Cookie Swap, and Book Group: American Cookie, by Anne Byrn

The December 2018 meeting of the SFRR Book Group coincides this year with the Slow Food Russian River 2018 Holiday Party, on December 9th. It includes an American Cookie Swap. Preferably cookies made with California Grain and other local and regional ingredients.

About the Cookie Swap

About California Grain

The California Grain Campaign is led by small-scale farmers who are growing a diversity of identity-preserved, whole grains. This is the one place to read about the farmers and the grains they grow — and how you can get them to your table! Order the California Grain Catalog 2017.

The 20% by 2020 Campaign wants to ensure that small-scale California grain farmers can get their whole grain to eaters, and for eaters to have easy access to healthful, local whole grain products. The obvious site that brings together local producers and eaters is the farmers’ market.

The Campaign works with California farmer’s market organizations to require a minimum of 20% locally grown whole grain in products sold in those markets by 2020. That means that in 2020, you can bite into a farmers’ market pretzel and 20% will be delicious locally grown, whole grain. More…

About the Author

Anne Byrn is known to millions of fans through her Cake Mix Doctor, Dinner Doctor, and American Cake cookbooks. Her newest book is called American Cookie, which is a history of the favorite cookies and small sweet bites in America with recipes. When Anne is not in her Nashville kitchen, she is in the garden. Visit her online at www.annebyrn.com. There she writes: “I’m a Nashville gal who loves to cook and talk about it, too!” More…

Anne Byrn writes

“Today’s cooks should take note that baking cookies is a part of our American heritage before we forget how good it feels to pull a sheet pan of decorated sugar cookies from the oven. Do we want to completely wipe the crumbly, soft texture of a home-baked tea cake or thumbprint cookie from our minds? In our marbled kitchens, there is ample space to roll out pastry for lemon squares, or to pipe meringue onto jam-topped Marguerites like women did in the 1830s, and even improve our gingerbread skills.”  More…

Publisher’s Blurb

From the beloved author of the bestselling Cake Mix Doctor series and American Cake comes a delicious tour of America’s favorite treats, cookies, and candies, American Cookie. Each of America’s little bites—cookies, candies, wafers, brittles—tells a big story, and each speaks volumes about what was going on in America when the recipes were created. In American Cookie, the New York Times bestselling author and Cake Mix Doctor Anne Byrn takes us on a journey through America’s baking history. And just like she did in American Cake, she provides an incredibly detailed historical background alongside each recipe. Because the little bites we love are more than just baked goods—they’re representations of different times in our history. Early colonists brought sugar cookies, Italian fig cookies, African benne wafers, and German gingerbread cookies. Each of the 100 recipes, from Katharine Hepburn Brownies and Democratic Tea Cakes to saltwater taffy and peanut brittle, comes with a lesson that’s both informative and enchanting. More…

Southern Kitchen writes “Anne Byrn’s newest cookbook will have you itching to pull out pounds of butter, brown sugar and more

Her streamlined shrimp and grits have changed the way we make seafood brunch. Her classic Southern cornbread has become a regular in our cast iron rotation. And her pot roast? Well, let’s just say we’re waiting impatiently for cooler weather to come around before we start eating it again on the regular.

Anne Byrn’s Southern Kitchen column, Taste of a Place, has generated some of our most popular recipes and stories since last spring. Byrn’s voracious appetite for American culinary history has educated all of us on what it is we’re really eating when we eat Southern food. And now she’s expanded her expertise to one of the most iconic of desserts — the cookie.” More…