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In the South, when somebody dies, you don't just send condolences—you send food.
Mark Ballard looks back at the wonderfully Southern tradition of funeral food, when church ladies descended on a grieving household armed with fried chicken, casseroles, homemade cakes and serving dishes carefully labeled with masking tape.
From the feast surrounding his mother's funeral to the decidedly different reception when his father died, Mark shares some of his funniest memories of food and bereavement. Then a funeral in Soperton introduces him to a towering pink coconut cake—and a recipe good enough to end up in one of his cookbooks.
It's a story about food, family, changing traditions and the recipes that keep our memories alive.
In This Episode:
In This Episode:
- The Southern tradition of funeral food
- Why everything used to be made from scratch
- Church ladies, Tupperware and masking-tape name tags
- Why Mark expects flowers—and plenty of them
- A grandmother who fried chicken "just in case"
- What happened when Mark asked, "Where are the cakes?"
- Discovering Willie Mae's unforgettable pink Cherry Crumb Cake
- Southern etiquette when someone asks for your recipe
- How food and recipes preserve memories as traditions change
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to Genuinely Southern
00:45 The Southern Tradition of Funeral Food
01:40 From Scratch or Store-Bought?
02:43 Tupperware, Masking Tape & Southern Manners
03:53 Funeral Food for Mark's Mother
05:03 Church Ladies Take Over the House
06:10 Fried Chicken—Just in Case
08:17 Cake Gets You Through Grief
09:13 “Where Are the Cakes?”
10:03 Funeral Food in the Country
11:31 The Mysterious Pink Cake
12:55 Willie Mae's Cherry Crumb Cake
14:06 The Rules of Sharing Recipes
15:07 From Funeral Table to Mark's Cookbook
16:15 “Laying a Corpse” & Other Southern Expressions
23:55 Traditions Change, Memories Remain
00:00 Welcome to Genuinely Southern
00:45 The Southern Tradition of Funeral Food
01:40 From Scratch or Store-Bought?
02:43 Tupperware, Masking Tape & Southern Manners
03:53 Funeral Food for Mark's Mother
05:03 Church Ladies Take Over the House
06:10 Fried Chicken—Just in Case
08:17 Cake Gets You Through Grief
09:13 “Where Are the Cakes?”
10:03 Funeral Food in the Country
11:31 The Mysterious Pink Cake
12:55 Willie Mae's Cherry Crumb Cake
14:06 The Rules of Sharing Recipes
15:07 From Funeral Table to Mark's Cookbook
16:15 “Laying a Corpse” & Other Southern Expressions
23:55 Traditions Change, Memories Remain
This episode is brought to you in partnership with Carlyle Place at Home - Inclusive, Interactive Retirement Living Without Moving
Creators and Guests
What is Genuinely Southern?
Whether through writing, broadcasting, or word-of-mouth, stories have always forged a connection between people and places. Nowhere else is this truer than in The South. Southern artist, influencer, speaker, and author Mark Ballard will weave stories of life in Macon, Georgia, and stories of the South. Tales told as only Mark can, will be interwoven with guest interviews and listener questions, and requests.
Hi. I'm Mark Ballard. This is my Genuinely Southern podcast where I will share Southern stories and perspectives that show just how unique our South is. Growing up in the South gives people a little different perspective to life. I've always used the South to inspire me in my artwork, my writings, and even my food.
Mark Ballard:I've been telling stories about the South for years in my newspaper articles, my magazines. I even had a television show. The South is more than a region to me. It's genuinely a way of life. That's why I'm excited to share these Southern stories with you and introduce you to interesting people.
Mark Ballard:I'm proud to be genuinely Southern and I can't wait to tell you why. Being raised in Macon since I was a baby I'm very familiar with a lot of things that go on that now you don't see so much anymore. One is back in the day there was a wonderful culinary event for the bereaved and it was called Funeral Food. There's just something about sugar that's absolutely healing for someone that's in bereavement. Usually the person that died is family associated with some sort of church so the minute the person has died they send some kind of sonar out to all the church ladies, they deviate who's baking what, who's doing this, who's going be washing dishes, who's going be setting the tables up, and they get it together so they can move into the house where the person has had a death and set up a culinary kaleidoscope of food.
