Miranda Lambert Cooks Up Some Culinary Hits in Her ‘Pretty B*tchin’ Kitchen’ With First Cookbook

Jessica Nicholson
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Miranda Lambert is known for conveying her stories in song, but with her first cookbook, Y’all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty B*tchin’ Kitchen (Dey Street Books), out today (April 25), the reigning Academy of Country Music Awards entertainer of the year is bringing fans deeper into her story, and sharing delicious recipes along the way.

“I’ve never written a book before, and I haven’t because I didn’t feel called to, because I didn’t know what that would look like,” Lambert tells Billboard, seated upstairs at her Nashville restaurant, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. “This just happened so organically. I’ve never shared some of my personal happy times, and memories and some hard stuff other than in my music. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, so I feel like this is maybe a side of me that my fans haven’t gotten to see and dig a little bit deeper.”

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Down-home friendship and mentorship are the magic ingredients behind the new book’s origins. During the social distancing induced by the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Lambert was looking for a way to stay connected with her mother Bev Lambert, as well as a circle of longtime friends whom she affectionately calls her “aunts,” and “The Ya-Yas,” including Denise Watson (whom Lambert calls Neicy), Vicki Plaxco (Princess V), and Heidi Prather (Quaheida). She was also looking to honor her grandmother Nonny.

“We were regularly FaceTiming, and we started doing what we called our ‘Chopped Cookoff,’ where our husbands would all pick ingredients and we had to make something with the ingredients — and we couldn’t Google it, that was the rule,” Lambert recalls of her pandemic-era cooking crew. “But then we started talking about how cool it would be if our favorite recipes — the ones we’ve had for so long from all these memories we’ve made together — were all in one place. Three years later, here we are.”

The 290-page book features a hearty blend of stories, memories and more than 50 recipes, covering appetizers, casseroles, entrees, drinks, desserts and favorites — including banana pudding, Vicki’s deviled eggs, Bev’s chicken salad, whiskey cupcakes, Neicy’s gumbo, chili and jalapeño cornbread.

In the book, Lambert calls her grandmother Nonny “The Original Queen of the Pretty B*tchin’ Kitchen,” and a source of inspiration for Lambert’s love of a “high-low” mix of the glam and the everyday — whether in cooking or fashion. “She came from not a lot — a humble background — and she made a fancy life for herself, because she served food on crystal dishes and used the good China at Christmas every year,” Lambert shares. “Those same hosting lessons were passed down to my mom and me.”

Another recipe that brings back sweet memories is her Nonny’s Thanksgiving dressing, made with eggs, sage and celery.

“Before we lost her, my brother Luke and I filmed her making her dressing. She does something when she makes it and we can never figure it out. She always said, ‘It’s in the hands.’ I know that her hands were magic, because none of us have been able to master it.”

Y’all Eat Yet?, which Lambert wrote with author/journalist Holly Gleason (Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives), includes plenty of everyday dishes, but also some recipes for those special moments — such as “Bev Lambert’s Famous Meatloaf,” a tasty concoction that incorporates ground beef, pork sausage, yellow onion and Worcestershire sauce. In the book, Lambert calls “The Loaf” “The one thing that’ll get the [engagement] ring!”while adding that the sought-after dish has worked not only for herself, but friends, including her Pistol Annies bandmate Ashley Monroe.

Even with seven No. 1s on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart and 38 ACM Awards — the most wins for any artist — Lambert had had to weather highs and lows, both personally and professionally, and she’s turned to her fellow “Ya-Yas” again and again.

“There’s a glue that’s held me together through this crazy entertainment business. Every recipe I could think of is a version that I learned from these ladies,” Lambert says. “I learned so much about being a woman and making a house a home and was prepared for all that life throws at you by living vicariously through watching them. You can’t make old friends and that’s what this book is about.”

With Y’all Eat Yet?, Lambert follows a lengthy dynasty of country artists with cookbooks, including Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, Jr., Little Big Town’s Kimberly Schlapman, Martina McBride, Kix Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.

But Y’all Eat Yet? doesn’t simply extend the canon of country cookbooks — Lambert includes a favorite dish from one of her favorite country vocalists. Yearwood’s turkey recipe, which Lambert pulled from the pages of former publication Country Weekly years ago, has been adapted and is now a staple in the Lambert household.

The book is the latest of Lambert’s many business ventures, the list of which already includes Casa Rosa, as well as her Idyllwind clothing line and the Wanda June homewares line. Looking ahead, she doesn’t rule out the idea of adding some type of cooking show.

“We did some content footage at my farm a couple of months ago and we had never cooked on camera before. All of our photo shoots and content days have been excuses to drink together because that’s what we like to do,” Lambert says with a laugh. “But it was fun to see these things come to life. We were doing what we would normally do but with a camera, so it was fun.”

The kitchen table, where Lambert says she has written so many of her songs, is a place to share food, but also a safe, nonjudgmental space to share hopes, fears, dreams, heartaches and laughter, Lambert says. And it’s a place where the country icon draws closer to her collaborators, whether bonding over a song or a recipe.

“I’m a storyteller, so I feel like food tells just as much of a story as words and songs do — there are so many memories attached to food — a smell, or a song you heard for the first time. Recipes and food, a lot of the magic started around the dinner table. This book is a reminder to surround yourself with great friends and spend quality time together, and gives permission to be imperfect. It’s less about what it looks like and more about the time spent and who you are with.”

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