Have you ever wanted to have lunch with Dolly Parton or sip cocktails with Miranda Lambert? Or enjoy a southern dessert with Trisha Yearwood or Martina McBride? While we may never get invited to the ultimate dinner party, there is a way for country fans to enjoy some of their favorite artists go-to dishes: the country star cookbook. There's a seemingly endless library of cookbooks created by country superstars, from Tammy Wynette to Alan Jackson, who shared the recipes they were raised on. Flipping through a country star cookbook is a listening to some of their most personal recordings -- intimate and comforting. But it's also familiar, like sitting in your grandma's kitchen while she makes you an after school snack.
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Wynette in particular was known for her comfort foods -- cornbread, fried green tomatoes, retro jello recipes that might be best left in mid-century recipe boxes...you name it, Wynette was the country cookin' queen. As Epicurious reported in their 100 Greatest Home Cooks series, Wynette even cooked while on the road -- from her tour bus equipped with an oven and a range.
That tradition has continued in recent years, with artists such as Martina McBride and Kimberly Schlapman of Little Big Town sharing the recipes that feel like home.
Whether you're an ace in the kitchen or a newbie cook looking to expand your horizons, there's no shortage of country cookbooks to choose from. Below, we've rounded up eight essential country music cookbooks. So the next time someone compliments your cooking, you can tell them you learned from your friends: Tammy, Dolly and Loretta.
Trisha Yearwood: Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food For Friends & Family
Trisha Yearwood has been a country music star since her 1991 debut which featured the instant classic chart topper "She's In Love With The Boy." Yearwood is also a chart topper when it comes to cookbooks. Her first two topped The New York Times bestsellers' list and led to her Emmy-award winning Food Network series Trisha's Southern Kitchen. In 2021, Yearwood used those years of experience to put together her fourth cookbook, Trisha's Kitchen: Easy Comfort Food For Friends & Family in which she expanded her repertoire with aplomb, noting in an interview with People, "Having my own show on Food Network has given me so much confidence to try new things and come up with new recipes. I think that confidence shows."
Dolly Parton: Dollywood Presents Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking
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Dolly Parton continues to be a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most iconic country stars of all time. On top of everything else, it turns out that Dolly is an excellent cook. When asked if she can cook in the 2020 Wired "Dolly Parton Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions" video, she answered "You better believe it!...I'm not a gourmet cook. My food is not pretty but it's goooooood." Dolly's Dixie Fixin's came out in 2006 and features 125 recipes as well as family photos and stories ranging from her childhood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee up to life on the road as a superstar. To top it all off, proceeds from the book go to her Imagination Library foundation, which mails free books to children.
But perhaps the most sought-after Dolly cookbook is the cult favorite Dollywood Presents Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking, featuring everything from Smokey Mountain Biscuits to Dolly Parton's cowboy beans. This out of print cookbook is one of the holy grails of Parton ephemera (there's a listing on Amazon for $250), but never fear: in an interview with Yahoo! Life, Parton shared that she's working on producing a cookbook with her sister Rachel. The book, titled Good Lookin' Cookin', will feature some of the beloved recipes from the Dollywood cookbook.
"We're going to rework a lot of those recipes because they're still great," the country icon shared. "We'll refurbish that thing and use many of those same recipes."
Loretta Lynn: You're Cookin' It Country: My Favorite Recipes and Memories
Loretta Lynn once sang "If you're lookin' at me, you're lookin' at country" and so it made sense when it came time for her to publish a cookbook to cheekily call it You're Cookin' It Country. The book was much more than a novelty item; Lynn was known by friends and family to be a skilled chef. When Lynn died in 2022, People ran an article quoting a Lynn interview from 2004, the year in which she both published her cookbook and enjoyed spectacular success with her comeback album Van Lear Rose, as produced by Jack White of the White Stripes. White visited Lynn at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee and per Lynn, "I fixed chicken and dumplings and homemade bread, and he said that was the best bread he ever ate."
