♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Come ride with us for "A Literary Tour of South Carolina."

♪ (man) Whoops.

♪ ♪ ♪ (female speaker) I became passionate about comfortable entertaining because people need to know how to have people into their homes.

People are so afraid about entertaining and knowing what to fix and following the rules, and I just wanted to loosen that up.

I love teaching cooking.

What I find the most exciting about teaching, whether it was teaching in my restaurant or teaching at Rich's or when I go in a lecture, is the learning.

Every time I teach something, I learn something.

It's just the most amazing thing.

It's just incredible.

Every time you write a sentence, you see another thing that you didn't know you knew.

Every time you teach someone, they're gonna make a mistake you never made before or fix it in a way you didn't ever do before.

Teaching is very exciting.

People that love teaching are blessed because their lives are rich and just keep on going.

You always learn from somebody else, a different attitude, a different life.

But seeing people gain dominion over their own food is rewarding in itself.

Everyone should have dominion over their own food.

No matter who does the cooking, if you don't know what's in your food, you are not in charge of your life.

Whether it's additives or your mother's generous hunk of butter, you've got to learn how to control your own food and know what's going in your body until the time you are willing to give it to someone.

It's a gift when you let someone fix food.

You may think you're lazy and you're lucky having someone fix for you.

Remember, you're giving control at the same time, so teaching for me is giving people control over their own life, letting them really take something they didn't know and make the world a better place.

When I was young, I didn't have anything I was good at.

To tell the truth, I was the world's worst secretary, and I tried public relations.

I wasn't very accommodating to the clients.

I just wasn't any good at anything.

I moved into an international student house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and everybody had chores.

My chore was to forward the mail.

I'm still not good at getting that letter folded and in the envelope and stamped.

My thank-you notes are piled up in drawers.

So there were two Mormon boys that lived in the international student house, and I didn't forward their draft notices to them.

So when they came back, they had to show up for the Army the next day.

They were not happy with me, and I made equally bad mistakes in all my other jobs.

Oh, my, I worked for Mass General Hospital doing record research.

I wasn't thorough in the sense that people wanted me to.

I didn't have a big attention span, so the cook got sick simultaneously, and when I was in the doghouse, they said, "You want to take over the cooking?"

We all paid $15 a month for dinner meals.

And I thought I could because I used to watch the cook.

So I started cooking, and I loved it.

I made a lot of mistakes cooking for 18 of us, but I loved it.

At the end of that time, I told my mother I wanted to be a cook.

She said, "Ladies don't cook.

"You find a woman "that's actually got some prestige in a restaurant "and is not just doing hamburgers on the grill and is not working at night with men."

You weren't supposed to work at night with men in those days.

She said, "You find a woman "working in a prestigious position in a restaurant "that you could work up to and you could pursue it, "but I didn't bring you up to be a line cook and work at night with men, lifting heavy pans."

There was no woman in America at the time that I could find.

I returned home, which was Virginia.

At different times I had hundreds of jobs.

I would keep a job six months, and then I was on to something else.

And so when I was nearly 30, I started to pray.

You don't have to say pray.

You can say affirm... power of positive thinking, and I decided that every day I was going to claim the fact that I could find a job that made the world better, support myself, because at the time there was no law protecting women from being paid less than men.

If you were a woman, you made $50 a week, even if you were a single woman bringing up three children 'cause white men got $100 so they could be saving money for the time that they had three children.

A job where I could support myself became important to me, and love what I was doing, be passionate about what I was doing.

At the end of the year, I met my favorite former husband, and we got married and moved to London.

It was all miraculous, and when we got to London, England, I couldn't work.

Here I'd been praying to find a job where I could earn money, and I couldn't work because I didn't have the work visa.

He did.

What I did instead was, I was looking for a place to live and stumbled into a house.

The other girl that was looking at the house said, "I am going to the Cordon Bleu tomorrow."

I said, "What is the Cordon Bleu?"

She said, "A cooking school."

She didn't show up, but I did.

A year later, I got my advanced certificate.

That was my answer.

I found a job where I could make the world better, where I earned enough to support myself, and where I loved what I was doing.

