Sunday Paper Recommends— Week of September 15, 2024

This week at The Sunday Paper, we're sharing a series, a playlist, an insightful book, and a recipe that move the needle and spark inspiring change. We hope these suggestions open your heart and mind and encourage you to come together for meaningful conversations!

What We're Excited About

What We’re Watching

Veteran reporter Lisa Ling has taken on a new beat in her work: spirituality. In a new CBS series called "The State of Spirituality," Ling looks closely at the role a belief in something greater plays in people's lives today. Ling will share stories of people of multiple backgrounds, religions, spiritual practices, and beliefs. In the first episode, Ling meets with several experts in the field, including clinical psychology professor Lisa Miller, PhD and author of The Awakened Brain, and Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life at USC, to talk about the depth of our spiritual core. It's no stretch to say we're all seeking some path to understanding and light these days, and this series offers a place to go deeper into this inquiry.

Also, it's the perfect night for some good folly and fun! The PrimeTime Emmy Awards are here. We'll be setting in to watch all the nominees, which include greats from the shows Hacks, The Bear, Palm Royale, and other Sunday Paper favorites. It's guaranteed fun as father-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy are set to host.

Another Newsletter We're Loving

World Alzheimer's Day is this coming Saturday, September 21. This is an annual global effort to raise awareness around this disease and build momentum for those working toward more treatments and a cure. In light of this critical day, we're encouraging our community to sign up for WAM Monthly, the digital newsletter created by Maria and the team at the Women's Alzheimer's Movement. Did you know that every 65 seconds, a new brain develops Alzheimer's, and two-thirds of those brains belong to women? The Women's Alzheimer's Movement is dedicated to educating the world about women's brain health and closing the gap in research. Signing up for WAM Monthly today lets you learn the latest and get critical news to keep your brain healthy.

Sunday Dinner Recipe

Nashville Chess Tartlets
Found in farm journals and church cookbooks, chess pie recipes were the easy, everyday pies baked by people who did their own baking. They needed no fresh fruit or refrigeration, and that was fortuitous, because before the 1930s, home refrigerators as we know them didn’t exist. Having spent a lifetime baking chess pie and eating other people’s variations on chess pie, I can confidently say this recipe is the best. What makes middle Tennessee chess pie different from that in other parts of the South is the cornmeal and apple cider vinegar. I grew up with little chess tarts at summer barbecues, packed in box lunches, and on the table at holiday parties. Because those premade tartlet shells aren’t so easy to find anymore, I make my own by cutting a piecrust into rounds, pressing them into muffin pans, then filling and baking. So good!

Makes 18 tartlets
Prep: 40 to 45 minutes Bake: 12 to 15 minutes

1 (9-inch) piecrust rolled to a 12-inch diameter
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick/57 grams) unsalted butter
1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar 1/4 cup (48 grams) lightly packed light brown sugar
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon white cornmeal
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons whole milk or buttermilk

1. Heat the oven to 425oF, with a rack in the lower middle.
2. Cut the piecrust into 12 (2 3/4- to 3-inch) rounds, and reroll the dough to cut 6 more rounds. Press each round into the bottom of a shallow muffin pan, prick with a fork a few times in the bottom, and place in the fridge while you make the filling.
3. Place the butter in a small saucepan over low heat until it has melted, 2 to 3 minutes. Turn off the heat.
4. Place both sugars in a large mixing bowl and pour in the melted butter. Stir with a wooden spoon until creamy and combined, about 1 minute. Add the eggs, cornmeal, flour, vinegar, salt, and milk or buttermilk. Mix until well combined, 1 minute more.
5. Remove the muffin pans from the refrigerator. Spoon about 1 1/2 tablespoons filling into each tartlet crust, and bake until golden, 12 to 15 minutes. Leave in the pan for 10 minutes, then run a small, thin metal spatula around the edges and carefully lift the tartlets out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

TO BAKE A WHOLE PIE
Pour the filling in a 9-inch pie crust and bake at 425oF for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350oF and bake until golden and set, 25 to 30 minutes more.

HOW CHESS PIE GOT ITS NAME
The words chess pie have prompted much head-scratching among food historians. Katharine Shilcutt of East Texas was told her ancestors baked chess pie and stored it in a chest of drawers, which calls to mind a variation on the name “chest” pie. Most experts, though, think “chess” is a corrup- tion of the word “cheese,” because the baked filling has a creamy consistency like cheese curds. The late Bill Neal, chef of Crook’s Corner, pointed us to the last part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition of a cheesecake: “A cake or tort of light pastry, originally containing cheese; now filled with a yellow buttermilk com- pound of milk-curds, sugar and butter, or a preparation of whipped egg and sugar.” Virginia historian Katharine E. Harbury wrote in Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty (2004) that the Virginia chess pie, cheese- cake, and lemon cheese didn’t contain cheese at all, and the name simply describes their texture. In 1891 in The People’s Press newspaper of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, “cheese pie” is the name given to a pie in which eggs are beaten with but- ter and sugar, poured into pans of pastry, and baked with a meringue in a hot oven, while a similar recipe in nearby Greensboro was called “chess pie.” The Piedmont of North Carolina had been settled by English Quakers, Scottish Highlanders, Moravians, and Germans who came down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania.

Taken from Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories by Anne Byrn.  Copyright © 2024 by Anne Byrn. Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen.  Used by permission of Harper Celebrate.