Top Chef: Paula Deen

The secret behind Paula Deen's success? A down-home attitude, a warm laugh, and a whole lot of butter.

From Reader's Digest

• Test Your Paula Deen Trivia Smarts
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• Buy Paula Deen's Book
  
  Paula Deen is the picture of Southern folksiness: funny and personable and prone to breaking out in contagious peals of laughter. That girlish friendliness, and her winning drawl, has helped the 62-year-old Deen become a one-woman lifestyle brand-with two restaurants, two Food Network shows, a magazine, and eight cookbooks, including The Deen Family Cookbook, written with her two sons, Jamie, 41, and Bobby, 38, and due out this spring.
  
  
  Part of her appeal is simply in the sweet and savory Southern food she's known for-she's never met a chocolate chip or a stick of butter she didn't like. But just as much as people respond to Deen's cuisine, they respond to Deen, with those wisecracks and that broad smile and fluffy meringue hairstyle. "I've asked myself why, and I think the short answer is, Women know I'm real," says Deen from her Savannah, Georgia, home. "I think I remind people of someone in their life who loves them very much."
  
  An adoring public is a nice turn of events for a woman who spent two decades avoiding life outside the house due to agoraphobia. She's open about those hard times and looks forward to the good times, and good food, ahead. "I might slow down," she says. "But I'm never going to stop."
  
  Q: What did cooking mean in your family?
  A: My grandmother taught me that simple, humble food is number one. It has nothing to do with a fancy restaurant with eight forks and one-by-one-inch servings.
  
  Q: You didn't even start cooking professionally until you were in your 40s. What made you finally take it up?
  A: For a lot of years, I was agoraphobic. My kitchen became therapeutic for me. I wasn't into vacuuming or dusting, but I loved that stove.
  
  Q: You had agoraphobia for almost 20 years. What happened?
  A: I had a lot of sorrow. I lost my parents when they were young-I was 19 when my mother died at 44. I kept waiting to die after I buried her. I thought I would never see 40. I was very sad, but when I bellied up to my stove, my mind was occupied.
  
  Q: It must have been difficult, raising two sons and not being able to leave the house.
  A: It got to the point where I could not take them a mile down the road to guitar practice. I said, "We are going to have to quit this stuff and go back to it later." It was a terrible feeling. But the food that I prepared for them, that was my show of love.
  
  Q: Eventually you started a catering business with them. Now you have the Lady & Sons restaurant in Savannah. What's it like working with your kids?
  A: Bobby once said, "The best part is working with family, and the worst part is working with family." You do feel freer to say hurtful things to those who love you unconditionally.
  
  Q: Tell us about your work with Helping Hungry Homes, the charity that fed over a million people across the country last year.
  A: My sons and I recently dropped off 25,000 pounds of protein in the Savannah area. The food banks have a hard time getting protein. I never went hungry myself, but [during that difficult time] I was close enough a few times, I could smell it. No one should go through that.
  
  Q: You have a deal with Warner Bros. to do your own talk show pilot. Any dreams of becoming the next Oprah?
  A: My aunt Peggy always called me the white Oprah, long before I had a show on the Food Network. I take that as the highest compliment.
  
  Q: Men seem to really respond to you too.
  A: The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. I think I clinched the deal with Michael [Groover, her second husband and a tugboat captain] the day I baked him a caramel cake.
  
  Q: You're known for creating guilty pleasures, like a bacon burger served between two doughnuts. Where do you come up with this stuff?
  A: It just happens. My friend and I were making burgers one day, and we said, We don't need bread, because we have doughnuts. It blew me away how good it was.
  
  Q: If you had to spend the rest of your life on a desert island, would it be with butter or bacon?
  A: I'm trying to think of what I could put the butter on: A banana? A coconut? I guess I would have to choose the bacon.
  
  Watch a video of Paula Deen's Best Dishes