Comfort, Created
It was a project seeded by inspiration during the pandemic shut-in days and a rest order after a shoulder replacement. No heavy mixing. “I was looking forward to recouping out at the farmhouse,” Noyes shares.

A judge and her daughter in the Pacific Northwest posted a video on Instagram. They were baking their way through Noyes’ first cookbook, Red Truck Bakery Cookbook: Gold-Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery. “It’s all about getting to know the family once again and family comfort, and the judge had a lot of first responders living on her street that were coming home late at night and leaving early in the morning for the hospital,” he relates.

The mother-daughter duo baked and baked and left warmed sweet and savory covered dishes at the doors of their fatigued neighbors, who undoubtedly were sick of Instacart and Door Dash deliveries.

“It was such a great story and I thought, ‘Family, comfort, that’s what cooking is all about, so here is a project for a new cookbook,” Noyes says. “I went after it. There is a bent, a focus on all our farmers out there because they were going through this, too, and none of the farmers’ markets were open, so I wanted to salute them.”

Farmer’s market recipes are plentiful throughout Noyes’ pages.

A key point of pride for Noyes is the creative leisure and license to muse down memory lane, times the California boy visited his paternal grandmother in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. “I’d fly out in summers, and she would teach me to cook southern,” he says. “I learned more from her than anything else.”

He remembers the first time she drove him to a meat-and-three diner. The deal: Pick a meat and three side dishes. “I didn’t know what anything was on the menu,” Noyes laughs. “What are collards? I just thought everyone ate food like on Fisherman’s Wharf.”

After all, Noyes grew up among Meyer lemons and oranges that he could pluck from the trees outside the back door of his Monterrey childhood home. Abalone was not one of the “pick three.”

Initially and for decades, his baking was a hobby, albeit more of a study given his études at The Culinary Institute of America and l’Academie de Cuisine, just because. When it grew into a bona fide business, Noyes says, “It turned out to be a southern bakery with a lot of family recipes along with recipes I learned during my schooling.”

You’ll find a Moonshine Cake, a nod to Virginia. Family favorites like rum cake and bourbon cake are included as staples. “A magazine referred to us as ‘the bakery with a drinking problem,’ so I say we are, ‘the bakery with a side of party,’” Noyes quips. Case in point: The Lexington Bourbon Cake with Fresh Ginger (see page 183).

Apples are aplenty, and Noyes’ all-time favorite pie is just that. Because apples can be a year-round fruit in his neck of the woods, he incorporates them into dishes like apple soup, a butternut squash soup recipe, a galette and, of course, apple butter. All are recipes in his latest book.

His Caramel Butter Pecan Cake is a holiday home run, as is the bakery’s epic fruit cake that marinates in rum for three months. “We brush them with rum several times in the fall,” he says, tempting a curious epicurean to wonder exactly how this process unfolds. You’ll have to wait until the next book or scoot to get one shipped before the New Year.

Don’t expect fancies like wedding cakes or frou-frou cookies at The Red Truck Bakery, or in his cookbooks’ pages. “We do interesting bundt cakes, big chunk fresh fruit pies with local ingredients and the type of recipes that a person in the family used to make who is not around anymore,” Noyes says. People told him this about the rum cake recipe. It’s a warm reminder to cherish all we hold dear.