I love to cook whenever that is possible, but I hate to follow a recipe. This is particularly irritating to my husband who also loves to cook but follows a recipe to the letter. We are both blessed to carry with us many tried and true recipes and favorite dishes from our mothers and grandmothers. While loving to cook and entertain is definitely our rarely-used passion, it so often turns out that we only get to do it during the holidays. We host Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at our home in Franklin, and I love cooking all day and watching the Macy’s parade or endless Hallmark Christmas movies on television while doing so. I let Johnny tend to his things and I have my favorites, which to be perfectly honest, emanate primarily from my favorite chef and muse, Miss Daisy.

 

I have loved Daisy and her food since I was a little girl and my mother and I would go to Miss Daisy’s Tearoom for a special lady’s lunch out. Some of the same things I ate when I was a child are the same things I long for once or twice (or ten times) a year. Thank goodness Daisy has carry-out and keeps many of my favorites stocked all year long at Miss Daisy’s Kitchen. Of course, you can special order your holiday fare–and yes, I have been known to do so in a pinch when getting ready to host twenty people every November and again in December. However, with enough time, I do prefer the fun of doing it myself and so, armed with my copy of the famous Recipes from Miss Daisy’s well known yellow-backed cookbook, I am able to recreate many of my family’s holiday favorites in my own kitchen.

 

Here are a few of our annual must-have’s–our holiday memories would not be complete without them–and so we say thank you to Miss Daisy for always being part of our holiday meals. I hope you will give these a try yourself or you can order a multitude of dishes and desserts from her at missdaisyking.com.

 

This year, Tennessee’s “First Lady of Southern Cooking,” Daisy King, celebrates fifty years in business. Daisy was the founder and chef of the renowned Miss Daisy’s Tearoom and is now the proprietor and executive chef of Miss Daisy’s Kitchen in Franklin.

 

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Daisy has been a cook since the age of six, when she “baked a Five Flavor Pound Cake from my grandmother Linnie Angleine Fraser Deaton’s recipe” and still serves that cake today at Miss Daisy’s Kitchen. From pound cake, Daisy progressed to learning the cooking skills that can only come from growing up on a farm. “My grandmother taught me how to dry fruit from our orchard, can and pickle vegetables from the garden, roll out biscuits by hand, and fry chicken. I even learned how to churn butter.” A move into the city pushed cooking into the background until college at Belmont University, where she earned a degree in home economics and journalism.

 

LUNCHEON AT THE TEA ROOM

The story of Daisy King’s career in the restaurant business is as interesting as the food she serves. In the mid-1970’s when Carter’s Court in downtown Franklin was still on the drawing board, the developers recognized the need for a place where ladies could lunch. After a turn of the century house was moved back from Columbia Avenue to its present location, upon seeing it people exclaimed: “That’s it! That’s got to be a tearoom.” Thus, the old house was given a new lease on life and with much work and ingenuity, became Miss Daisy’s Tearoom.

 

FIRST LADY OF SOUTHERN COOKING

Once the quality of her food and the gracious and sublimely southern hospitality found in both the restaurants and in Miss Daisy herself, became known–Miss Daisy soon became the “First Lady of Southern Cooking.” The author of fourteen cookbooks, including the million selling Recipes from Miss Daisy’s, she has appeared on the “Today Show,” “CBS This Morning,” QVC, NPT’s “Word on Words” and for thirty years, as the perennial guest chef on Nashville’s WTVF-TV’s “Talk of the Town.”

 

A LEGACY OF FOOD AND HOSPITALITY

After the closure of the tearoom in 1991, where she opened first in Franklin and then in Nashville, Daisy went on to serve a consultant to major grocery store chains and gourmet markets, and as a media spokesperson for Pillsbury, Swift’s Sausage and Bisquick.

 

Long one of America’s most celebrated regional cooks, she’s prepared her unique brand of “Southern cooking from the heart” for country music legends, television stars, U.S. Senators and most importantly, for friends and family.