Tammy Wynette : The Tammy Wynette Southern Cookbook
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Of course the First Lady of Country Music wrote a cookbook and it does not disappoint. Wynette once declared that her favorite meal was a hot dog, but she was obviously capable of cooking up a wide range of southern classics. In addition to the customary family photos, stories and anecdotes from her life on the road, the book, released in 1990, has nearly 300 recipes, including Mississippi-Style Stuffed Bell Pepper, Cornmeal-Fried Potatoes, Pineapple-Banana Pudding, and something called Husband's Delight that perhaps George Jones enjoyed before their D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Epicurious named Wynette one of the top 100 home cooks of all time in 2017 and quoted her daughter Jackie: "She loved nothing more than to have a houseful of people and cook for 'em. The more the merrier."
Miranda Lambert: Y'All Eat Yet?: Welcome To The Pretty B*itchin' Kitchen!
Miranda Lambert has won more Academy of Country Music Awards than any artist ever and is well on her way to joining country icons like Dolly, Loretta and Tammy in the pantheon of all-time greats. She even has her own cookbook, just like her predecessors. "Country gal singers love them a cookbook," she quipped in an interview with ET after the book's release in 2023. The book was inspired by the women who raised and grew up with Lambert in Texas, and she notes "I learned so much from them. And a lot of my first songs started with me sitting around the dinner table with these ladies or cooking together in the kitchen and sort of listening to their life stories and what was going on in their world."
Kimberly Schlapman: Oh Gussie!: Cooking and Visiting in Kimberly's Southern Kitchen
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Not only is Kimberly Schlapman one of the founding members of Little Big Town, which has been delighting country fans with their gorgeous four-part harmonies since the release of their self-titled debut in 2002, but she is an accomplished cook as well. She released Oh Gussie! in 2015 after hosting the television show Kimberly's Simply Southern for several years. (Per Yahoo, she said of the book's title, "It's a Southern saying and I say it all the time...It means 'I'm excited' or 'I'm nervous,' or 'Oh, that's incredibly delicious!'") In a 2013 interview with USA Today, Schlapman spoke about southern food culture, explaining "It's cozy and it makes you feel good and welcomed and like home. There is a tradition in Southern cooking of recipes handed down for generations. And when I make my grandmother's strawberry pie — she is gone on now — I feel her right with me."
Martina McBride: Martina's Kitchen Mix: My Recipe Playlist For Real Life
Martina McBride is best known for her country-pop classics like "Independence Day" and "This One's For The Girls" but she's also an enthusiastic cook and entertainer. McBride has written two cookbooks. Her latest publication, 2018's Martina's Kitchen Mix, is built around the concept of a playlist. In an interview with The Music Room, McBride explained that a kitchen mix is "a combination of recipes that I use when I'm cooking in my own kitchen...You know how you share playlists with friends...I'm just sharing recipes with friends." She went on to proclaim "I eat pretty healthy 99% of the time, but sometimes a great recipe that has lots of cheese," and noted that the book contained a lot of vegetarian recipes balanced by meatier fare like "my mom's pot roast and things that have been handed down."
Kix Brooks: Cookin' It With Kix: The Art of Celebrating and the Fun of Outdoor Cooking
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Kix Brooks of the powerhouse country duo Brooks & Dunn isn't just a talented songwriter and vocalist, he's also a star when it comes to grilling, tailgating, and hosting a good old backyard cookout. In his 2016 cookbook, Brooks channeled the rambunctious, hilarious energy he's famously brought to Brooks & Dunn for several decades and offered up a slew of southern favorites, including D-Daddy's Fried Fish, Big Ol' Mess Jambalaya and Revved-Up Brussels Sprouts Slaw. In an interview with The Country Note, Brooks shared that the cookbook idea came out of writing an autobiography that he never finished and "just realizing that I grew up in a really colorful, rich culture that revolved around not just meat, or cooking, but the adventure of gathering...It's funny that the book that I had written for my autobiography was a cookbook and I didn't even realize it."