Everybody has that right.

When I first started in this business after I graduated from Cordon Bleu-- Julia Child came to my graduation.

She happened to be there that day, and I asked her, "What should I do?"

She said, "Start a cooking school."

She said, "Always learn from one person that knows more than you do."

When I returned to the United States, my favorite former husband and I started a restaurant, and as soon as I could, I started teaching in the restaurant, and I always loved teaching.

The idea of being a celebrity cook never occurred to me.

I could not imagine myself going on television.

The first television show I did was in Georgia with...

Governor Busbee's wife.

They said to me, "Do not drain that spinach in that sink "because that sink does not have a bowl "and a pipe that goes anywhere.

You pull the spinach out like this."

I didn't have training in that.

The first thing I did was pour spinach in the sink, and the liquid came out onto Mrs. Busbee's beige suede shoes.

That was enough television for me for a long time.

White Lily came to me and wanted to underwrite a program on public television.

It took me six months to bring myself to the point where I would consider going on television.

I thought if you went on television, you had to be beautiful and glamorous.

And cooking is a lot of things, but no matter what you see with the beautiful young women now on television, you can get pretty messy when you're cooking.

It's a pretty sloppy job.

Being famous was never my goal.

I wanted enough money to support myself.

I never had goals to be rich or famous, and so along the way, I have achieved a modicum of fame that is satisfying to me, but not so much that I would fight to stay in the public eye.

I love lecturing.

I love being on television, but fighting for it doesn't appeal to me.

I can't figure out why.

It just doesn't.

I did do...a hundred-and-some television shows for the Food Network.

I was one of the first people on PBS.

I followed Julia and Jeff Smith and some of the others.

I was very fortunate I was there at the heyday, and I've had this wonderful life and this wonderful career.

Being a cook now is still hard, dirty work, and when you see chefs in the restaurant, there are some that are glamorous appearing, and maybe they have an endless supply of white, starched coats that they can change before going out in the dining room, but before they get to that point, they are on their feet for years.

It is hard work, and it's the exceptional chef that makes a big fortune, but if you are clever and you determine what you want, whether it's working during the day rather than at night, being with your family, whatever, you can shape the culinary needs of the community towards what you're best at.

It might be doing breakfast or doing lunches, and in that sense, the culinary field is just wide open because there are so many, many, many people and so many jobs where people need help with their cooking.

Those jobs didn't exist when I started.

There were just a handful of restaurants in each town.

Heck, Southerners didn't go out to eat.

They might go to a buffet on Sundays, but now the South is like everywhere else.

People go out to eat, several times a week even.

When you multiply that by all the people in the world, that's a lot of eating out and a lot of work that can be done, but there's recipe testing, there's cookbook writing, and cookbook writing in some ways is easier because there are more people reading cookbooks, but also, let's face it.

It is hard to compete against the big, big television stars.

If you buy a cookbook, chances are you're gonna buy it from somebody that's been in your home week after week rather than some name you've never seen.

The person that's been in your home week after week is on PBS-- my great love-- the Food Network, or one of the other stations.

You're liable to buy that more, so it's harder for people that don't have that entrée, but all things are possible.

Writing a cookbook is in some ways like writing a literary book, in some ways like writing nonfiction, and in some ways a scientific process.

If you read older cookbooks, you would think that there was no science involved because they just say, "Mix together three eggs in the usual way, "dump in the flour, and put it in a greased pot and bake till done."

And there's not a lot of science in that, but cookbooks have changed over the years.

Cookbooks have changed since my first.

My first cookbook was a little pamphlet called "Let's Entertain," and then the next one was another tiny little pamphlet on Southern cooking, bigger pamphlet.

And then the first major hardback book I did was called "New Southern Cooking," and I still didn't know anything about really writing a recipe, how to make it so that it was an easy flow for the reader, and over the years I have changed that.

For instance, we test every recipe.

I've always tested every recipe three times, but now we also make sure that we change all the active verbs in a recipe so that rather than saying, "Place the meat in the bowl," we might say, "Move the meat to a hot pan," so that it's something that stimulates people to get a picture of what the process is going to be.

