Does This Taste Funny? is a food- and family-filled homage to life in the Lowcountry
He wooed her with shrimp paste. She appalled him with a metal spoon. Well, by stirring a nonstick pan with one, which evidently became a sore subject—as in, “Oh, the spoon story again!” He, not surprisingly, loves kitchen improv, brilliantly winging it with saucy wit. She stays on script, prefering to follow orderly instructions. “I like steps,” writes Evelyn “Evie” Colbert in the opening pages of Does This Taste Funny?, the new cookbook she co-authored with her husband, Stephen, that’s due out later this month. “I like how one set of ingredients becomes another thing entirely. It’s like magic—a transformation of raw materials into intentional pleasure,” he counters, their back-and-forth banter reading like the sassy dialogue of two short-order cooks.
Together, Evie and Stephen Colbert, the mustard and ketchup, yin and yang of cooking, bring to the kitchen what he brings to comedy—sheer, delicious delight. And to serve up a spoiler right off the bat, the answer is no, this book does not taste funny, despite its cheeky title. Loaded with Lowcountry staples and showstoppers, the book tastes, and reads, like exactly what we all need right now—comfort, warmth, kind humor, a sense of belonging and shared history, lots of happy Southern smiles, and yes, yummy shrimp paste and cheese biscuits. Think of it as the bear hug version of The Bear, with Stephen’s winky arabesque eyebrow giving Jeremy Allen White’s baby blues a run for their beef Wellington.
Most of us know Stephen as the king of late night, the nice guy Charleston native who’ll bust your gut with laughter, not so much with chicken l’orange. We know his blisteringly hilarious monologues, his well-seared satire, and perfectly parboiled parodies. But did you know he begins every Late Show taping by sitting in the hair-and-makeup chair, getting glammed up by the “glam squad” while watching an Ina Garten episode and talking about cooking? Did you know he’s a Duke’s mayo purest, a butter bean aficionado, a historian of green goddess dressing, and basically the Mike Lata of chickpea fries?
“Being down here and having this back in our bones for 10 months of the last two years really reacquainted us with the ingredients—the peaches, tomatoes, and okra, all the fresh seafood—and reminded us how lucky we were to grow up with that cuisine.” — Stephen Colbert
Evidently his Late Show team did—as did the publishers of his earlier books, including I Am America (and So Can You!) and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t—which is why they suggested, sometime pre-pandemic, that Colbert consider a cookbook for his next literary project. “But the idea of Evie and I doing it together didn’t come till later,” says Stephen.
“It happened because of COVID, because we were all stuck here living and working and eating together. That’s when we backed into the why of the book, or rather discovered it,” adds Evie, who was “discovered” by Late Show audiences during the pandemic, when she, Stephen, and their three young adult kids quarantined in their Sullivan’s Island home, which morphed into a makeshift production studio, where Evie made frequent appearances. “That’s when we kind of became an on-air couple,” Stephen says. “We hadn’t really worked together before COVID, but we had a great time, and audiences clearly loved it when Evie was on.”
When they weren’t writing and taping the show, the Colbert crew—whose beach house is a watermelon toss from the house of Evie’s sister, Madeleine McGee, and her husband, Bunky Wichmann, and just down the street from her parents, Peter and Patti McGee—were cooking and eating together, often with their extended family. “So I thought, ‘Let’s do this cookbook together,’” says Stephen. And the rest is history, or rather, a collection of family stories and nostalgia baked into 100-some recipes that Evie quaintly calls “receipts,” as did her mother who, along with every other Lowcountry housewife of the 1960s, learned to cook from the Junior League of Charleston’s iconic Charleston Receipts.
(Left) On Sunday, September 22, Stephen and Evie Colbert, in partnership with Buxton Books, will take the stage of the Gaillard Center to discuss the inspiration behind their new cookbook, Does This Taste Funny? (Celadon Books, September 2024) and the fun they had producing it. Ticket prices start at $75 and include the book. For more information, visit gaillardcenter.org; (Right) Stephen and Evie at their home on Sullivan’s Island.
Fill Up on Happy
Despite Evie’s old-school terminology, this is hardly an intimidating, rigid, haute cuisine kind of cookbook. “I think my favorite photo is Bunky cooking soft-shell crabs, barefoot, on the dock,” she says. The Colbert kitchen feels relaxed and user-friendly; their porch suppers and drinks by the pool have a more sandy-feet, beach-blown-hair vibe than Martha Stewart perfection. “I’m not a confident cook at all; this is more about ‘Welcome to our kitchen, here’s what makes our family happy,’” says Evie, explaining the “why” of the book. “We wanted readers to hear our voice, how we talk to each other, what it feels like to hang out in the kitchen with us,” adds Stephen.
The recipes are easygoing crowd-pleasers—pulled pork, cowboy caviar, deviled eggs, and okra soup, to name a few. Those last two are Peter McGee classics, recipes that Evie’s father loved and perfected—there’s a photo of him beaming over his famous eggs.
