CD: Well, I lost my mother at a young age. I was 22, and I was very fortunate that she left me a notebook filled with stories. She wrote it in epistolary letter form, letters to me and my sister about our family history. And much of that journal, if you will, included recipes. And also before that, growing up I realized early on that spending time with my mother meant hanging out in the kitchen, hearing our stories and baking with her. So that became a really sweet time for me.. SU: What is one of your earliest baking memories with your mom?. CD: Oh, pies. It was all about, she loved making pies, sweet potato pies, lemon meringue was her specialty. And I love making lemon meringue pie now, but there was a time that I didn’t think I’d ever rise to the level of her pies, so I just never made them until when I started writing cookbooks, I knew that I needed to honor that recipe. And so I started making… I didn’t have the exact recipe, so I was going from memory and trying to recreate that recipe. And I remember the first time that I did, it just brought so many memories back, those taste memories, and it’s still probably my favorite pie.. SU: Aww. Wow. You had a bakery in Savannah, Back in the Day Bakery.. CD: I did.. SU: For over 20 years.. CD: Yeah, 22 years to be exact. And we decided, my husband, Griff and I, we started out doing artisan baking, but pretty quickly we decided that we wanted to tell our personal story. My husband’s from Minneapolis, he has Norwegian background, so we did lots of cardamom and lots of his family recipes. But somehow it turned into mostly my recipes because just the Southern canon and American baking just really started moving forward in our story.. JS: And Cheryl, I have to ask, you personally made the biscuits every day for something 20 years?. CD: Yeah. It is true. I mean, there were times when I was on book tour because obviously I’ve written several books, and so I had to leave and it was very nerve-racking because I had a great team, but people feared those biscuits. And so we tried all kinds of tricks to see if we could make them in advance or what could we do. And they definitely rose to the occasion, but I would say most every day until the very last day, I was making those biscuits every single day.. SU: Wow.. CD: People expected a lot out of me.. JS: It’s like, we really did get the perfect guest for this episode.. SU: We really did.. JS: Truly. Jackpot.. SU: On that note, I want to know now what, to you, makes a perfect biscuit?. CD: Oh, that’s such a great question, Shilpa. So for me, I think that the perfect biscuit is… Obviously it’s heritage for me, so it goes way back. But I think of light airy layers, not just layers, but they’re light and airy, delicate. They just kind of pull apart. There’s a perfect balance of slightly sweet and salty. They’re pretty salt forward, mine are. Just really, I think it’s really hard too, and I know this obviously for fact, because I’ve also tasted a lot of biscuit
