TWO YEARS AGO AT CHEZ FONFON restaurant in Birmingham, Carla Hall and Jessica B. Harris, two big-time food personalities and authors, walk in the door.
I looked at my server who was reciting the evening’s specials, and said as nicely as possible, “I’ll be right back.”
I raced across the restaurant, and Carla greeted me with a wide smile and a bear hug. We had never met in person, but we “knew” each other. I’m not sure what got into me that evening acting like a star-struck kid. I didn’t follow her on Top Chef or The Chew.
But I sensed from her tall confidence as a Black woman walking into a restaurant in the Deep South that she had done this before. She knew people wanted to meet her, talk to her, be in her aura. She had felt racial bigotry, sexism too, and those experiences had informed her.
As a result, Carla Hall, in cool and colorful glasses, is who she is.
“Other people put us into boxes—our gender, our age, our professions,” she said to me on a Zoom call in July. “But when people put you in a box, it becomes very limiting…Sometimes it’s freeing to be underestimated because they don’t see you coming.”
A lot of people didn’t see Carla’s 2008 season of Bravo’s Top Chef coming. She didn’t win, but it shot her into celebrity status. She had catered in Washington D.C., enrolled in cooking school at L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Maryland at 30, and then worked in restaurants. When she appeared as a contestant on that Top Chef season, it opened the door. She returned to Top Chef All Stars two years later.
And in 2011, Carla became a co-host of The Chew, an Emmy-winning daytime food and lifestyle show, along with chefs Mario Batali and Michael Symon. That ABC would replace longtime soap opera All My Children with The Chew and air it for seven seasons says something. In 2017 Mario Batali left the show voluntarily after sexual misconduct allegations from his restaurant workers hit the news, and he was later fired. By the next June, The Chew was cancelled.
And Carla was crushed. But like Carla had learned before, she reinvented herself.
I sensed there was something more about Carla Hall than what we see on TV, and that’s why I wanted to talk to her. My fascination started when I read Issue 13 of the Bitter Southerner earlier this year. She wrote a heart-wrenching essay about her mother’s dementia and how she and her sister fixed up their childhood Nashville home so it could be rented in the booming real estate market to provide income for their mother’s longterm care.
“It meant spending money in order to make money, with the knowledge that this house — once built to hold a family — was now being asked to hold time.”
I wanted to know about the woman who was ready to come back home and do that.
Carla Hall grew up in North Nashville, and Nashville was racially segregated when she and I were raised here. She looked forward to her visits to Lebanon, a small town to Nashville’s east where her maternal grandmother Freddie Mae Price Glover, best known as “Granny,” and her grandfather everyone knew as “Doc” lived. He was a country doctor, she said.
“My grandfather bought the house in 1961 as a wedding gift for my mother,” she wrote in the Bitter Southerner. “It sat in a historically Black neighborhood in North Nashville, developed by families who were building something solid in a city that rarely made room for them. The purchase wasn’t sentimental. It was practical, protective; an investment in stability, in a future where his daughter would have something that could not be easily taken.”
Like anyone who moves away from their childhood place, times change. In Nashville in the last 10 years, whole neighborhoods have been erased or have lost their cultural charm as older homes aren’t renovated and instead replaced by what locals call “tall and skinnies,” and most of them are painted white.
“This was the house I grew up in. It was where my mother began her marriage, where family gathered, where my idea of home was built room by room. Long before it was described as an ‘East Bank opportunity’ or folded into someone else’s vision of progress, it was simply ours.”
Granny was a hairdresser and known for her fine cooking and baking, Carla told me, especially a five-flavor pound cake. It called for a teaspoon each of vanilla, almond, coconut, lemon, and rum extracts. Carla’s family didn’t use liquor in recipes. Her father was an alcoholic, she told me, and for this reason she does not drink alcohol. The drinks she was sipping on TV as a cooking judge were mocktails.
I was curious to bake Granny’s cake. And while it’s not my usual way of making pound cake, it seemed a genius way to clean out the baking cabinet and use up extracts I’ve bought to test so many recipes.
Five-flavor pound cake was a Christmas cake in Carla’s family, and I can see why because it made our summer kitchen smell festive. Come December, I’d dress it up with a quick glaze of 1 cup confectioners’ sugar, 2 tablespoons warm milk, and a grating of fresh nutmeg.
But for the summer kitchen, I let the cake cool a bit, sliced it, and ate a piece standing at the counter. It was perfection.
Extracts and flavorings were popular baking additions during Prohibition and the years after the Great Depression. And they stayed popular during World War II what with rationing and needing to make do. You find them in a lot of vintage recipes. Finding all five of them in one recipe is a bit of an outlier and seems quirky. But Carla’s quirky, too. It made sense to me that she liked this cake.
The day of our call Carla was on a small break from her one-woman play Carla Hall— Please Underestimate Me at the Olney Theatre in Olney, Maryland, just north of D.C. It ran until the end of July and was about not allowing others to underestimate you.
