Flour

Tender and just slightly sweet, these are good teamed with spicy or chunky soups and stews.

Moist and flavorful, these muffins pair nicely with bean soups. Try them with Long-Simmering Black Bean Soup (page 38).

These little biscuits pair especially well with mild-flavored soups featuring cauliflower or broccoli, but they are compatible with most any kind of vegetable soup.

Although this excellent traditional Italian bread is yeasted, it does not take as long to make as other yeasted breads, since it requires only one rather brief rising. If you are making a long-simmering soup, this bread will likely fit into the time frame. It’s a natural pairing with Italian-style soups such as Minestrone (page 50), but it’s good with most any tomato-based soup.

These offbeat little griddle biscuits pair well with bean soups, purees, and soups that feature root vegetables.

This tasty bread goes well with many soups. Try it with mixed vegetable, tomato-based, and bean soups.

Here’s an unusual bread that teams beautifully with many kinds of soup. Try this with anything from hearty bean soups to light, brothy ones. Use your favorite kind of olive; it works well with most any variety.

This moist cornbread is an ideal companion to bean soups and chilis.

Try serving this offbeat pan bread, studded with pink beans and scallions, with hearty vegetable soups and stews. I especially like this with soups that feature corn and/or squash.

Cooked cornmeal makes a delightfully dense soup base. Serve this meal-in-a-bowl with a bountiful salad and crusty bread.

Not too sweet and just moist enough—this corn bread goes with anything! Try it with Spicy Oven-Baked Pepper Shrimp (page 69) and All-Day Beef Chili (page 122).

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, hush puppies are crunchy little cornmeal fritters. We always have them at fish fries, and they’re a real hit with kids (and everyone else). This is a healthier version of one of our Granny Paul’s specialties. We bake them in mini muffin pans to have on hand for a snack. They travel well, too, so they’re a great lunch box option.

Cornbread is the Southern starch; it’s been in the South as long as there have been cooks to make it. Some people I know still call it corn pone. I always cook it in a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet and add my secret ingredient: cracklin’s. These are fried pieces of pork skin, and they are incredibly delicious; they’re the by-product of rendering pig skin for fat, and because I cook a lot of whole hogs I have the makings for them around all the time. If you don’t, feel free to substitute some nice crispy bacon instead. You might also add some chopped red bell pepper for a change and some color.

When I have the urge to bake bread on a weekend and want something not quite so time-consuming as French bread, I often make this loaf. It is a healthy bread with a good texture and makes particularly delicious sandwiches. It is also great toasted for breakfast.

What could be more appealing on a weekend than to fill the kitchen with the good smell of bread baking? I like to start my bread dough when I get up, and for lunch I reward myself with a fresh-from-the-oven pizza. Perhaps I’ll share a baguette over dinner with friends, and have some mini-loaves to put in the freezer and enjoy in the weeks ahead—all made from the same dough. If there are children around, I announce what I’m up to, and invariably they will want to join me and pitch in. For them, there is something magical about making bread-the way it rises quietly in a bowl under a cover, the fun of punching the dough down, forming the loaves, and creating steam in the oven just before baking. To say nothing of how good it tastes. I started baking bread in the sixties, when I persuaded Julia Child to work out a recipe for French bread that could be baked in an American home oven. In those days, it was almost impossible to buy a crusty baguette. Now there are artisan bakers all over who have mastered the techniques, and there’s really no need to bake one’s own. But it is such fun.

Nothing is better than pizza dough made from scratch. For the pizza connoisseur (and the pizza consumer), the crust can make or break the whole pie. It does take some extra time and patience, but we promise that it is well worth the effort.