The book is dedicated to her mother, Patti, the quintessential Charleston hostess famed for her “party food” and for feeding, entertaining, and befriending Spoleto musicians—from Yo-Yo Ma to flutist Paula Robison (whose banana bread recipe is included)—when the McGee family lived next door to the Dock Street Theatre during the festival’s early years. “Party food is happy food, and we like to fill up on happy whenever we can,” writes Evie, who was grateful for the time spent with her mother, who was ill with cancer, while they reminisced and worked on the cookbook. Patti died in November 2022, and Peter passed away this spring.
“Mom and Dad were very much a part of this—I was able to talk to Mom about the book and her recipes before she died.” — Evie Colbert
“Mom and Dad were very much a part of this—I was able to talk to Mom about the book and her recipes before she died,” says Evie. “We cooked for my parents a lot that summer of 2022, testing out the recipes on them. It was like, ‘Here’s some stuffed flounder; how’s this pickled shrimp?’ Mom couldn’t remember her pickled shrimp recipe, so we kept making and remaking it and asking her what was missing, trying to re-create it. Of course, we finally found her recipe card after we finished the book.”
Each of the Colbert kids has a recipe included, as do other family members, like Stephen’s brother-in-law’s boiled peanuts, his sister Kitty’s swordfish, his sister Lulu’s tomato pie, and several meaty Green Egg offerings by the aforementioned, always-aproned Bunky. “He’s really the breakout star of the whole thing,” says Evie. Their niece, Lucy Wichmann, played a critical role as recipe organizer, tester, cake decorator, photo shoot supervisor, and general spreadsheet queen. “Thank god for Lucy,” says Evie.
Hanging with family and friends at sister Madeleine and Bunky’s Sullivan’s Island house.
Place Settings
Mouthwatering close-ups of lemon chicken orzo soup or crabmeat quiche by California-based photographer Eric Wolfinger will make your stomach growl, but the book’s visual appeal is as much a love letter to the Lowcountry as it is food porn. The photo shoot was Wolfinger’s first trip to Charleston, “and he was blown away,” says Evie. “He really got it that this project entailed more than photographing the food. That capturing what we love about this place was equally, if not more, important.”
“I grew up dropping a fishing net off the dock on James Island with my dad,” says Stephen. “There’s nothing better than pulling fish out of the creek and coming home to make the red rice to have with fried spottail. It’s all very basic to us down here but exotic to others.” To wit: when he and Evie were testing the stuffed flounder recipe back at their New Jersey home, they couldn’t find a local fishmonger who understood how to filet the fish and still leave it stuffable. “But here at Mount Pleasant Seafood, you ask and they say, ‘Sure, okay,’ needing no explanation, then ask if you want that crabmeat over there to go in it,” Evie laughs.
Both she and Stephen gained a deeper appreciation for their Lowcountry culinary roots and way of life during the five months their family spent here during the pandemic, then the five months last summer they stayed on Sullivan’s when the show was on hiatus due to the writers’ strike. “Both times we were here in the spring and into the summer season, when everything’s coming in fresh. Being down here and having this back in our bones for 10 months of the last two years really reacquainted us with the ingredients—the peaches, tomatoes, okra, and all the fresh seafood—and reminded us how lucky we were to grow up with that cuisine,” Stephen says.
“This is more about ‘Welcome to our kitchen, here’s what makes our family happy.’” —Evie Colbert
That love of local flavor and of family is the key ingredient, the secret sauce, in Does This Taste Funny? It’s a personal book, spiced with touching, often humorous, anecdotes and family lore. Evie’s sparkling smile blazes across the pages while Stephen hams it up. Dogs are underfoot, kids casually hanging out (and baking bread!), and Aperol spritzes at the ready. A century-old chess pie receipt from Evie’s grandmother makes the cut, as does a simple fig tart that Stephen claims he whipped up for Ina Garten and insists she loved. “I’ve never seen these before. You make them for Ina but not for me?!” Evie rebuts.
This cookbook may be Stephen and Evie’s professional collaboration debut, but it’s not the only project the two are cooking up. Both are principals in Spartina, the couple’s production company with a first-look deal to produce television and streaming content for CBS Studios.
“What I learned from working with you on this is that you’re a lot less bossy than I thought you’d be,” says Evie. “Well, we had clear lines—you’d take the lead on your recipes, or excuse me, ‘receipts,’ then I’d handle mine,” adds Stephen. There’s good-natured ribbing and clear adoration between the two who, despite their different cooking styles and rules about spoons, have a shared vision of what they bring to the table: a love of family, friends, and place. And more specifically, their love of this place: Charleston and Sullivan’s Island and a fishing hole behind Capers Island—a place where Patti McGee’s cheese biscuits will, thanks to their cookbook, remain party staples, so we can all “fill up on happy.”
RECIPES:
From Does This Taste Funny? by Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert. Copyright © 2024 by the authors and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
