Lane Cake, Southern Hospitality, and Sweet Memories of Jimmy Carter

Words by Anne Byrn

December 29, 2024

As reflections on our 39th President, Jimmy Carter, pour in, I’d like to share a few that might not be mentioned elsewhere. They have to do with the dinner table and layer cake.

I was the food writer for the Atlanta Journal while Carter was President, so I not only met him but I wrote about and prepared recipes his family was famous for — Rosalynn’s cheese spread ring with strawberry preserves in the center, the Lane Cake baked every Christmas, and cornbread.

The Carters came from small town, hard-working, farm people who baked their own cakes and cleaned their own houses. And once they left the White House, the world discovered who they really were.

It’s no surprise Carter never meshed with the Washington elite. He was more like the stubborn Southerners I had been raised around — hospitable, prayerful, and hard-working.

In June 1979, Rosalynn Carter decided inflation and the alarmingly high price of putting dinner on the table was something that needed to be talked about. So she invited food writers from around the country to the White House.

She was well aware of the sting of a high grocery bill as she had been presented the tab for $600 worth of food to feed her family and in-laws — the “Peanut Brigade” — who traveled all the way from Plains after Carter had won the presidency and then stayed awhile. Presidents are supposed to cover the cost of feeding themselves, friends, and family.

To save money, White House chef Henry Haller was instructed by the First Lady to buy house brands and trim food costs immediately. Light drinkers, the Carters removed hard liquor from receptions. Rosalynn had done the same in the Georgia governor’s mansion.

Jimmy Carter was thereafter painted as a penny-pinching peanut farmer. But what many might not have considered was that Carter saw his time in Washington as serving the country, not milking it. He looked at things not only through his eyes but with his heart and continued a life of service through the Carter Center in Atlanta and humanitarian efforts in remote parts of the world as well as by building homes and raising awareness for Habitat for Humanity.

His naysayers might not have known he had a soft spot for Lane Cake, that bourbon-saturated layer cake with chopped cherries, raisins, and pecans in the filling that takes a better part of a day to assemble and was named for Emma Rylander Lane who won first prize for this cake at a fair in Columbus, Georgia, before Carter was born. She grew up in nearby Americus. Both Carter’s father and his mother-in-law baked a Lane Cake each Christmas. The Carters spent every Christmas Day in Plains with only one exception — in 1980 when Americans were held hostage in Iran. Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy retreated to Camp David and invited White House staff and their families to join them.

Following Rosalynn’s Washington meeting, I joined a line of newspaper writers eager to meet the first couple. I was fresh out of college and honestly knew little about food and less about the politics of the Middle East, only that Carter had recently brokered peace in his Camp David Accords.

The Carters felt like people I knew back in Nashville, my home, and it wasn’t just their accents but the way they made you feel — their hospitality. The receiving line that snaked through the White House hallways could have been anywhere in the South on any occasion, from a funeral to a wedding to a political gathering.

When I shook hands with Jimmy Carter, and made eye contact and saw his signature broad smile, the fact that I worked at the largest newspaper in the South must have been the reason his and Rosalynn’s handshakes were firm, and they welcomed me back any time.

And then as I moved on and glanced back, the Carters were having those same exchanges with the next person in line, and the next.

Rosalynn shared a personal story with us. Before the Inauguration, she and her husband walked through the White House. “He toured the downstairs while I toured the living quarters. At one point, I overheard a chef say, ‘Well, they’ll be easy to feed. They’re from the South. And we make that kind of food for the help every day.’”

Back then the rest of the country hadn’t woken up to the beauty of country ham, red beans and rice, a mess of greens, sliced ripe tomatoes, and homemade peach ice cream. Southern food and perhaps this Southern President, too, didn’t seem fancy enough for the White House. But this was the food Jimmy Carter was raised on, and it wasn’t going away.

Alex Prud’homme, great nephew of Julia Child, wrote in the forward to The White House Family Cookbook, by Henry Haller with Virginia Aronson, that the White House is not just a home but a symbol, and the food served there sets an example for everyone… “studies show that the public pays attention to the president’s diet and often emulates it. As his tastes tend to mirror the trends of his era.’’

If that’s true then the love affair with Southern cooking began 46 years ago when Jimmy Carter welcomed world leaders to his table and unapologetically placed cornbread on the menu.

Through the years I’ve struggled to explain the words “Southern hospitality.” The South doesn’t always seem a hospitable place, and certainly we haven’t been hospitable to all our neighbors. When I grew up, hospitality was offering someone who visited your home food and drink within minutes of their arrival. If their visit was in the morning, you asked them to stay for lunch, and if in the afternoon, you extended an invitation to dinner. 

Perhaps it was rooted in a rural South where small towns were situated far apart, and if people came to visit, they stayed awhile.

I was reminded of the small town vibe and the South’s rural landscape as I drove through sleepy Plains last year. With its 550 inhabitants, the Carters and their large extended family are like royalty here, and you will find campaign signs still hanging as if time has stood still. Not far from the modest ranch where the Carters have called home for generations are government offices and the Secret Service. Plains is a national park that includes Carter’s boyhood home and farm. 

Jimmy Carter, the longest living U.S. President, might have been misunderstood in his four-year presidential tenure, but the rest of his life was spent in this southwest farming quadrant of Georgia where people, Black and white, have known him best. Here families deal with the same issues the Carters have — alcoholism, mental health, or just big personalities.

Henry Haller was chef at the White House from the Lyndon Johnson administration through the Reagans, and considered the Carters’ tastes in food easy to please. They ate chicken soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. And Rosalynn’s mother Miss Allie would often visit from Plains, and when she did, she’d peek her head in the kitchen to say hello. She taught the pastry team how to bake a Lane Cake. 

But Haller would say his greatest task in the Carter years was to prepare dinner for 1,340 on the White House lawn to celebrate the success of the Camp David Accords. It had to be organized in one week.

It was Rosalynn’s idea for her husband to invite Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the Maryland presidential retreat. Her husband had been meeting privately with the leaders, to no agreement, but she felt if they came to Camp David with its privacy it might provide the right setting for dialogue and hopefully there would be a truce and an end to bloodshed that had plagued the region for centuries.

For 13 days, Carter, the optimist, pushed for peace, and while he did, Begin’s kosher cooks, Sadat’s Muslim chef, and the White House stewards cooked side by side in the Carter’s kitchen, says Alex Prud’homme in his book, Dinner With The President, 2023. “The bored, hungry Israelis and Egyptians followed the cookie crumbs, as it were, and were soon chatting with each other. The American pies, cakes, and mousses were so popular that the delegates were gaining weight.” Rosalynn would remember, “For months afterwards the participants complained about the 10 extra pounds they’d put on at Camp David.”

I would see Jimmy Carter in person one more time, in 2001, when we were both on Good Morning America, and we passed quickly in the hallway near the Green Room. His memoir An Hour Before Daylight, what it’s like living in the small town of Plains during segregation and before the Civil Rights movement, had just been published. It would win a Pulitzer Prize. 

Jimmy Carter was comfortable with the uncomfortable, accepted a challenge, and was a forgiving Navy lieutenant who pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers and who stood up for a disgraced Paula Deen, whom he thought deserved a second chance.

Now the kind, peace-loving, prolific, and humble Southern son leaves us but rises to heaven. In remembrance, I say we go bake a Lane Cake.