"While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of Southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions-Indigenous American, European, and African-collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the Southern baking tradition"--

Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. Her most recent book is Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960.