Miranda Lambert talks food, fame and female friendship: 'I surround myself with people that will call me on my s***'
In a new cookbook-as-memoir, the country storyteller shares core memories through her love language, food, including a recipe for engagement meatloaf that "worked for me — twice!”
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“Growing up in Texas, watching my mom and her friends, I saw the way pitching in, working together, loving music, and being there for each other are the greatest gifts you can have in life,” country superstar Miranda Lambert states in her new confessional cookbook, Y'all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty B*tchin' Kitchen. “All these women would come together, cut up, sometimes dress up, and share everything life could possibly have them. And 99% of the time, they were together in the kitchen, making deviled eggs and chili, drinking whatever struck their fancy, and talk about whatever the local news, secrets, hopes, and song on the radio might be.”
Y'all Eat Yet?, co-written with veteran music journalist Holly Gleason, isn’t so much a cookbook as it is a memoir, telling tales of Lambert’s core memories through her obvious love language: food. (There’s even one salsa recipe called “Love in a Jar.”) And more than anything, it’s a heart- and stomach-warming story of female bonding, starring a recurring cast of characters called the “Ya-Yas” which include Lambert’s mother, Bev; maternal grandmother, Nonny; and a tight-knit tribe of glamorous family friends, including one nicknamed Princess V. “They were so strong and had all gone through so much, and I think watching them love life and celebrate it and cry together and smoke about it and drink about it was really good for me to see,” Lambert tells Yahoo Entertainment.
Lambert has always been a skilled storyteller, and she points out to Yahoo, “I feel like a lot of the stories that have come into my music were started around the dinner table.” Growing up “with very little money” in Lindale, Texas, raised by parents who were private detectives and later became ministers, Lambert witnessed the power of female solidarity when mama Bev (a “stickler for ‘we're having dinner as a family’ at least six nights a week”) opened their bitchin’ kitchen and home to women in need — an experience that inspired one of Lambert’s signature songs, “Gunpowder & Lead.”
“We took in abused women and children when I was a teenager, and they would live with us till they could get on their feet,” Lambert recalls. “These were really strong women going through really hard things, and I watched some of them come out of the dark right there in front of my eyes. And I think that's because they were surrounded by love from my mom's friends and my mom. Having somebody just support you, especially a group of women — it's great to celebrate the highs, but the lows are where you really need 'em. I got to see some ugly parts of the world, and some reality. So, I think that my actual beginning of my career started around the table. I was very safe, but it was an important life lesson of my mom and dad saying, ‘You know, it's not always gonna be roses. It's not always gonna be great. It's not always gonna be easy.’ And I'm glad because I didn't go into the real world — especially into the music business — thinking that.”
Lambert first performed live at age 13, when her supportive mother literally pushed her onstage at New Braunfels, Texas’s Gruene Hall during a family vacation. (This incident is warmly remembered in a cookbook chapter titled “Road Trippin’, Boobs, and Tubes: Trips, Chip, and Good Times.”) But she came to national fame at age 19 when — because she was “tired of playing shitty bars” — she took a big career risk and signed up for the TV talent show Nashville Star in 2003. Lambert, who placed third but still won a Sony record deal, admits she’s “glad people have kind of forgotten” about her reality television breakthrough by now, and recalls she did sense some competitiveness from other Nashville ingenues 20 years ago. Thankfully, the girl-powered life lessons she’d learned from the Ya-Yas stuck with her.
“The drama or whatever, I think a lot of it stemmed from insecurity,” Lambert muses. “I feel like I had a little bit of that at the beginning, I mean, I was signed when I was 19, and there were 20 other blonde girls that were about 19 years old signed to labels in Nashville at that time! But what it did for me, instead of being catty, is it just pushed me to make sure who I was in my space and find my own lane. And that didn't mean I had to pass somebody else or squash somebody else to get there. I really made it a point to stand out in my own way, instead of taking it out on other people.”
