Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George on Their Beloved Childhood Recipes

23.09.2024 - 21:29 / bhg.com / Lauren Phillips

Aubrie Pick

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.

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.

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.

Rachel: I think the meatloaf is