"Heat the pan," those kinds of things.

Baking and pie crusts becomes very scientific and very important with cookbooks.

Even further is the fact that no two flours are the same, and Southern flour is quite different than Northern flour.

Southern flours have much less gluten than Northern flours that are primarily used for bread baking, yeast-bread raising, which wants a real tough flour to rise the bread.

Southern flours want something for cakes or for biscuits that are delicate and tender.

It's apples and oranges when you talk about baking.

Baking bread can be a little of this, a little of that.

But cakes, every step makes a difference.

The way I choose the recipes to put in a cookbook is very mixed.

I might come to someone's house-- your house-- and just enjoy the meal and feel that it's representative of home cooking and that there is a real technique to be taught, in that there's a message to be taught in that recipe, that it's something that people will do.

I'll wheedle the recipe out of the person I'm visiting or make it up myself because I have a different tangent to go to.

There are two kinds of permissions when writing a cookbook.

One is when you use a recipe exactly, and that, you pay for.

You write the publisher and get permission, and then you credit it.

That credit goes in the front of the book, like, "This was reprinted from Mrs. Dull's cookbook 'Southern Cooking,'" and the year it was published.

Most of us do the second way, which is if someone gave us a recipe, we want to acknowledge that person.

If I look at a cookbook when I'm writing a cookbook, I write the name of that book down for my bibliography.

The back of my books always has a bibliography.

"Shrimp & Grits" didn't have a bibliography.

I also will write what we call a headnote to introduce the recipe.

I might say, "I had this first at Joe Bob's house, "and then later I found it in 'The Joy of Cooking,' "but Joe Bob had added thyme and parsley, and instead, I've added coriander seed," and then you give the recipe.

A recipe cannot be copyrighted.

The ingredients of a recipe cannot be copyrighted.

Let's say scrambled eggs is five eggs and a little salt and melted butter, maybe some whipping cream.

They can't copyright that you have eggs, salt, and butter, but if you say, "Heat the butter in the pan, "whisk the eggs separately, pour into the pan, and stir," it's possible somebody could say you copied their recipe if it was written that way.

What you might say instead is, rather than heat the butter, you say, "Melt the butter in a saucepan," rather than a frying pan.

"Meanwhile, beat the eggs vigorously separately, and stir eggs with a wooden spoon."

You've got the same eggs, and you've got the same salt and the same butter, but you have completely rewritten that recipe.

It is the sequential words in a sentence or several sentences that mean that you have stolen a recipe.

However, there are some interesting cases of people that have used very famous recipes that were in the body of knowledge for so long that they became known as that person's recipe, like Joyce Chen's Lemon Chicken.

If you wrote a book and used it, you would be smart to say, "This is my edition of Joyce Chen's Lemon Chicken," rather than trying to pretend you made up the recipe.

Give credit when it's due.

When you give credit, you've got one more person that wants to buy your book.

If you don't, you might find yourself hanging on a rafter.

You always give credit.

My book "Shrimp & Grits," my friend Marion Sullivan and I wrote it together, and shrimp and grits is just-- every restaurant, when I moved to Charleston, had different shrimp and grits.

It became clear that shrimp and grits wasn't like fried chicken.

With fried chicken you know the chicken was fried.

With shrimp and grits, you do not know what you're gonna get.

It can be...shrimp stuffed under the shell with kielbasa!

Theming a book and knowing how to theme a book in this case was that I knew somebody had to start writing down these recipes for shrimp and grits before they went out in the universe.

Of course, the original one was just using shrimp, cooked grits, and lots of butter.

People love color picture books.

Pictures have become more prevalent in recent years as the cost of photography has gone down.

The author frequently doesn't have control over pictures.

The photographer takes the pictures.

They go to the publishers, and the publisher chooses the picture.

The publisher chooses to put them in the book in whatever arrangement they want.

Unless you're a strong author, you usually don't get a lot of say-so about pictures.

And the author, nine times out of ten, pays for the photographer and the pictures, so the decision to put in the pictures directly affects the bottom line of the author as well as the publisher.

