Oh noes, White Lily is done

By Michael Fraase

Wednesday, 18 June 2008 04:58AM CST

Section: Business

White Lily flourAnybody who eats and has spent time in the US South knows that White Lily flour is for biscuits. Transplants like me have to con their wives into bringing it back in suitcases from family sojourns lest we be reduced into getting it from fancy-pants specialty stores like Williams-Sonoma at outrageous prices.

White Lily was always the cheapest kind of flour in its native South. Here, on the far north edge—if it can be found at all—it’s an imported delicacy commanding ransom-like prices similar to those paid by anyone south of here for wild rice.

But all that’s over; White Lily was purchased by the J.M. Smucker Company last year. White Lily is done. Demonstrating that jelly people know surprisingly little about flour, or even biscuits for god’s sake, the first thing Smucker did was close the downtown-Knoxville White Lily mill. And, yes, began producing the flour in two Midwest plants, according to Shaila Dewan writing for the New York Times. White Lily had been produced in downtown Knoxville since 1883; that’s done at the end of July when the mill closes for good.

Dewan reports the flour produced in the Midwest is, you guessed it, nothing like White Lilly:

“Maribeth Badertscher, a spokeswoman for the company, said the new White Lily was the result of thorough product testing and promised that customers ‘won’t know the difference.’ But in a blind test for The New York Times, two bakers could immediately tell the old from the new.”

The difference that makes a difference in the case of White Lily is where it came from: low-protein, low-gluten, soft red winter wheat. The kind that used to be grown throughout the deep South. The kind that, before consolidated national food distribution systems, was the only kind of wheat southern millers could get. Today the wheat variant is grown in the US Midwest, but it’s nothing like what came from the red-clay South.

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