Mark Ballard:Back in the day it was all from scratch and we all know what from scratch is, from scratch is when you start with nothing and make it every bit of it, like I made a banana pudding the other day and somebody was telling me that they had like where's your cans of pudding, we don't have cans of pudding, we make the custard homemade, we make the meringue homemade, so back then no one would even think of going to someone's house or especially if it involving a funeral that they had not gotten up at the crack of dawn the day that they had to deliver it and made it from scratch. Versus Stobalt which means it was bought in a store and then obviously was not from scratch. People about when I became a teenager they got a little wise to the fact that they could maybe go to the grocery store and get a pound cake that was store bought and just slide it off of that plastic thing that comes in and put it on one of their platters and then wrap it with saran wrap and think they were going trick us that they had made that that morning.
Mark Ballard:I'm so tired, I've made this this morning, it's still warm and you're thinking that came from the grocery store. Always, and I'll take this opportunity now to talk to you about how all the church ladies were able to keep up with all their Tupperware, all their platters, anything that they used to transport their food to the bereaved. They always had a piece of masking tape, in fact I've still got some of my mothers and she's been passed away since 1994, platters and stuff where she's got on the bottom that piece of masking tape that says Joe Ballard and you know when the funeral was over the family took that back up and they put it into the church kitchen and then it was up to you to go look for your mask and tape name and get your stuff you brought. Now normally in the South the tradition is that if someone brings you something, some food related gift, that then when you return their, well however they brought it to you, whatever it was in, container, then you are supposed to put something that you made back in there. That's just a Southern thing to do, those days are gone too honey, they're like here's your thing, I think I watched it, I'm not sure.
Mark Ballard:So I'm going go through a few funeral scenarios that I'm very familiar with because it involved my parents and one of Debra's granddaddy's. So when my mother died, she was only 60 and I'm 65 now but when I was only 30 when she died I thought oh 60 is old but when I got to be 60 I thought mother was young, you know, was young but when she died I was in the height of my TV career and so she got really good stuff for her funeral food and everything because everybody was trying to impress me because I had cookbooks and all that kind of stuff. And flowers, oh my gosh there were flowers everywhere and you know some people, you know how weird it is when somebody wants from an office wants to send an envelope around so you can collect to either buy something to take over there or some flowers and so everybody gives you a 0.25 or a dollar or whatever and people think that whatever is in that envelope has to go to whatever that is so somebody told me they went to Lawrence Mayors in Macon one time and it was Deborah's office and they just dumped out that envelope with coins rolling and all that and said whatever this is use it to make an arrangement but keep in mind it's Mark Ballard's mother.
Mark Ballard:And so they were like well who else is doing, they knew every other florist was working so they were thinking I'll put this in it and I'll put that in it. So mother got beautiful flowers, a lot of times people say, I don't want you to waste any money on flowers, but I have been to some funerals where there was like one piece plants and that just doesn't say goodbye in a nice kind of way, I wanna see some flowers. Okay, what happens first after they've sent the message to the, or they've read about it, the church ladies are organized and in line, ready to go to work, they go into the home, they start setting up card tables, they start cleaning off counter spaces, the person that lives there doesn't even recognize their stuff because they've shoved it all into the garage or some kind of closet somewhere. It doesn't just have to be the kitchen and dining room either, you can go in, if it has to spill out into the den or living room, wherever they can get that food they will put up a table and try to have a place for somebody to sit down or you can walk around with you know it's very difficult to walk around anywhere to party with food but sometimes you have to and they organize it by what it is like if you're doing a buffet they start out with what would be like an appetizer kind of thing just like you would in a buffet.
Mark Ballard:Then they come to the main meal, you go down to the vegetable side dishes and somebody fried that chicken. Everyone like they went by Kentucky Fried Chicken or something and got it. They fried it. In fact my grandmother used to, when she knew there were two or three people in her church that were ailing, kind of like they started writing those obituaries for the stars that are real sick so they have them ready to go right when they die. She would just get up every other day and cook fried chicken just in case one of her people at the church passed away.