You decide to give $10,000 of your income away-- minimum, maybe-- when you're doing a color picture book.

You have to say, I always wanted a picture book, but do I want it that much?

It's a roll of the dice as to pictures, but authors have little control over pictures nine times out of ten.

Well, Pat Conroy's cookbook has me as chapter 1, I guess because I was his first cooking school teacher.

Pat Conroy is a novelist, and just as he did not get my permission to embellish my stories-- and I adore Pat Conroy, but I do think I tell my stories better than he does-- but he didn't have to get my permission.

And if you don't say something libelous about someone, as my husband says, Pat Conroy's chapter about me was what we call an affectionate caricature.

In this case, the nose was a little long, like Pinocchio's, was a little embellished, but he's such a beautiful, lyrical writer that who wouldn't mind being written about.

I did have an old boyfriend I wrote about.

He didn't much like it, but I didn't call him by name.

If somebody can figure out who it's writing about because you write a story about the time you went to dinner and he ordered for you-- remember, food is a control issue-- before you got there, so you got duck.

You cut into the duck, it shot off the plate and down his shirt, and he stalked off.

You rode all the way back for an hour because he thought you did it on purpose.

You don't have to ask any permission because nobody's gonna know it but him unless he's told everybody else.

If he sees the fool in this story, that's his problem.

You don't have to have permission if you don't name a person or describe the situation and person so clearly that you put yourself into a libelous situation.

Some people are even concerned about writing about their former husbands or parents.

They feel they have to get the permission, so sometimes they'll wait till they're dead before they write about them.

Other people reach some accommodation with them, but check with your lawyer if you're really concerned, if you have got something big to say.

It is harder to prove liable than people think it will be.

Oh, it's terribly important.

Sometimes you might just read cookbooks for months before you get around to writing your first recipe.

Right now we're testing recipes for pound cake because I'm doing a book called "Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking."

I'll be darned if, when I looked back at Southern cookbooks, they didn't have the real pound cake, which is a pound of flour, butter, sugar.

I thought, Why is that that they're not using it?

We had to start with the basic one.

It's too sweet, so all the derivations start there.

Do you add baking soda?

They didn't make baking soda till the end of the 18th century, so when did baking soda wind its way in there?

Somebody wanted a lighter cake.

You keep seeing all the derivation-- brown sugar pound cake-- and it goes from there, but start at the beginning.

There are things you shouldn't do in writing a cookbook.

You shouldn't steal other people's ideas.

It always backfires, among other reasons.

You should always give people credit.

You shouldn't just write the recipe and not test it.

You have to test it after it's written because it's easy to leave out one ingredient.

Anyone that has written down their mother's recipe and gone back 30 years later will wonder why they left out potatoes in the potato casserole.

It's real easy to leave something out, so you have to proofread, and the best way is to cook it again from that recipe.

You shouldn't just think you've got it.

What you should do is, determine who you want to buy this book.

Do you want a little lady that drives by antique stores and wants a book with an old-time cover and a spiral back and is looking for familiar things, or do you want someone who wants a gussied-up book that has elaborate cakes in it?

Who is the person you're thinking about when you write this book?

You shouldn't confuse it.

If you're writing for the lady that's gonna buy the book and publish her own book and make a lot of money 'cause she knows her market, you're gonna write a different recipe than the one that does the cakes.

A chef has the hardest time writing a recipe because a chef uses a lot of difficult words for people, like, um... lard the beef.

Unless you know that larding the beef means putting a strip of fat in a needle that clamps it and then pulling it through-- or barding it-- you are not going to buy that book, so making it user-friendly to the people that want it.

By the same token, a chef probably doesn't buy a book that calls for... half a teaspoon of mace because he's probably thinking a teaspoon in feeding 30 people.

He might buy it to read, but not necessarily to cook from.

So knowing your market is very important, knowing who you feel passionate about teaching is more important than anything.

Once you love that person and see them in your mind, then you are going to do the right thing for them.

It's gonna get rid of the should-nots that would come up.

Look at the style of different cookbooks.

See what style you want in your writing and in your recipe presentation.

Those are important things.

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