Does This Taste Funny?: Recipes Our Family Loves

A serious cookbook with luscious photos and easy-to-follow receipts (more about that later), Stephen and Evie McGee Colbert still manage to have fun, their individual repartee introducing each dish taking us deeper into the family history and the sense of conviviality that they bring to home entertaining.

Known for his caustic wit and biting sense of political humor, when Stephen Colbert, the host of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, is cooking with Evie along with an ever-changing cast of children, friends, and family members, readers are introduced to a different facet of his personality.

Sure, he’s still funny—and so is his wife—but their cookbook Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves puts readers at the counter watching as they joust and joke with each other, stirring pots, recounting life experiences, and sharing receipts.

Oh yes, the receipts.

“Evie: At some point we should address the ‘recipe/receipt’ issue.

“Stephen: Yes. The people deserve an explanation. I say ‘recipe’ because I live in America in the twenty-first century. Why, throughout this book, do you say ‘receipt?’

“Evie: Well, I suppose because my mom always said ‘receipt. She was a young wife in 1960. She had come to the Big City of Charleston from little Marion, South Carolina, and I think she learned most of her cooking from The Charleston Receipt Cookbook. Saying ‘receipts’ was a way of indicating that she knew the traditional recipes.

“Stephen: I love archaic words, so I love ‘receipt.’ Did you know that ‘receipt’ comes from the days when you wouldn’t take a cookbook out of your library to the kitchen . . . Instead you copied down a ‘receipt’ of the instructions.”

The Colberts met in 1990, though they’d lived just a street apart in Charleston since 1977. But their upbringing was completely different.

“We ran in different circles, because one of us is a year older, and I’m not supposed to say who,” writes Stephen. His mother was a widow with 11 children to raise while Evie’s mother was asked if she would host parties at the family home for the musicians who were performing at the prestigious Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston.

Their cookbook came about during COVID. As the two explain it, they were in lockdown with their three children under one roof for the first time in a long time and were filming Stephen’s show from their home on Sullivan’s Island in the South Carolina Low Country. Cooking became their major source of entertainment.

Deciding to write a cookbook started a scramble for old recipes feared lost and long interludes spent with Patti McGee who was succumbing to cancer but determined to share her culinary expertise including for the dishes she was locally famous for such as Cheese Biscuits, Huguenot Torte, Curried Chicken Salad, Crabmeat Quiche for Cocktail Hour, and Pickled Shrimp. About the latter, Evie says “Growing up in Charleston, there were three food groups: shrimp, barbeque, and everything else.”

If it hadn’t been for COVID there might not have been a cookbook. Early in their marriage an incident occurred that the couple term “the spoon story.” They were living  in Chicago when Evie, gasp, used a metal spoon on a Calphalon nonstick pan—a definite cooking no-no. Up until then, Evie says she had visions of the two of them sipping wine while chopping basil together.

Well, it happened. Just not in the way she originally expected nor quite so soon.