Flours For My Mother

The New York Times just ran an article on the famed White Lily flour and the move of its production from Knoxville to the Mid-West. A massive wave of nostalgia and hunger washed over me while reading the article and I immediately had to email the story to my mother.

White Lily flour reminds me of childhood and I can almost taste my mother's buttermilk biscuits, warm and topped with butter and honey, just by looking at the photo above. My Very Southern Mama (an Alabama-bred, Tennessee-raised daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher) taught me to bake with White Lily flour and instilled in me a deep loyalty to its fluffy white grain and accompanying White Lily snobbery. The New York Times gets to the heart of the brand, writing that down South its known as the "Sunday Flour", i.e. reserved for the best. It breaks my mom's heart to bake biscuits or cakes with anything else.

My family first moved to California from Georgia when I was about six years old, and my mother was dismayed to find White Lily wasn't available in stores on the West Coast. Sometimes she'd buy a couple bags on trips to visit my grandparents in Tennessee, then smuggle them home in her suitcase. The flour would then be carefully rationed over the course of the year, to be saved only for company and just the right bread, cake or pie.

A few years ago, I was overjoyed to find that Williams-Sonoma in California sold White Lily as a specialty item. At 3x the usual price, sure, but worth every penny for some. I bought my mom a few bags, wrapped them up in a bow and gave them to her for her birthday that year. I think it was one of her favorite gifts from me ever, and now she knows where to get White Lily nearby without having to board a plane to the Bible belt.

The Times article cast some doubt on whether White Lily would stay the same once its plant moves out of Knoxville, and I, of course, hope that it will. If not, it would be the end of more than just an era, but of an epic baking legend in the Southern section of America. My bet is that it will retain much, if not all, of its glory and will still be well-worth the extra trip to the Williams-Sonoma here in Boston to pick up a couple of bags and make my mother proud. I'm going to make a fresh strawberry cake for my father-in-laws birthday this weekend and, in homage, I think that I'll go out of my way to procure the finest flour straight out of the Smokey Mountains (for just a little while longer).