Mark Ballard:But now, as I said, they probably go to a chicken place and just get some chicken nuggets or something. And then my favorite part of funeral food is the sugar related food because I happen to be addicted to sugar so I immediately go right past everything. Everything was a from scratch cake or a homemade banana pudding. It was dripping in sugar and butter coming out the side and cakes that were 12 inches tall and I was just like a kid in a candy store, was like, I am getting, you know, was at the mother's funeral, the first thing I saw because I was having such a hard time with her death, thought I've got to find me some sugar right away to get through this. Well one of our dear Southern veil friends made a from scratch caramel cake that was still warm when my sister Deborah and I opened the front door in the house I grew up in and she said, I'm not going to come in, but I just took this out of the oven, brought it in and she said, but it's a caramel cake and I thought I've already smelled it.
Mark Ballard:I made the decision since was kind of in charge of the house that we were not going to share that with the other people who were bereaving my mother's death. My sister Deborah and I were going to hoard the cake just for us. I'm not ashamed to say that. We were like, this is too good to waste on just the regular people. That was my mother, my sister's mother and Deborah's best friends so we took it to the bedroom I was raised in because we were in our old house and I just turned, I just pushed off something off the desk I used to have in there and put that still piping out wonderful aroma of caramelized sugar in the frying pan and all and we just cut it ourselves and didn't share it.
Mark Ballard:I know you all think less of me right now but that's exactly what happened and any time we were having a bad moment during the whole process, we would go to whoever was talking to us about I love your mom and all that, and we'd be like, Okay, wait just one second, we'll be right back. And we would all huddle back there, left a knife back there and we didn't require any of the sourdough plate or paper plates, and just cut us out of that cake, got ourselves together and then went back to the people that were there to see us for the fact that mother had died. So when daddy died, it was many years later, it wasn't the same situation because I was thinking I would have my fifth cookbook out and people, I noticed for years that they quit asking me to come over to their house and we would meet at a restaurant because they didn't want to cook, we're not about to cook anything if you're coming over and I'm thinking I'm just thrilled I don't have to cook it, know, I'm not going to be judgmental. Same thing with wreaths, I would be at their front door before I rang the doorbell and I'd think, did they just hang this up after something sat on it all winter?
Mark Ballard:And I'd be trying to fluff it out and then they would answer the door and I was going, I was just doing a little touch on that. So from then on I couldn't go anymore because I was critiquing the front door wreath so it was at my house when daddy died all the family and all the friends gathered and I kept going to the kitchen every time I got a little break from talking to somebody to see who was bringing the cakes in, where was the sweets, where was the food period and I could never find it so there was one lady assigned to washing dishes and she was at her sink and I tapped her on the shoulder and I was like where are the cakes and the homemade stuff and all that? She pointed over to three bags, grocery store bags of ingredients like sugar and flour and eggs and what not. And I thought, and? And she said, we're not about to make or bring you anything like that, we brought this stuff in case you want to.
Mark Ballard:And I'm thinking, I'm bereaved, I'm not baking anything, ya'll were supposed to bake it. But she didn't think that was funny at all but she did not leave her post at the kitchen sink for sure. If really get some funeral food make sure you go to the country they will play it up right there. Deborah's papa died right after we got married so we've been married forty four years, so that's been a little few minutes ago. I didn't know all of them well because I was new to the family, but they had set up a feast of everything homemade.
Mark Ballard:You literally couldn't walk through the house cause there was a table everywhere of food and of course I stood right in front of the big table of every kind of confection you could possibly imagine just drool coming out of one side of my mouth thinking forget the rest of the stuff, I'm going straight for the sugar because there's nothing like a death to make you realize that time is short and I've often said I pray that if it's my time to go that I get at least a thirty minute warning because I'm always dieting and not eating and I want to eat everything I possibly can to when they're pumping my stomach they go, Oh my God! He could not get another bite in here! Instead of saying, Oh he had a slim fast for his last meal, that would be terrible. In fact, this kind of sounds awful too, but when Princess Diana got killed in that wreck, showed that they were coming out of some nice restaurant right before she went into the vehicle and you know she had a 10 course meal of something and I thought at least she had something fabulous because she was always worried about her weight as well.