Carla had graduated from Howard University with an accounting degree, something she thought practical and might sustain her through life. But not long into her career, on a whim but with some serious thought, she left for Paris, where she met friends easily. Statuesque and with a knowledge of the stage and camera, she modeled for a while. Until the meals she shared with these friends became more interesting than the modeling, so she returned to D.C., catered a party for her sister, sold sandwiches, started a cookie company, and enrolled in culinary school. Her life has been about reinvention and believing in yourself.
She learned as the “theater kid” in high school to be able to interact with people and think on your feet. And this theater kid was preparing for TV all along even if she didn’t know it yet. She was also preparing for her own play and the guts to get on stage alone and be honest.
“We are put into boxes but need to figure out how to unbox ourselves,” she told me.
“It’s a double edged sword to exert power but also be emotionally intelligent enough to admit you don’t know something,” Carla said. “With older women, we grow and learn but our wisdom isn’t really valued.”
The fact that Carla waxes on about her Granny’s pound cake and has a soft spot for people like me when they dash across a restaurant to meet her, that’s her gift. Yes, her cookbooks say she cooks with love. But I think it’s more. She lives with love.
“At the Chew we filmed 1200 episodes over seven years, so when I was out and about, people felt like they knew me,” she said. Her husband Matthew was skeptical at first, but played along with it. “I’ve found a balance. I get to thank people for watching me. I know what I signed up for.”
Thank you, Carla, for letting us get to know you. And congrats on your new cookbook, Carla Bakes, publishing September 8.
“I love this book so much…The chapter with the bits and bobs, the frostings and soaks and jams let you change up what you bake,” she said on our call. “They are our accessories.”
And the fashionable Carla Hall knows a good accessory.
Happy Baking!
- xo, Anne
P.S. Carla also won an Emmy for her HBO Max series called Chasing Flavor, which lasted one season. I asked Carla if she had any regrets about her time on The Chew and this was her reply: “I didn’t get to interview Gladys.” Gladys Knight and Carla Hall, cooking smothered chicken together, one Black woman talking to the other. No, the producers chose Michael Symon.
As I am finishing this post, Chicago has tornado warnings and a dear friend texts me that fires have sprung up north of Santa Fe. I want to say to everyone who is near fires and extreme heat, stay safe. Clip the recipe from today and save it for when the temps cool down. I wish all the children and grandchildren a safe back-to-school. Just everyone take care of yourselves. These are some unsettling times — here and abroad — and if we need common ground we can usually find it in the kitchen.
THE RECIPE:
I love this pound cake, and as with baking any pound cake, details mean everything. I prep the tube pan (you can use a Bundt but watch the cooking time as Bundts bake a little more quickly) with Crisco (I know, roll your eyes, but it preps the best cake pan) and flour. I’ve read reviews about this cake sticking, and that’s because people don’t properly prep the pan and think baking sprays can do it for you. No. I used a mix of Gold Medal bleached flour and King Arthur unbleached cake flour because that’s what I had in the pantry. All of either would be great. You want a softish flour for this cake, not AP King Arthur. As for the extracts, which I will call extract if they are pure like vanilla and almond, but call “flavoring” if they are artificial. I did not have lemon flavoring, but I did have Rodelle’s Fiori di Sicilia extract, which was fabulous! I had just enough rum flavoring—a teaspoon. Next time, I won’t run out and buy it and instead add a tablespoon of dark rum. Try to be creative and not go to the store for this cake. I think Carla and her Granny would appreciate that. (But do let your eggs and butter come to room temp before beginning.)
Makes 12 servings
Bake: About an hour
Vegetable shortening or butter and flour for prepping the pan
2 sticks (16 tablespoons; 1 cup) unsalted butter, at cool-room temperature, which means soft but not runny, cut into tablespoons
2 1/2 cups (500 grams) granulated sugar
6 large eggs, at room temperature
2 3/4 cups (330 grams) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 generous teaspoon kosher salt (or level teaspoon table salt)
1 cup (234 grams) sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon lemon flavoring or Fiori di Sicilia extract
1 teaspoon rum flavoring
1/2 teaspoon coconut flavoring (Carla calls for 1 teaspoon but I think 1/2 teaspoon would be better because coconut flavoring is bossy)
Preheat the oven to 325ºF. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan and set aside.
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle, cream the butter and sugar on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Resume mixing on low speed, adding one egg at a time, incorporating one egg before adding the next. Stop and scrape down the bowl.
In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add this mixture alternately to the batter along with the sour cream, beginning and ending with the flour mixture, beating on low speed only long enough to blend. Add the extracts, and beat on low just to combine, 30 seconds.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and place in the oven. Bake until golden brown, and an instant-read thermometer inserted in the cake reads 200ºF, about 1 hour. Let the cake cool in the pan 20 minutes. Run an icing knife around the edges to loosen, place a rack on top of the pan, then invert the cake onto the rack. Place another rack on the bottom of the cake, and invert the cake right-side up to cool about 1 hour. Slice and serve, or store covered on the counter for several days, or freeze well covered for up to six months.
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