Heaven, heartache and the power of deviled eggs

Trisha Yearwood is known for her gorgeous voice and her marriage to Garth Brooks. But, as she told Salon, she can also whip up some mean comfort food.

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Read more: Nashville, Celebrities, Country Music, Cooking, Recipes, Life

May 24, 2008 | Trisha Yearwood's fans, if those of us gathered at a Viking store and cooking school in a suburb outside Nashville, Tenn., are representative, are mostly Southern or Midwestern white women in our 30s and 40s, but some of us are men, some of us are gay, and at least one of us has a mohawk. What we have in common, besides that we love Yearwood, is that through local radio contests sponsored by Clear Channel Communications stations in various American cities, 34 of us have won a cooking lesson with the country singer to celebrate the publication of her bestselling new cookbook, "Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes From My Family to Yours." This is how we've found ourselves in the sort of mini-amphitheater where a college class might be held, except that instead of a professor standing in front of us, it's Yearwood, and instead of syllabuses waiting on the desks when we entered, there were deviled eggs.

OK, so I didn't actually win a radio contest, but I called Yearwood's publicist to ask if I could tag along, and I'm here as a fan as much as a journalist. Or maybe it's some combination, because, while exclaiming with contest winners over how tall and pretty Yearwood looks, and how delicious her deviled eggs taste, I'm also trying to find answers to some pressing questions. For example: Given that Yearwood has led an awfully interesting life, why'd she choose to write a cookbook instead of a memoir? Is it weird for her to be married, as of 2005, to Garth Brooks since she's very successful but he's very, very, very successful? And finally: What exactly did I do wrong the other night when I tried the recipe for Uncle Wilson's Baked Onions?

Yearwood, as you may or may not know, has a gorgeous, powerful voice. The winner of three Grammy awards and two female vocalist of the year Country Music Awards, she's had nine No. 1 singles, and 11 of her albums have gone gold or platinum. Though she doesn't write her own music, since releasing her first album in 1991, she has cultivated a consistent tone and focus. Has your man left you heartbroken and you just wish everyone would quit telling you to get over him? Yearwood's been there, as she sings about in "Everybody Knows." Have you ever given your man his walking papers, then wished you hadn't? So has she, in "Believe Me Baby (I Lied)." Have you found yourself endlessly revisiting what you and your man used to have even though it's long finished? Yearwood feels your pain in "Where Are You Now." And yet, in the midst of all this man-inflicted torment, do you sometimes feel flashes of you-go-girl empowerment and optimism for the future in spite of the fact you're not a Size 6? Well, have a listen to "I'm Still Alive," "Real Live Woman" or "Not a Bad Thing."

Lest it seem presumptuous to read autobiographical elements into her music, Yearwood, 43, actually invites this, telling us during the cooking lesson that she chooses songs "that feel like they're mine. I like songs for the same reason you do, songs that sound like someone was spying on your life." To be fair, Yearwood does sometimes sing about love gone right, especially about the promise of an early relationship, and she even sings the occasional song that has not much at all to do with love but focuses more on, say, the pleasures of country living. She's most well-known for her first No. 1 hit, "She's in Love With the Boy," which is one of the songs Yearwood will perform for us later today, but first there are meatloaf, green beans with ham, and brownies to attend to.

In person, Yearwood is warm, energetic and quick-witted. "You guys didn't really think I cooked, did you?" she asks as she shows us how to make several recipes; meanwhile, the same recipes, already prepared by Viking employees, are brought out for instant gratification sampling. As we watch and chew, Yearwood offers cooking tips and other banter -- "Mom said never open an egg over your recipe," she says cheerfully before proceeding to open an egg directly over the mixing bowl for the meatloaf. She also reassures us that she washed her hands right before the demonstration, tells us that when a recipe calls for room temperature butter and she's forgotten to get it out ahead of time, she'll cut it up and set it on the windowsill, and explains, "I'm about using as few dishes as possible. You know how that is." Oh, and the pressure cooker is, she says, "just a wonderful invention, and they don't really explode anymore."

More than once, tabloids have razzed Yearwood about her weight, and there's something refreshing about a celebrity whose reaction to such criticism isn't to become a Jenny Craig spokesperson but instead to publish a cookbook featuring multiple recipes that start with melting a stick -- or two -- of butter. And, although she has spoken publicly about her weight struggles, on this day, Yearwood is downright trim; in fact, with her long, straight, very blond hair, navy blue sweater, fitted jeans and jewelry, she looks kind of like the head cheerleader 25 years out of high school if the head cheerleader had aged as well as possible without medical intervention. At the same time, she's not so skinny that you doubt she actually eats, let alone cooks. "I love potatoes -- they're my favorite food," she announces, mentioning shortly afterward, "I like a gooey cookie." And she's only more effusive in the pages of her cookbook, where she writes, variously, "I love cheese!" "I love any salad that has bacon as an ingredient!" and, "So to answer the burning question, can you make an entire meal out of sausage ball appetizers? Yes!"

The idea of writing an autobiography did come up, Yearwood explains, but she wasn't tempted because, as she later tells me in an interview, "I don't interest myself that much. Maybe in 20 years, I'll have something to say, but at this point, I feel like it'd be Part One."

A cookbook, on the other hand, seemed like fun to her. Raised in small-town Georgia by a teacher mother and banker father who both were avid cooks -- the cookbook is dedicated to her late father, Jack, who died in 2005 but shows up in photos making yeast bread, barbecued chicken and collard greens -- Yearwood decided the project should be a family affair. Her mother, Gwen, and sister Beth are credited as co-authors and, indeed, the title and many of the recipes come from a 40th birthday gift they made for Yearwood after she moved to Oklahoma: a binder they called "Georgia Recipes for an Oklahoma Kitchen."

The result of this labor of culinary love manages to be glossy and even kind of beautiful at the same time that it feels genuinely down-home. The lush photographs of the food, including shots taken for the book at a Yearwood family picnic, are interspersed with older photos from when Yearwood was growing up. Individual recipes are accompanied by personal commentary from the Yearwood ladies of both the practical and the more conversational varieties. For instance, accompanying the Baked Ham With Brown Sugar Honey Glaze recipe, "From Gwen: If you don't want or need a whole ham, you can bake half a ham, but choose the butt (meatier) end rather than the shank end." Or, also from Gwen for Mama's Cornmeal Hushpuppies: "The idea for adding jalapeños comes from Herb's sister Patty." Having read through the cookbook at length, I have to confess I still have no idea who either Herb or his sister Patty is, but it's hard not to be charmed by these sorts of details. In fact, as you peruse, you may find yourself wishing you, too, were a Yearwood.

Given that the closest most of us can come is just to eat like one, I attempted three of Yearwood's recipes before venturing down to Nashville: Garlic Grits Casserole (tasty, apparently, because my husband ate four servings), Easy Peach Cobbler (delicious, and also in danger of being submerged under its river of melted butter) and the aforementioned Uncle Wilson's Baked Onions. With just three ingredients, all of them pretty hard to wreck -- onions, bacon and butter -- Uncle Wilson's recipe seemed a sure-fire hit, but when I made it, the onions were about to disintegrate after being in the oven for well over an hour, yet the bacon still wasn't fully cooked. I was prepared, for the sake of research, to forge ahead and eat them anyway when my husband wisely if inelegantly warned, "You don't fuck with bacon." So instead I threw them in the trash.

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