Mark Ballard:So back to Soperton, Georgia which is down the road from Macon that's where Deborah's grandparents lived. One cake caught my attention right away because it was pink and it had coconut and it was I know eight inches tall or nine inches tall on a beautiful plate stand and I thought what is that because I love coconut. Now in the South coconut is no game changer, you either like coconut or you don't, you're not going to convince a person that doesn't eat coconut that they're going to like it. You haven't tried it this way, I don't care how you've tried it, I happen to love it. If it's got coconut in it, it's hard for me to refuse.
Mark Ballard:So I couldn't understand what was making it that beautiful pink color so I just went over there, of course the ladies had already sliced some little tiny slices, I just bypassed those. Went over and got a big knife and cut me a hunk of it and it had five layers of just wonderful yellow cake from scratch and it was the best thing I had ever tasted. I immediately went and got one of those styrofoam take home things they had and put me another piece of take home because I was scared there was too many people coming and it wasn't going be left. So I hid it in the bathroom somewhere so that no one would dare touch it. And so I finally went up to Deborah's grandmother and I said, Who made that pink cake?
Mark Ballard:What kind of cake is that? And she said, Oh, that's Willie Mae made that. She was like a family member. And I said, Is Willie here? And she said yes she is and the corner I went over there and was like what is that cake?
Mark Ballard:And she she called it cherry crumb cake but there wasn't anything crummy about it, it didn't have any kind of crunch or anything it was just the most moist layers just dripping with butter and in between them you had maraschino cherries that's something else either people either like or don't I happen to love those as well chopped up and they tinted the ice in that pinkish color and you can see little flecks of red like they were floating around in a sea of sugar and then she had put fresh coconut kind of mashed into it on the top and she said I just call it my cherry crumb cake and I just made it up one day and I said well can I get the recipe? You know in the South we love it when somebody wants a recipe because you're thinking oh my god they thought it was fabulous they want the recipe. Some people, and I've noticed a of a trend in this lately if it's something that they think they've gotten that's not in every cookbook or that most people know especially if they have a some sort of cocktail party and everyone is raving about something even if they didn't make it and had somebody cater it they only shared the recipe with the caterer and then he had to sign one of those things that he wouldn't share with anybody else disclosure.
Mark Ballard:You're almost, a southerner is almost shocked when you say oh that's the best cake I've ever had can I have the recipe if they say no? You know this is straight up no and you're like she didn't hear me apparently I'm just to say it again, I think that's a great cake, I would love the recipe, I don't share. And I'm thinking, okay. Willie Mae was not that person, she was willing to share but she sent it to me on a ratted piece of paper, you know, My mother was the same way, you could see where mother had been when she got the recipe sometimes it would be on the back of a bank statement or she had gotten made a deposit and then somebody she was talking to the phone and she wrote it on the back and in fact I kept all of my mother's recipes simply because they were written in her handwriting and they were on just about anything you could imagine, green stamps, I don't know if you all remember green stamps, anything like that mother would jot down a recipe. So Willie Mae jotted this recipe down and I could not wait to get back home and make it.
Mark Ballard:And I made it and I actually put it in one of my cookbooks. She didn't say I couldn't so I've always been one of those people that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. So I was just like, you know, okay, I'm going put it in one of my cookbooks and so everybody solicited us cherry crumb cake and everybody who loves coconut and cherries love it. It's my wife Deborah's favorite, I think it's because it's from Soperton, but it's my wife's Deborah's favorite birthday cake. Every birthday, only make it once a year and I make it on Deborah's birthday and the longer it sits the more that that cherry juice and sugar and all just drains into the layers where it's almost like a stained glass window where you can see it kind of dripping down in the back.
