• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

7. Ease each pastry circle, parchment and all, onto a baking sheet, slide into the oven, and bake for 7 to 8 minutes or until delicately browned. Lift the baked pastry circles (still on the parchment) at once to wire racks to cool. Shape, bake, and cool four more pastry rounds the same way. Note: If your oven is large enough to accommodate two baking sheets on each rack, so much the better. Otherwise, you will have to bake the pastry circles one or two at a time.

8. To assemble the stack cake: Working on a large round cake plate, sandwich the six pastry rounds together with the apple filling, dividing the total amount evenly. Do not spread filling on the top layer.

9. Cover the stack cake with a domed “cake keeper” or large turned-upside-down bowl and let stand in a cool spot (not the refrigerator) for at least 12 hours before cutting.

10. To serve the stack cake, cut into wedges and top each portion with the sweetened whipped cream.

* * *

TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine

1964

After selling fried chicken franchises to more than 600 North American restaurants, Harland Sanders sells his company to a group of investors, among them future Kentucky governor John Y. Brown, Jr. Now $2 million richer, Sanders remains KFC spokesman.

The chicken breast sandwich—fried breast fillets on buttered buns—is invented at Truett Cathy’s Dwarf Café in South Atlanta. The sandwich is an instant hit and becomes the specialty of Cathy’s soon-to-open Chick-fil-A restaurant. Before long, Chick-fil-As proliferate throughout the South.

Holly Farms of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, introduces Holly-Pak poultry: chicken parts sealed in chilled, quality-controlled packages.

Pepsi-Cola launches Diet Pepsi and quickly grabs market share from TaB.

1965

Sema Wilkes and her husband buy the old Savannah boardinghouse where she’d cooked for 22 years, renovate, and reopen as Mrs. Wilkes’ Boarding House restaurant. Now a Savannah landmark, the dining room still packs them in for breakfast and lunch.

* * *

BANANA PUDDING

MAKES 8 SERVINGS

Country restaurants proliferate all over the South and despite their sometimes cutesy names (Ye Olde Country Kitchen, Grannie’s Pantry), most serve the good down-home cooking today’s mothers and grandmothers knew as children. Many of these restaurants serve salad-bar style so that you can heap your plate, choosing from a dozen or more “mains and sides,” then go back for dessert. Front and center here—nearly always—is a big pan of banana pudding. Some restaurants now cut corners by using vanilla pudding mixes and commercial whipped toppings. Others still make banana pudding the old-fashioned way. This is a good from-scratch recipe.

¾ cup sugar

1/3 cup unsifted all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

4 cups (1 quart) milk

1 cup half-and-half

3 large eggs, lightly beaten

1½ teaspoons vanilla extract

75 vanilla wafers (about ¾ of a 12-ounce box)

6 medium firm-ripe bananas (about 2¼ pounds)

1 cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks with 2 tablespoons confectioners’ (10 X) sugar and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Combine the sugar, flour, and salt in a large, heavy saucepan. Whisk in the milk and half-and-half, set over moderate heat, and cook, stirring constantly, for 7 to 8 minutes or until thickened and smooth. Whisk a little of the hot mixture into the beaten eggs, stir back into the pan, and cook, stirring constantly, for about a minute or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the mixture registers 160° F. Remove from the heat and mix in the vanilla.

2. Skim-coat the bottom of an ungreased 9 × 9 × 2-inch pan with about ½ cup of the hot pudding, then “pave” with 25 vanilla wafers, arranging the cookies side by side so that they touch one another.

3. Peel the bananas, slice ¼ inch thick, and layer a third of them on top of the vanilla wafers, again arranging side by side. Spread with a third of the remaining pudding, add another 25 vanilla wafers, then half the