Lambert confesses that her sudden fame “was a lot at once,” and the scrutiny over appearance — especially when her love of “trucker snacks” and her grueling touring schedule made “those first couple of years not very healthy for me” — was tough. “I've had to deal with the ups and downs of [weight and body image] my whole life, and definitely the road makes it harder to find good food and find time to exercise and all of that. It took me a minute to adjust all of that,” she says. But once again, support from other women pulled her through. “It was the fans who helped me with that, because girls would come up to me and be like, ‘Thanks for just being normal-sized and confident in who you are, no matter what size you are.’ And that always saved me for my own self when I would get doubtful or worried about it. I feel so thankful that we could lift each other up in that way. I think that's part of the reason I have the career I have.”
Lambert, who admits, “I love eating way more than I love cooking,” still loves to indulge, and Y’all Eat Yet? features many of her easy comfort-food favorites, like deviled eggs, potato salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, black-eyed peas, green bean casserole, canned cream of mushroom soup, peanut butter pie, cheese balls, rum balls, sausage balls, and, yes, trucker snacks. “We made a point in a book to make sure people don't think we're not partying and having all these recipes seven days a week — that's why we save up for it. Like, we all plan we're gonna have a girls' weekend, and we know we're gonna get to love on each other and love food, and not worry about it. But I think it's important to take breaks from worrying about [weight] on the forefront of our minds all the time,” Lambert explains. “Especially if you're in the public eye, it's like, you get judged if you just ate a Whopper that weekend. It's like, ‘Guys, I just had a good weekend! Sorry, it was just beer and burgers!’ I learned to let it go way early, because it doesn't matter. It’s strangers’ opinions of you, people that don't know who you are. You can't let that get to you.”
The book’s most talked-about recipe, however, will no doubt be “The Loaf,” sort of the Lambert family version of that famous mythical Engagement Chicken dish. The meatloaf is hyped in Y’all Eat Yet? as “The One Thing That’ll Get the Ring,” and Lambert tells Yahoo Entertainment with a chuckle, “It worked for me — twice!” ( presumably referring to her marriage proposals from first husband, Blake Shelton, and current husband, Brendan McLoughlin). “And it's worked for a tons of friends of mine. It's one of those things where it's like a family staple and kind of sacred to us. If we care about someone enough to say, ‘OK we're having the Loaf,’ that means you might be here for a hot minute. And don't know what the magic is, but it's pretty good.”
Also in wedding-centric section of Y’all Eat Yet? called “White Trash Weddings and Baby Showers,” Lambert writes about her own “Trashy-Ho” bridal shower (complete with sloppy joes and Jell-O shots) and a “White Trash Baby Shower” she threw for her Pistol Annies bandmate Ashley Monroe (who actually got engaged with some help from the Loaf). When asked if the term “White Trash,” which is also the title of a popular Lambert song, isn’t all that politically correct these days, Lambert just shrugs. “I mean, I feel like you can't say anything anymore, in my opinion,” she says. “Like, if everybody loves you, you're doing something wrong. I celebrate how I grew up. I grew up with no money, but with such a great foundation, and I think that should be celebrated.”
As evidenced by Y’all Eat Yet?’s 50 “opposite of bougie” family recipes, Lambert has never forgotten her roots. “I surround myself with the ladies in this book, like my manager who is a very strong, amazing woman — we've been together 20 years. I surround myself with people that will call me on my shit,” says the singer, who in March 2023 announced that she was parting ways with Sony Music Nashville after two decades. “I look at some of the really young celebrities out there and see there's a circle of people that are sort of just saying ‘yes’ to everything, and everything's so chaotic. It’s really important for me to remind myself that I am exactly the same as I was, not better, because I think that can happen so easily.”
As Lambert and Gleason explain in Y'all Eat Yet? Welcome to the Pretty B*tchin' Kitchen, “The Bitchin’ Kitchen isn’t a place after all. It’s how the people you love make you feel when you’re with them.” So, in makes sense to wrap Lambert’s Yahoo Entertainment interview by asking her who’d she invite to her dream dinner party. “My grandma,” she says, referring to head Ya-Ya Nonny, who died of cancer in 2019, “and probably Elvis and Merle Haggard. Oh… and Tammy Wynette!” And what recipe would she serve them? Lambert answers, without missing a beat: “One-hundred percent, Mom's meatloaf.”
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