Publicity shot of American singer Dolly Parton, 1977. Credit RCA Records

Dolly Parton’s Delicious Culinary Legacy

12 Minute read

26 Aug 2026

Julie Tremaine

Writer

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The country icon understood that life’s simple pleasures were meant to be savored.

“We dedicate this book to every person who has ever raided a garden, opened a refrigerator, held a spatula, or put a skillet or a pot on the stove to furnish love and nourishment to those they hold dear,” Dolly Parton and her sister Rachel Parton George wrote in Good Lookin’ Cookin’, “and to those who believe that good food and good times are the next best thing to pure love.”

To call Dolly just a country singer would be like calling butter just an ingredient. People like me who have loved her our whole lives love her for her music, yes, but for so many other reasons. Her iconic acting roles. Her indomitable spirit. Her singular maximalist style. Her ability to see the best in people, and to help them succeed through initiatives like funding higher education for any employee at Dollywood, her theme park in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. Her endless drive to make the world a better place through her vast charity efforts, like the more than 300 million books she has sent young kids for free through her Imagination Library.

But she was also a great cook, and a true epicurean. When the news broke that Dolly had died on Aug. 25 after a brief battle with cancer, I didn’t immediately put on one of the albums I know by heart, or turn on one of her movies that I can quote line by line. I turned to her cookbooks. The kind of comfort I needed when faced with the loss of Dolly Parton was her comfort food.

Good Lookin’ Cookin’ came out in 2024, a collaboration between sisters that doesn’t just share their recipes, but gives us a glimpse into Parton family celebrations, a rare insight into the icon’s private life. As I paged through it, I sought out what I didn’t know about her before. Dolly’s favorite meal, her sister wrote, was Rachel’s chicken and dumplings, which she would make every January 19. “Rachel always makes this special for me on my birthday,” Dolly added in a note. “I’m so busy doing other things, I sometimes forget my own birthday until she says, ‘Come on over!’”

Dolly wasn’t the fanciest or most refined person. She loved what she loved, wholly and unabashedly: wearing too much makeup, adorning herself in rhinestones and sequins, digging into a homemade meal she fixed just for her and husband Carl Dean. “I’ll cook the stuff that I know we love,” she told People in 2020. “And I pack it up in a picnic basket. And then we’ll go find some riverbank somewhere with our little camper, park, have a picnic.”

Dolly always understood that food was one of life’s supreme pleasures. She loved to talk about it, and she loved to fantasize about it. “My weaknesses are food and men — in that order,” she famously said. In her 2012 Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire, when asked about her idea of perfect happiness, she said: “A big loaded baked potato and a good book with time to eat it and read it.”

Food is also one of her most effective storytelling tools, at the center of some of her most famous songs. Her 1984 song “Tennessee Homesick Blues,” the one that added “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world” to the lexicon of Dollyisms, recounts some of her favorite childhood memories of growing up in the Smoky Mountains. In the song, she longs to be back at the family’s fishing hole, “eating green apples and waiting for the fish to bite,” and recalls Sunday suppers after church, “eating grits and gravy and country ham.”

“What I wouldn’t give for a little bitty taste of mama’s homemade chocolate cake,” Dolly sings. “Tennessee homesick blues running through my head.”

That love of food started with her mother Avie Lee Parton, who kept an impoverished family of 14 living in a two-room cabin fed and happy with the barest of supplies. For Avie Lee, the key to happiness in life was a recipe: “Half a cup of love, a teaspoon of caring, and a dash of humility topped with compassion.” That recipe is displayed on the wall at Song & Hearth, the restaurant at Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort; it hangs above the buffet station where guests serve themselves Stone Soup, Avie Lee’s signature meal, the one she would make when one of the kids needed some extra love.

“She would announce that we were having stone soup for supper and send us all out to pick out a pebble,” Parton wrote in her 1994 memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. The soup required a rock as the special ingredient, but only one, so the kids tried their best to find the perfect one.

“We took it seriously, as if the stones actually had some power to make the soup better,” she wrote. “I suppose if that many kids believe a rock can make soup taste better, it can.”

Inevitably, Avie Lee would choose the stone from the child who could use the boost. “I can remember the feeling of having my stone picked to go in the soup,” she went on. “It’s a warm feeling, a sense of being needed, and of knowing, or at least believing, that you have had a hand in feeding your whole family for a day. In that sense, there was magic in those stones and a lot of wisdom in that mother.”

Her family’s food is at the center of Dollywood itself. Parton’s theme park, in her hometown in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, is an homage to the Appalachia she grew up in: its music, its crafts and trades, the warmth of its people, the cuisine of its culture. Theme park food doesn’t get much respect from lovers of great food and drink, but Dollywood is the exception, regularly bringing in awards for its culinary offerings and rare accolades from top food publications.

One of my most prized possessions is my grandmother’s copy of the original Dollywood cookbook, Dollywood Presents Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking. Inside, in blue ink, she wrote, “August 1990, Pigeon Forge, Tenn.” I was eight, and it was my first trip to the park. Every time I plan a trip back to Dollywood, I plan it around meals: when we’ll have fried chicken and biscuits at Aunt Granny’s, the restaurant in the park named for what Dolly’s nieces and nephews all called her growing up; when we’ll stop for pit ham at Granny Ogle’s, named for her lifelong best friend Judy Ogle’s mother; when we’ll pop into Spotlight Bakery for a three-pound slice of its 25-pound apple pie. Whether we’ll get the park’s famous cinnamon bread isn’t the question; it’s how many times we’ll have it, usually warm right out of the oven, drizzled with icing and the park’s signature apple butter.

But in my grief over her loss, the food I keep thinking of isn’t actually Dolly’s; it’s her character Truvy’s, from the 1989 movie Steel Magnolias, a recipe she rattles off as she’s doing hair in her salon Truvy’s Beauty Spot.

“A cup of flour, a cup of sugar, a cup of fruit cocktail with the juice,” she says. “Mix it up and bake at 350°F ‘til golden bubbly.”

“Sounds awfully rich,” Clairee, played by Olympia Dukakis, responds.

“It is,” Truvy says, “so I serve it over ice cream to cut the sweetness.”

As many times as I’ve recited the recipe in my head, I’ve never made it.

On the way home from dinner on the day Dolly died, where a friend and I toasted her with martinis and more than a few misty-eyed moments, I stopped to get the ingredients for that cuppa cake. Soon, I’ll gather the people I love most and put a spread out on the table inspired by Dolly and the culinary legacy she left behind. The chicken and dumplings her loved ones celebrated her with. The legendary cole slaw Dolly would make for them. (The secret ingredient, besides being prepared by the lady herself, is pickle juice.) The Appalachian apple stack cake Avie Lee would make in that tiny cabin in the 1950s. And that cuppa cake, served golden bubbly, an homage to one of the most genuine, generous and singular people who ever lived.

Dollywood’s Cinnamon Bread

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Easy

1H 20MIN

Dollywood’s Cinnamon Bread

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