From Glenn Reynolds I hear that White Lily Flour will no longer be made in the South:
By the end of the month, White Lily Flour, for more than 100 years a staple for biscuits, cakes and pies, will no longer be made in the South.
The flour has been made in the same Knoxville, Tenn., factory for 125 years, where it’s milled to produce the lightest, whitest flour around, one ideally suited for Southern favorites like biscuits. Other flours have higher protein contents, which make them better for sturdier baked goods like breads.
J.M. Smucker, which bought the White Lily brand in 2006 from C.H. Guenther & Sons, will continue making the flour at facilities in the Midwest. But many cooks are worried that the flour won’t be the same, according to a story in today’s New York Times. The newspaper got a few cooks to do a blind-baking test of flour milled in Knoxville, and the new version produced in the land of hard winter wheat. The results weren’t scientific, but they were unanimous: Cooks said they could tell the difference, and that the new White Lily flour didn’t produce the tender biscuits that the old one does.
White Lily Flour is a national treasure. It produces results in biscuits and pie crusts I haven’t been able to duplicate with any other flour. Although I live in Chicago where it’s not available, it’s a staple in my larder and whenever I find myself somewhere that it’s sold, I always stock up. Blessedly, it’s part of the Southern Care Package I receive as as an annual Christmas present from my beloved friends in Raleigh.
If the character of the flour changes in the move as it almost inevitably will, it would be an act of desecration equivalent to smelting down the Statue of Liberty or using the Grand Canyon as a landfill.
