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As the world mourns country music icon Dolly Parton following her death at age 80, her favorite Southern dishes offer a taste of the traditions she cherished throughout her life.
“We were born cooking, as they say,” Parton told Food Network of growing up as one of 12 children in Tennessee. “All of my life, I remember being in the kitchen with somebody because life just centered around the kitchen.”
Parton said she learned to cook from “all those wonderful relatives” she watched in the kitchen.
“If I were giving you tips, I’d probably get a notice from the health department because I like to use a lot of butter,” she told Food Network. “You’ve got to use a little bit of the things that really make things taste good if you’re going after that soul food, so to speak. You’ve gotta use some grease — bacon grease, mainly.”
The signature dishes Parton said she often prepared and liked to eat showcased her Southern roots.
She published two cookbooks: “Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s” in 2006 and, with her sister Rachel Parton George, “Good Lookin’ Cookin’” in 2024.
Parton also endorsed several food and cooking products, including cake mixes and frozen meals, throughout her career.
“I’m a really, really good cook,” Parton told Wired in 2020. “I’m not a gourmet cook. My food is not pretty, but it’s good.”
Below are some of the Queen of Country Music’s favorite foods.
Chicken and dumplings
A recipe for the Southern classic appeared in “Dollywood Presents: Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking,” published in 1989.
Decades later, Parton said in an interview with Country Living, “When I think about my mama, I think about some chicken and dumplings.”
“I like a good meatloaf. It’s easy to make,” she told the publication. “But I also love to make chicken and dumplings. I get a couple of chickens, and I get enough for everyone because everyone loves my chicken and dumplings!”
The 1989 recipe associated with Parton begins by simmering a whole chicken with onion and celery leaves in salted water, according to The Kitchn.
Parton said it would take her “all day” to make chicken and dumplings the way she liked them.
“I may read a while or try to relax while I check in on my cooking,” she told Country Living. “It’s the same thing with a meatloaf or fried chicken.”
But Parton wouldn’t give away all the details of her famous dish.
“I don’t give out the recipe,” she said. “Mine is all these secret ingredients — and the main one is love.”
Biscuits and gravy
One of Parton’s favorite breakfast foods was biscuits and gravy.
“Everybody makes biscuits, but how many people make buttermilk biscuits unless you really are from the South?” Parton said in a 2023 interview with Eater.
“I love it all. I eat gravy and biscuits at least once a week for breakfast with sausage or whatever. With the same pan, I’ll get a biscuit and put apple butter or jam or jelly on there. Whatever looks good. There’s no bad way to eat a biscuit.”
Banana pudding
Parton described herself as more of a cook than a baker, but banana pudding was among her favorite desserts.
“Everybody loves banana pudding,” she said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2022. “That was always one of my favorite things, a big old bowl of banana puddin’.
A recipe for the Southern staple, inspired by her mother’s method, is included in “Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s” and calls for a 12-ounce box of vanilla wafers and five to six sliced bananas.
Potatoes
Parton admitted to Wired that potatoes were her weakness.
“Every diet I ever fell off of has been because of a potato,” Parton said. “Either french fries or mashed potatoes or baked potatoes. Potato, potato, potato! I never met a spud I didn’t like.”
Parton said a mayonnaise-based potato salad was her go-to dish to bring to a barbecue.
She recalled that Sunday fried chicken served with potato salad was “one of the greatest things ever” from her childhood.
“When that happened at our church and that big bowl of potato salad got there, you didn’t have to worry,” she said during an interview on the “Today” show in 2022. “Even [if] it was sunny, it wasn’t gonna last that long! It wasn’t gonna go bad … not if I was around!”
Roast pork
Another love of Parton’s was roast pork, “especially the fatty part,” Parton said in a 1992 interview with The New York Times. “I can’t help it. The greasier the food, the better.
Parton revealed to the Times in 1992 that one of her favorite meals to serve guests was roast pork with green beans, turnip greens and fried okra.
Chess pie
Chess pie, a traditional Southern custard-style pie typically made with eggs, sugar, butter and flour or cornmeal, was Parton’s favorite pie, she told USA Today in 2019.
“I don’t eat much cake,” she said. “I usually have pie on my birthday. My favorite pie is chess pie. That is ‘chess,’ not ‘chest,’ pie.”
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