A Born Storyteller

Senior Editor Ivy Odom has a fabulous new cookbook

- Sid Evans

Ivy and Sid at our 2024 Idea House

THE FIRST TIME Ivy Odom showed up on my radar was in January 2017, when she was still fresh out of culinary school. I’d gotten word that a young Test Kitchen Professional was making a showstopping dessert that I really needed to see. So I went upstairs to our Food Studios, the sprawling space where we create and photograph recipes, and there was Ivy, putting the finishing touches on an 18-layer chocolate cake. She called it a “little layer cake,” and a small crowd of food stylists and recipe developers had gathered to watch because they had never heard of such a thing. Sounding like a seasoned cook far beyond her years, Ivy talked about the dessert’s origins in parts of Georgia and Alabama and how her great-grandmother had often made it for special occasions. She and her mother had both grown up requesting it for their birthdays, and she was hoping to make a version of it for Southern Living readers.