Mark Ballard:Just absolutely fabulous. They also found out at the same time I was down there, her Popeye died and I heard her grandmother talking to somebody years later and she said, well you weren't there when Wilburn lay a corpse? And I thought, what does that mean to her? She meant laying out at the funeral home, which is bizarre to me anyhow. My mother made me promise we weren't going open her casket and I was scared to open it because she would have certainly haunted me about it.
Mark Ballard:But her pawpaw, he did apparently and he lay a corpse, literally that was the words that she said. So now the trend has changed a little bit and I've seen it more from when we were little children where we could barely reach our hands up to the table to snatch some funeral food to as I got to be a teenager to then as I got to be an adult where I had my own cookbooks and everything. This is just funny to add, a lady came up to me one time and she said, How many cookbooks do you have? And I thought she meant how many I had authored and I said I have five and she said I have like hundreds and I said I have hundreds also but five of them are mine and so she's like ah so people are funny about recipes in cookbooks. One lady that we knew, this other lady, she's really the one who I was talking about earlier about not sharing the recipe, she flat would just tell you no.
Mark Ballard:So I went to this lady's cocktail party there one time and she had this wonderful sun dried tomato pesto dip. It was like beautiful because it was layers of green, you know the green from the pesto and the red from the sun dried tomatoes and in between there was a season block of cream cheese that had other herbs and stuff in it and then it was stacked up like you would do a cake so that when you cut a piece to scoop out you got all the colors blending together and forming like an Italian flag or something. And so I was intrigued by being an artist, first of all by the appearance of it, because I thought it was just delicious, something like some of those toast points or Melba toast or something like that. So I went up to her afterwards after I ate half of the thing at the party and said, what is that? And she called it a sun dried tomato terrine or something like that and I was like, what's a terrine?
Mark Ballard:And I said, want to get that recipe I don't share. And I'm like okay thinking what just happened? I'm like I've never heard anybody say that, are you from here? So I made it my goal to go home and recreate that recipe and I kept tweaking it trying to decide, know, get Deborah to be the taste tester, da da da and finally I got it right. Well the next time I had a party I had it and she was coming and to the house and went over there, I saw her go over there, was just waiting to see if she could go over there and she came back and said, where did you get the recipe?
Mark Ballard:And I was like, I didn't get the recipe, you didn't share it and she said, it must have been the person I had catering the party shared. It. No he didn't share it either because I tried that and he wouldn't give it to me either because he signed a non disclosure and she said well how did you do it? I said I made it up. I just separated out the flavors I thought were in there and she left in a huff because she knew it tasted exactly like hers and so I put that in one of my cookbooks as well.
Mark Ballard:So back to cocktail parties and how things have morphed with Funeral Food. Now, after everybody started working, you know, was a whole different generation as things were going up. People, ladies would work, men would work and the visitation used to be the night before which I loved because you could really visit with the family. Now they're doing it where they join it in to the funeral. You come from ten to eleven the family will be there and then the funeral will be eleven so what that looks like you can't just dash in there and sign the book, you can't just sit there and talk to the people and go I'd like to stay for the funeral but I've got a buzz.
Mark Ballard:It's kind of tricky but if you do it the night before you can say I've got something planned for tomorrow and get away with it. Well, the same time all that was going on, that was switching up because it was always the night before or afternoon before and then you had the funeral the next day so you really gather twice at the funeral home or at the church. And now they've done away that because people don't want to go twice or anything, want get it all done at one time so they do it like I said with one time and then an hour later do the funeral. And so people during that period of time when things were changing they were like, you know I am just going to run by a nice or deli place and get a way before charcuterie they were, can you do me a plate that's got fresh stuff on it and crackers and all that or they would go buy a nice chicken place and get a nugget tray. They also got to the point where it didn't matter to them if they knew it came from Chick fil A, they could just leave it on the black thing, nobody had to look for the mask and take it back to the church or family friend, none of that had to happen.
