie Greenspan’s “Dorie’s Cookies,” America’s Test Kitchen’s “The Perfect Cookie,” and Stella Parks’ “Brave Tart,” all excellent, Byrn darn well knew she needed her own hook.

With her divinity, fudge, tea cakes, jumbles, pralines, fritters, funnel cakes, macaroons, drop cookies, jam bars, lemon squares, madeleines, shortbread, wafers and tassies, among many others, she delivers a very full jar. Tells a good story, too.

‘Canning in the Modern Kitchen: More than 100 Recipes for Canning & Cooking Fruits, Vegetables & Meats’ by Jamie DeMent

DeMent believes in the honesty and integrity of fresh food. She knows it’s something you really shouldn’t mess with.

The best thing you can do with field peas, corn, squash and tomatoes, she seems to say in her work, is to eat them the minute they are picked.

The next best thing is to preserve them for later, when the fields and deep-freezers are barren.

Last year, this North Carolina farmer, cook and restaurateur published her first cookbook, “The Farmhouse Chef: Recipes & Stories From My North Carolina Farm” (UNC Press, $35). I took quite a shine to her simple, straightforward approach to the heirloom produce and heritage livestock she nurtures on her Hillsborough farm with her husband, Richard Holcomb.

Now, I’m just as smitten with the blackberry jam, peach salsa, bread-and-butter pickles and numerous other delectable preserved foods she showcases in her second effort, “Canning in the Modern Kitchen” (Rodale, $24.99).

DeMent prefaces her 100-plus recipes with the basics. Clearly and authoritatively, she explains the principles of water-bath and pressuring canning. When putting up low-acid foods, pressuring canning is required for safety reasons. No exceptions!

The method for preserving high-acid fruits and veggies, however, is totally low-tech. It doesn’t require much of an investment, either: basically, a large pot with a lid, a rack for protecting fragile glass jars from the flame, and perhaps a jar lifter.

Starting with unadorned peaches and pears, and moving on to jellies, jams, sauces, juices, meat and fish, DeMent makes it all seem so hassle-free, foolproof, delicious.

Happily, I don’t see a single recipe calling for manufactured pectin. And, the instructions for putting up deboned meat, salmon, spaghetti sauce, etc., are a revelation — stuff I normally don’t mess with, because I don’t own a pressure canner.

She seals the deal by closing each chapter with recipes for using the fruits of one’s labor. As always, she keeps it simple, too. Jars of corn and butterbeans are combined to make succotash. Meat or veggie broth and salsa goes into black-bean soup. Apple jelly or cranberry-orange curd is the filling for a jellyroll.

I’m a fairly dedicated canner, and I own a lot of books on preserving food. Few of them really teach me anything new (aside from flavor profiles and pectin workarounds). “Canning in the Modern Kitchen” is different. It demystifies an art that is foreboding, and precious, to many.