It started with a
card game in 1967.

Nana was born in Memphis in 1955, into a kitchen that ran on a schedule nobody wrote down. Her mother — Mawmaw to everyone who ever met her — made yeast rolls the way other people breathe. There was no recipe card. There was a bowl, a hand, and a woman who could tell by the feel of the dough whether the kitchen was too cold.

Then came a night in 1967, at the house on Battle Creek Drive. Mawmaw had made rolls that day, and a couple was coming over to play cards with Nana’s parents. Nana was twelve. She asked her mother if she could try to make a dessert out of some of that roll dough — something Mawmaw herself had never done. Mawmaw’s whole answer was three words: “Go for it.”

A twelve-year-old, a borrowed piece of her mother’s dough, cinnamon, and a card game worth of witnesses. That was the first pan. The address was 1588 Battle Creek Drive, and the way Nana tells it, that is where 1588 yeast rolls were born. She has been making them ever since — going on sixty years on the same recipe, and as she puts it: “I’ve got the recipe down pat.”

Ask her if they’re the best and she will not claim it. “I don’t know if everybody’s gonna think they’re the best, but I get a lot of compliments with them.” That is as far as she will go. We are comfortable letting the pan argue the rest.

Forty years in Jacksonville

She came to Jacksonville more than forty years ago and brought the whole Memphis kitchen with her — the cast iron, the Saturday, the refusal to measure. North Florida changed a lot about her life. It never changed the rolls.

What did change is how many people ended up eating them. Holidays. Church. Neighbors. New babies. Funerals. Every time somebody in the family moved into a new house, a pan of these showed up on the counter. For four decades the answer to “what should I bring” has been the same in this family, and it has never once been wrong.

Why we are doing this now

Because Nana is seventy, and because we counted how many people have asked her to sell these — and then we stopped counting. Because a recipe that only exists in one person’s hands is one bad day away from being gone. And because it turns out that the thing everybody begs you for is, in fact, a business.

So we are writing it down. Not to change it — to keep it. The buns are first. The gumbo roux and the Sunday gravy are coming. The dough is still Mawmaw’s. The buns have been Nana’s since she was twelve. Nothing about that is changing.