Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George on the Recipes They’ll Never Stop Making

No matter how old you get, the recipes you ate and loved while growing up never lose their flavor. If you grew up in a region or culture with a strong culinary history, that’s doubly true—just ask Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George.

Growing up in Tennessee, the two sisters—plus their ten other siblings—were raised with Southern cooking traditions, and now they’re sharing that legacy via a new cookbook that captures the magic of the dishes they ate as children, plus flavors and recipes they’ve picked up during their travels over the years.

Ahead of the release of their cookbook, Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals (released September 17), Dolly and Rachel spoke with Better Homes & Gardens about the recipes that defined their shared childhood, their secret ingredients, and more.

Are there recipes in the cookbook that you’ve held on to for years?

Dolly: You’re going to always have your things, like your cornbread, you’re going to have your meatloaf, and you’re going to have mashed potatoes, and the gravies, the biscuits and all that—

Rachel: Banana pudding.

Dolly: And the banana pudding, yeah, so we’re going to always have that no matter what, whether we’ve written a book or not, and of course, we felt that we need to put as many of those kind of things in our book as we can, for ourselves and for the people that do enjoy that sort of eating too.

Will you ever stop making those recipes?

Dolly: Well, we won’t stop eating them. [Laughs] Unless our health said we could not do it, then it would have to be a pretty serious ailment.

Rachel: I think there are a few things like biscuits, gravy, things that I’ll always cook. I don’t cook them every day, but for holidays, special occasions, I’ll go all out and do all the cooking that that we’re familiar with.

Dolly: And it’s good. Always good.

What recipes taste like childhood to you?

Rachel: I think the meatloaf is one. And I think the banana pudding in our book: We did a version of Mama’s banana pudding, which uses the custard that you cook on top of the stove. And then I wanted to have a quick version of banana pudding, because sometimes you don’t always have time. And it is a wonderful version of banana pudding, and it’s quick and easy, and it’s great.

What cooking traditions did you incorporate into the cookbook?

Rachel: We’ve got lots of our traditional things in the cookbook, and we often get, “Are these only Southern recipes?” and a big part of them are a big part of the things that we wanted to put in a book, things we know and things we love, that we believe that other people would enjoy. But we have traveled a lot through the years, and we have many friends who love to cook, and so we gather up different recipes of things that we like from other people, but we will always incorporate all the things that we grew up with.

Did you blend any of those cooking traditions together as you were creating the cookbook?

Rachel: Two southern girls are always going to do their southern touches, and that might be to add a little bacon grease or add a little extra butter. We don’t limit ourselves on the butter and bacon grease.

Dolly: And salt and pepper!

Rachel: And salt and pepper.

Dolly: I think all creative cooks do that. You’ll find a great recipe, and even if you love it, when you take it home, you start cooking it, you’re just going to automatically start sprinkling some of this, a little bit of that, like, “Oh, I wonder how that would taste if I added little onion to that, or put a little of this and that.” So I think that’s what’s great about cooking. It’s creating. That’s what that word means. You can kind of play in it and make it your own, but some things you don’t want to mess with, and some things like your own traditional dishes that we grew up knowing and loving, we just love it as it is.

For the recipes you grew up with, did you tweak them at all for the cookbook?

Rachel: I thought it was very important to value the recipes the way we grew up with them. I’ve said many times, if you have a sensitivity—[let’s say] you can’t have a lot of salt. Well, then please don’t use a lot of salt. But in our recipes, I put in the ingredients that we cook with and the amount that we start with, and that’s the same with whatever we’re cooking. I know that I personally love butter, too much. I love it. I always add more than probably I should, but it works for me and my kids.

Dolly: Yeah, we laughed a lot when we were actually putting some of the recipes together. Should we put one stick of butter or two? [Laughs] We’ve tried to stay true, but we want people to think food’s good the way we grew up with it.

Rachel is a great cook. I love to cook. Rachel’s food is really pretty and really good, and mine’s really good, and it’s not always pretty.

So I guess every cook is different. I cook more like Mama, who had to feed a house full of kids, and I grew up as one of the older kids. So Rachel has time, and she takes it so serious. She loves the kitchen, and she loves recipes, and she really devotes a lot of time and effort. For our Yorkshire Pudding recipe, she was going to get that right. She thought about it before she even started it. I can just see her now, thinking about it, planning for it, thinking “I’m going to get this right.” So that’s how she cooks. But we just love the food, and we love how we grew up. We love to share this with people. I think they’re going to enjoy the stories that we tell in the book, and I think they’re going to enjoy all these recipes.

Do you ever tweak your own recipes over time?

Rachel: I always keep the original recipe, and then if one day I have more time to cook, or I want to be really creative, I will take the original recipe and then I will venture from that to try to create something else, but I always start with the original recipe. But I love to be creative and to take what we grew up with and to give it a little extra taste. It’s just the way that I love to be creative, and cooking is a creative outlet for me.

Growing up, were your recipes written down?

Rachel: I always watched Mama, and she would say, “OK, you’re gonna need two cups of cornmeal, a cup of flour, one egg, one cup buttermilk, a pinch of salt.” That was my first recipe, and that was what we have in the book, that skillet cornbread. It was just watching her cook, and I love the expression, you know, a pinch of that. All of those, and what is that? And then when I was getting older, I really tried to say, “No, OK, now hold on, let me measure that,” and she would laugh, and she thought that was so funny.

Dolly: I don’t remember ever seeing a lot of recipes laying around in our household, any of our aunts and all the people that we knew, our grandmas and all, they just knew how to do it, like Rachel said, the dash of this, dab of that, but it’s more like a natural thing for country women and then the way they cook. But then when you start trying to figure out those recipes, it’s people like the daughters, like us, or like a Rachel, that they go back and say, “Well, how much was it of this or that?”

Rachel: How much is a pinch? [Laughs]

Dolly: It’s just more about cooking the Southern foods, cooking by feel. But you’ve got to have some sort of instructions to go by, and that’s what the book is.

Do either of you have any secret ingredients?

Rachel: Well, I think we sold most of our secrets. My main one is spelled L, O, V, E, we put a lot of love in everything we do. [Laughs] I really think it is a little bit of bacon grease, a little bit of butter and salt. Those are the three things that I feel I have to have.

Dolly: Well, that’s no secret to me! [Laughs] But seriously, those things are the good things. It’s the butter, it’s mostly the seasoning. Everything is made a little better with spice and seasoning. Otherwise it’s just bland.

Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals by Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George is available for purchase now.