Southern Baking Traditions - Home

INTERVIEWS

Matthew Fuller
Annelle Lindsey
Sandy Pollard
Eula & Alton Stitcher
James & Evelyn Tamplin

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The Center for Public History
Online Baking Exhibit

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*NOTE: A complete set of interviews from the Southern Baking Traditions project is archived in the Southern Foodways Alliance’s oral history collection at the University of Mississippi.

Sandy Pollard

The Carrollton, Georgia, kitchen of Ms. Sandy Pollard is always filled with the inviting smells of traditional Southern cuisine. Unlike most contemporary mothers and grandmothers on the go Ms. Pollard continues to cook regional favorites. Sandy is enrolled as a graduate student at the local university, and she successfully balances the demands of her busy class schedule with her personal chef service as well as an active church membership. Overtime, Pollard has mastered the art of baking “light and fluffy” biscuits and adapted to perfection her ex-husband’s family tea cake recipe. Although the convenience of modern restaurants, groceries and bakeries have altered the diets of many Southerners Ms. Pollard continues to observe tradition by cooking the “old Fashioned way.” Sandy Pollard believes the extra time required to bake homemade southern foods like pound cake and banana pudding produces a delicious tangible product, but also an unspoken message of love that nourishes the soul.

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Interview of Sandy Pollard
March 31, 2003
Interviewed by Demetrius Weaver, Ricky Hall
University Oral History Project
Center for Public History
Transcription by Demetrius Weaver
Transcription finished by Helen Chambers, July 2003

DW: Oh, OK. Alright and uhm, can you describe how you would eat biscuits so to speak, with jam or jelly or...?

SP: Well you always have to have butter as far as I am concerned, a biscuit is wasted if it does not have butter on it. [Laughs] And I don’t mean margin, I mean real butter cause, we, it had to be, uhm, I generally split my biscuit with a knife spread it with butter and then put either honey or homemade jelly cause my mother makes real good jelly or uhm, sorghum too. I like biscuits and sorghum. I do know if you ever had that before. Ha ha ha [laughs]

Uhmm, I never had that before. Alright and uhm, how, how would you eat cornbread?

I, well, again hot, if it was made in pone, in a cast iron skillet, you could cut a wedge of it out and I split it in half, butter it and then eat it when it’s really hot, I like it that way. I don’t ever eat sweet stuff on my cornbread. I save all that stuff for biscuits. Ha ha ha [Laughing in the room]

Oh, OK. An’ uhh were there certain types of food that you always served with cornbread?

Yeah, uhm, if we had greens or fresh vegetables, by fresh vegetables I mean stuff out of the garden, green beans, squash, crowder peas, things like that, you know we had uh sliced tomatoes and uhm, you know corn on the cobb and stuff like that. It was always those types of country vegetables that we served with cornbread.

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All right, what time of day do you do the bakin’? When you go out and prepare...

It’s generally in the afternoons uh whenever I cook for my clients, it’s in the afternoons, generally, after I get finished with class. And then I do uh some cooking at home an’ deliver that to uh clients also. So, I have clients I cook in their home and then I have other clients who I cook here a my home and take it to ‘em an’ I generally do, the first part of the afternoon is spent cooking in someone else’s home an’ getting enough meals prepared for the week. And then I come home an’ do the same menu, one particular entree an’ usually a salad or a starch and a vegetable for several different clients an’ then deliver that to them about six thirty or seven o’clock at night.

Oh, OK. What types of flours or meals do you use?

Uhm, for my biscuits I like to use White Lily uh self rising flour. It’s made out of winter wheat an’ it’s a softer textured wheat, ‘cause I like soft biscuits. Some people like real crunchy, hard biscuits, but I don’t, I like high, soft, lovely biscuits that will melt in your mouth.

Yeah, yeah.

[Laughs] And for my meal I, I try to get stone ground cornmeal uhm an’ uhm I do mix it with a little bit of flour though when ever I make my, make my cornbread so it’s not just, just meal, but of course I use winter wheat flour with my biscuits.

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OK. OK. Uhm, describe how you measure the, you know, the ingredients for baking?

I do measure mine, my uh uh biscuit ingredients uh cornbread I don’t do so much, I just dump it a bowl until it looks right.

So you’ve been doing it for a while...[both talking at the same time]

But the biscuits, I don’t like th’ uh if you get too much shortening an’ too little flour in biscuits you have crunchy biscuits an’ my rule of thumb for each half cup of self-rising flour that you put in the bowl you add a tablespoon of shortening so an’ two cups of flour will make six or seven good size biscuits an’ that’s all we need, so I dump two cups of uh uh flour in my bowl an’ then cut in two tablespoon-, no four teaspoons of shortening an’ then like I said I don’t measure my buttermilk after I cut in my shortening I, then I add the buttermilk gradually until it looks right.

Ok, do you have like a certain client that likes their bread a certain way?

Uhmmm, I have, I have a client that likes country food and yes they do like th’, they like their biscuits homemade, the way I make ‘em. Uhm, and then I have one client that likes sweet cornbread and I have another client that doesn’t like any sugar in their cornbread so thank-, thankfully their on different days so I cook one one day and one another day [inaudible].

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RH: Hello and welcome back. This is Ricky Hall now. Uh, we’re gonna continue our interview. Uh, does your family love teacakes?

SP: No, my family didn’t but my husband’s, that I was married, his family was well know for their teacakes an’ especially his grandmother.

What kind of teacakes?

Just plain ol’ teacakes. Uh, I make ‘em now for my clients, but I make mine slightly different than his grandmother made her’s. So, but mine are just uh little cookies.

Could you describe what ingredients your family used to make teacakes and the class system of the teacakes?

Yes I can do that. Let’s uh, ok, their, you use self-rising flour an’ butter an’ eggs an’ sugar an’ you melt ‘em. An’ now some people use plain flour or all-purpose flour an’ add some bakin’, they use bakin’ powder an’ salt. But, whenever we make teacakes you cream, the butter, an’ sugar well, an’ then you add your eggs an’ then uh then you add the flour in gradually an’ make a soft dough an’ the trick to makin’ teacakes – you have to roll ‘em out with a rollin’ pin on a floured surface an’ then cut ‘em with whatever you want to cut ‘em with. Then, you slide ‘em onto a baking sheet. And so they’re, now whenever I make teacakes, that’s, that’s my husband’s grandmother’s, I mean, my ex-husbands grandmother’s recipe. Whenever I make teacakes I, I dro-, I mix everything up an’ drop it off from the spoon onto a cookie sheet like you would uh chocolate chip cookies or oatmeal raisin cookies or somethin’ like that an’ then they, they just spreads out an’ make a thin crispy cookie. I never had an success with, I guess I didn’t have the patience that I needed to have with rolling out those teacakes an’ gettin’ ‘em really, really thin, because you have to have ‘em really, really thin because when they bake they rise up an’ they’re gonna get about that thick right there an’ I guess that’s what? Half an’ inch, quarter of an’ inch, thick. Uhm, but the story that they tell in my ex-husband’s family is that they, they want to eat the dough more than they wanted to eat the cookies already made ‘cause they liked the way the dough taste. And there is, really it’s a good tastin’ dough uhm, it’s uhm, it’s sweet an’ you know everyday ingredients that they already had there in the kitchen. If you wanted to make up a batch of teacakes you didn’t have to run to the store to get any chocolate an’ you didn’t have to get any special flavorin’ everything was right there, what you produced. That’s what I like, that’s the reason I like to make teacakes ‘cause it’s that generally everything is right there in the cabinet.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.