Read an Excerpt
In the world I was born into, biscuit dough is the best toy, and children teethe on oxtail bones: soul food runs through my family tree like kudzu vines in the South. On my blog and YouTube channel, I Heart Recipes, and now in this book, I bring those Southern roots into my Seattle kitchen and share everything my mom taught me, everything my grandmother taught her, and all of my inherited, long-nurtured love of soul food with the world.
I was just three or four years old when my aunt Frances first brought me into the kitchen, plopped me on a stool, and let my chubby little baby fingers dig into the flour, salt, and spices while she cooked. I patted the pork chops through the breading, following her on how much I needed of each ingredient, then handed them over to her to deep-fry. It was the first time
I cooked soul food, but it certainly wasn’t the first time I ate it, and it was only the beginning of my lifelong love of making the kind of food that sticks to your ribs and warms your heart.
From the moment I could walk, I followed my mom along with her mom and sisters to the Parkside Nursing Home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood,
where they whipped up grand batches of macaroni and cheese,
meatloaf, and gumbo for the residents, and I took the scraps they handed me and mimicked their actions, building my own pretend dishes in a corner of the commercial kitchen. It was probably illegal, and I know they wouldn’t let you do that kind of thing today, but there was nowhere else for me to go while they worked—and nowhere I loved to be more than making trouble at their feet as the smells of soul food wafted around us.
By the time I was five, I stepped up to the stove to make real food, cooking up a big ol’ batch of my favorite spaghetti, and that became my dish.
Everyone in the family has something they’re known for—my mom’s is her potato salad—that they always have to bring to family picnics and holiday parties. I still make my spaghetti just the same way, and it still brings the same Southern mentality to my Pacific Northwest kitchen, just like it did when I wasn’t even tall enough to stir the sauce without a little bit of help.
Because even though I was born and raised in Seattle, my cooking is firmly rooted in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My grandma—my mom’s mom—and her husband, my grandfather, left Baton Rouge during the Great Migration and headed north for a better life, pregnant with the first of what would be eighteen children. (Yeah, you read that right—eighteen kids. That’s why
I’ve got so many aunts that made sure I knew how to cook!) My grandma found that better life in Seattle, where my mom was born the youngest of the six girls, along with twelve brothers, and my grandmother took over as the queen bee of an always-busy kitchen. When those kids grew up, they all had a few kids of their own—that’s why I’m always known as Cousin Rosie—
and she fed them too. She never lost her role as a Southern belle, whipping out Creole and Cajun cooking that fed her family’s heart and soul (and a lot of the neighbors too) and kept them remembering where they came from.
With a giant family like that, every gathering was an event. Sunday supper always drew a crowd, and there was never any shortage of hungry mouths, so anyone who wanted to cook a dish was always welcome to step into the kitchen. But there was one day of the year that took even our family’s big appetites beyond their wildest dreams.
Christmas with my family was the biggest, most delicious celebration you’ve ever seen. We would have a turkey, a ham, and a giant pot of gumbo on the table. There were collard greens, candied yams, and my mom’s famous potato salad, which might be the best ever—except for mine! There were cornbread rolls and my grandma’s special fried chicken made with waffle batter. But the best part was dessert. Or, rather, all the desserts.
See, my grandparents didn’t have much money, and they couldn’t possibly afford gifts for all those children, so the present was the Christmas dessert table. By the time the next generation rolled in—my cousins and me—the tradition had solidified, and anything less than every dessert imaginable would have let the crowd down. Buttermilk chocolate cake, sweet potato pie, peach cobbler, pineapple upside-down cake, and tea cakes (those were my great-grandmother’s recipe—she wasn’t a great cook, but she made these so well that nothing else mattered) all spilled over the top of a table in the living room. It was a sweet feast that seemed to have no end.
My beloved grandma died when I was only two, but I carry on her legacy as a cook in my kitchen and in my name: she was Rosa Mae, and I was named
Rosemary after her. Funny, the name Mayes actually came from my husband,
though! I grew up eating the recipes she’d passed on to her daughters and was somehow the only kid in my generation that dared to step into the kitchen (though you better believe my cousins call me up when they need a taste of home). Her husband, my grandfather, cared for me and raised me on photos and stories of my namesake and the wonders that came from her oven and stove. There was never any question that I would follow in her footsteps, right into the kitchen.
