Grain and Fire by Rebecca Sharpless

Author:Rebecca Sharpless
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2022-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

City Bakery, New Braunfels, Texas, 1913. A pre-industrial bakery. Owner Alvin Charles Plumeyer, son of German immigrants, may be second from the left. Courtesy Texas Historical Commission.

Krispy Kreme bakery and delivery vehicles, Salem, North Carolina, about 1938. Courtesy of Old Salem Museum and Gardens.

Immigrants to the United States brought distinctive styles of commercial baking with them. Cubans came to Tampa to work in the thriving cigar-making industry. A cooperative opened three bakeries in 1915, making thirty-six-inch-long loaves of Cuban bread, each with a strip of palmetto baked along the top. Tampeño homes had nails beside the front doors for delivery people to stick loaves of bread onto each morning.213

German immigrants continued to establish bakeries with the rich bread traditions of their native country, and many also quickly adapted to the American palate. George Leidenheimer founded his New Orleans bakery in 1896 and made his reputation by baking crisp-crusted New Orleans–style French bread.214 Italian bakeries likewise thrived, particularly in New Orleans. Giuseppe Ruffino came to the Crescent City in the 1890s and began baking muffuletta loaves, the dense, round breads topped with sesame seed that could stand up to fillings soaked in olive oil. By 1909, fourteen Italian bakeries operated on Ursuline and St. Philip Streets.215 Eastern European bakeries in Charleston and Savannah turned out “schvartzer” bread (rye and pumpernickel) and challah for their Jewish customers. African American bakers working in those shops learned to make traditional Jewish foods.216 The New York Bakery in Atlanta, opened in 1930, may have offered the first bagels in the South.217

Commercial bakeries also made sweets for their customers, and by 1939, southerners bought more ready-baked treats than bread.218 Examples abound: In Richmond, Everett Perkinson sold “wine cake,” jelly rolls, pound cake, nine different kinds of layer cakes, and “small cakes in abundance.”219 John H. Hutcheson, the African American owner of the Idlewood Bakery in Richmond, offered fruitcake, four kinds of layer cake, pound cake, raisin cherry cake, and mincemeat pies for Christmas in 1930.220 In Charleston, the most popular product of the Beckroge Bakery was the “vanilla,” a jelly-filled sponge cake about the size of a biscuit, topped with vanilla icing.221 Eastern European favorites like stollen (fruit bread), honey cake for Passover, tortes, rugelach (filled cookies), strudel, babka (braided sweet bread), teiglach (boiled pastries in honey syrup), twice-baked mandelbrot, and hamantaschen (triangular shaped cookies especially for Purim) came from bakers in several southern cities.222

One enterprising baker franchised his pies. Simon “the Pie Man” Hubig established pie-making plants in Dallas and Fort Worth in 1919, offering both baked and fried hand-sized fruit pies. Brothers R. Milton and Windsor Jones opened a Hubig’s in New Orleans in 1922. By 1935, the other locations had closed, but the New Orleans location gained a fanatical following that continued into the twenty-first century.223

While king cakes had been around since the medieval period, in the twentieth century they became a popular product for commercial bakeries in New Orleans. The cake originated as part of the Roman Catholic celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, to commemorate the visit of the magi, or kings, to the Christ Child.

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