On the first Saturday of Virginia’s shelter-in-place order during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian Noyes and his architect husband, Dwight McNeill, unpacked their vehicles and settled into Adirondack chairs, bourbons in hand, for a long stay in the rolling hills of Piedmont hunt country.
Noyes had been on medical leave at their Arlington home after a shoulder and knee replacement, and their 170-year-old farmhouse seemed an ideal spot to quarantine while continuing to heal.
To bide his time, he played in the kitchen.
He devised new treats to add to the offerings at the two locations of his nationally acclaimed Red Truck Bakery — both housed in century-old buildings in tiny towns a short drive from their farm. He updated family heirlooms and adapted favorite restaurant specialties to share at home with his spouse and visitors. The makings for a second cookbook slowly emerged.
“The Red Truck Bakery Cookbook,” which was published in 2018, told how, while working as art director for the Washington Post and Smithsonian magazines, Noyes baked breads and pies at his country retreat to sell from the bed of a vintage red truck he bought from designer Tommy Hilfiger. After he’d honed his skills at several prestigious culinary schools, the truck became the brand symbol for his first bakery and the entrepreneurial ventures that have followed.
“The Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook: Sweet and Savory Comfort Food from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery” (Potter, $28) includes vegetarian Beetloaf Sandwiches, his mother’s sour cream coffee cake, and other customer favorites that wouldn’t fit in the first volume.
There are also recipes for soups, stews, main dishes, sides, condiments and all manner of desserts. Hunger-inducing photographs of Peach Hand Pies, Aunt Molly’s Brunswick Stew, and ginger-packed Lexington Bourbon Cake interspersed with soothing pastoral scenes and cozy farmhouse interiors draw us into Noyes’s evocative prose.
As the celebrated chronicler of Appalachian foodways Ronni Lundy puts it in the foreword, Noyes has produced not just a cookbook, but “a manual to tell you exactly how to fill your tummy while restoring your soul.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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