Mark Ballard:I remember as a teenager, early adult, that that was shifting from staying in your kitchen all morning trying to prepare for the people that were breathing. So as it continues to go down now, the last few funerals I've been to have actually had, and I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but sort of like a cocktail party that's catered after you go to the funeral. It's like please stay with us afterwards, we're having a party blah blah blah. And, you know, it's it's just not the same for me because it's not the same love that went into every single measure of every cup of sugar and, you know, making those homemade biscuits and everything because those people were really showing that they were bereaved by taking that extra time. Although I know it's a different world we live in and I'm not making any kind of judgments so if you do that that's fine.
Mark Ballard:But I do if I ever do funeral food do try because of the way I was raised Southern in Macon, I do try to let it be something fabulous that I've made. In fact, try to do a caramel cake or something because I know how much that caramel cake got me through when my mom died. It's just my way of saying, you know, it took me three hours so go put it in your bedroom because I hope you will enjoy this later. So it's funny how food has always been a part of us in the South but how it has morphed as the generations have changed from the people that who would not dare enter someone's house without something on a piece of their crystal or china that they had made that was either like that lady's still warm from the oven or definitely just out of the frying pan to where the people just depend on other people to cook it for them and they pay for it and take it. And I know it's the same gesture but to me it's sort of like a little bit like this.
Mark Ballard:When people ask for, you know, people to volunteer and sometimes people don't want to, you know, like say you're at the animal shelter, people don't want to go clean out the cages so they just write a check but then you got those people that can't write a check so they go out there and they clean out the cages and so it takes money from both people but when you invest your time in it I always felt like, you know, that's time I put into it. In fact, when I was teaching art classes we would always do certain holidays if it fell on one we would just send out around the table to the 20 people, know, we'll just have a little Valentine's Day party next week or whatever and so they would all sign up for something and when I had my magazine at The Telegraph we did something on summer salad I made them all volunteer for a salad, and so everybody was trying to outdo each other with the salad stuff, then you would have that person that would say, can I bring the plates and napkins? And you know, I'm thinking, I've been up since 3AM this morning, that icing and baking that cake, when I come back, since we're talking about grieving, when I come back in my next life, I want to be the person that brings the paper plates and the napkins because to me that's not the same thing as putting in three hours to make a from scratch cake.
Mark Ballard:So one thing I've learned the older I get, besides realizing how young my mom was at 60 when she died, was that the more you live the more things are going to change, that nothing ever stays the same. Sometimes I can mention these memories of, and I'm sure they've conjured up some things for you as well, that were back in time where, how that affected you to thinking I had a Chick fil A last night, where's the homemade fried chicken or something. You don't even know that that kind of thing existed. So with my podcast, it's my goal to plant some seeds so that you can bring up some of your memories. And every time I've ever told the story on stage about the funeral food, there's always been the people that wrote me and gave me a recipe or something like that.
Mark Ballard:So I want y'all to, the people that do remember that, to try to keep that alive because there's a whole new generation of people that probably don't even go to the funeral anymore much less, you know, contribute anything to the food. I look at that as it makes me feel warm and fuzzy to think of watching my grandmother take her arthritic hands and put together a pie crust that she was going to take because she was so proud of it and loved the person so much that it died, to just going to get a Mrs. Edwards pie or going to the bakery. Although that will do in a pinch if that's the only shoe you can get, but my hats off to the people in my generation that put in the extra hour to make a bad time like a funeral, a sad time like a funeral, into something that you can relate back to in terms of happiness. And, you know, the person that's passed on, I know, is looking down thinking, oh, I wish I had a piece of that cake.
Mark Ballard:Thanks for joining our conversation. One of my favorite things to do is share tales of our unique south. I hope you're gonna come back because there's always more. Thank you to our sponsors at Carlisle Place at Home. Check out at Mark Creates on Instagram and shop my artwork on Etsy.
Mark Ballard:Hosted by Mark Ballard, Genuinely Southern is a podcast by Creek Media. The show is produced by Mark and Deborah Ballard and produced and edited by Stephanie Shadden. Follow us on social media at Gen South Pod and message us with questions you'd like to hear discussed on future episodes. Engage with us, like us, subscribe, share with a friend. Be sure to stream this and more podcasts you may love at streamthecreek.com.