++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Courtesy of Anne Byrn – Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen
‘
About the Recipe:
Secrets
In this deeply nostalgic recipe, which Lee Barnes included in her 1977 Lee Barnes’ Cooking cook- book, she instructs you to line the baking pans with foil or parchment and drop the dough by “small ice teaspoons” on the pan. Ice or iced teaspoons, those long and slender spoons for stirring sugar into a tall glass of tea, aren’t used much anymore. But the idea is to drop just a bit of the dough onto the pan because these cookies have so little flour, they spread while baking. I use the smaller end of a melon ball scoop. I also add a sprinkling of kosher salt once the cookies are cooling, to cut the sweetness of the sugar.
Recipe Story:
Lee Barnes’ Creole lace Cookies
Lace cookies are as much a part of Louisiana and Mississippi as the magnolia. With a praline-like flavor, they bake up thin and see-through, like lace. This recipe comes from the files of the late Lee Barnes, who taught cooking in New Orleans from 1974 to 1989 and was a native of Natchez, Mississippi. At first she taught cooking classes out of her apartment, then opened a school, advertising her classes on the sides of streetcars. She taught mostly Creole and French cooking and invited guest chefs Leah Chase, Jacques Pépin, and Paul Prudhomme to teach as well. When she was remembered at a tribute in 2002 by her alma mater, Newcomb College, and Slow Food New Orleans, it was said her greatest gift was helping New Orleans to remember its very own recipes. Barnes died of a brain tumor at forty-one in 1992.
Taken from Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories by Anne Byrn. Copyright © 2024 by Anne Byrn. Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen. Used by permission of Harper Celebrate
pdf for Copy of Recipe – Lace Cookies
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
‘