The recipes were never written down, though, so by the time I grew up and tried to make all the dishes I’d heard of, I had only tidbits and lessons passed on by aunts and tastes nabbed at family reunions back in Baton
Rouge. So I started recording them, recreating each recipe, making them over and over in the kitchen until they matched my memory of them—and the uncles and aunts all gave them the thumbs-up. Then I would share them with my online audience.
See, I was lucky that pieces of all of these delicious Southern, Creole, and
Cajun recipes trickled down to me. You name it—gumbo, smothered chicken,
collard greens, sweet cornbread—I make it all. But at some point, I noticed that a lot of my friends didn’t know their way around the kitchen. They never patted biscuit dough on the corner of the counter at the Parkside. They weren’t fortunate enough to get their grandmother’s oxtail recipes from their mom or to learn to fry pork chops with their aunt Frances. So I became the friend and cousin that everyone called for help—the Butterball-turkey helpline for year-round soul food assistance, Cousin Rosie here to help.
Meanwhile, around 2009, I was getting a bit burnt out with my work as a patient care technician and certified nursing assistant. I’d been at the same place, doing end-of-life care for five years, and I was emotionally wrung out.
I worked twelve hours a day, had a young son, and didn’t do much for myself.
“You need a hobby,” my husband suggested. (He was right.) On my birthday,
I was bored and he had to work. And so, in a move I had no idea how much would change my life, I turned a camera on myself and started a video blog.
At first it was a mishmash of all things I was good at—an online diary peppered with makeup tips and tutorials or long monologues about whatever was on my mind. Then one day, I decided to record myself making dinner.
I made fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and peas. My brother came over (he’s always over if there’s fried chicken around) and recorded it on his girlfriend’s brand-new camera. When I posted it on my video channel at the time, it went nuts.
It all made perfect sense. There weren’t a lot of soul food blogs out there—it was almost like soul food didn’t exist online. There were baking blogs everywhere, seventeen million different diet blogs, and all sorts of niches that were filled, but not this one. I knew that there had to be an audience for authentic soul food recipes—and that first video proved it.
I just needed to call on the lessons that my mom, her sisters, and—indirectly—
my grandma had taught me, and I could put that all to good use.
I created my blog and YouTube channel and focused on Southern and soul food. The first five years that I had them, I was juggling the blog and channel with my full-time job. But then big companies started looking for my videos, and people wanted to pay me for what I had created out of my love for my food roots. They saw what I was doing and knew it was a worthwhile investment. It was all a bit of fate mixed with luck, kind of a total accident that changed my life.
Still, I wasn’t going to complain about it—I was going to jump in with both feet. In 2014 I decided to take a leap of faith and quit my full-time job to start blogging as a career. Since then I’ve gained a lot of online family members via YouTube, my blog at IHeartRecipes.com, Facebook, Pinterest,
and even Instagram. My family was big to start with, but my following makes even my seventeen aunts and uncles and their families look small in comparison.
And that’s why I’m always Cousin Rosie—online and in person—and
I’m still sharing old-fashioned, authentic soul food like my grandma made,
along with anything else that I can cook up. I find recipe inspiration everywhere and anywhere I go.
I love to eat, so if I have something at a restaurant that I like, I want to re-create it at home—you’ll see favorites from places I grew up on, like the
Blueberry Cornbread Waffles on page 23. Or when I’ve got a craving, I have to figure out what’s going to satisfy it (usually it involves one of my many variations on macaroni and cheese). I come up with a lot of ideas on my own, but also my subscribers and fans constantly email me or write to me on social media asking for recipes. I’m eager to please and want to make sure that everybody is fed, just like my grandma did, so if there’s something
I don’t have a recipe for yet, I just play around in the kitchen until I come up with the perfect one. But I always put my Cousin Rosie spin on it—whether that’s adding a Cajun or Creole touch to it, making it easier with modern appliances, or adding a totally unexpected ingredient, because I heart
(creating) recipes!
