From childhood favorites to the food items she made for grocery stores, all about the foods that define the country music icon
Credit: Jim Wright
NEED TO KNOW
- Dolly Parton often shared the Southern recipes that she grew up on, from her freezer meals to her cookbooks
- The country legend died on Aug. 25, 2026 at age 80
- Parton discussed her Southern favorites with PEOPLE, from her “famous” chicken and dumplings to childhood dishes like stone soup
Dolly Parton was not only a country icon, but a Southern food lover.
Over the years, the artist, who died on Aug. 25 at age 80, shared with PEOPLE her affinity for the food she grew up on.
From her chicken and dumplings to childhood favorites to grocery store staples, here are the foods that made Dolly Parton.
Her “Famous” Chicken and Dumplings
“My favorite [recipe] that I’m most famous for myself is my chicken and dumplings,” Parton said in an interview with PEOPLE in May 2025.
While speaking with PEOPLE alongside her sister Rachel Parton George about their 2024 cookbook Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals, which featured 80 family recipes, Parton prompted her sister, “Tell them how famous I am for my chicken and dumplings.”
“Dolly is great at that,” Rachel said, adding that the family has lots of different versions of the dish.
“And my version is not in the cookbook because it isn’t good lookin’ enough,” Parton said.
Rachel joked, “Because you won’t tell anybody the recipe!”
“No, I won’t because it’s not good lookin’. It just tastes good,” she said. “It’s just like Mama said, ‘It’s just got love in it.’ I just put a lot of love in it.”
Credit: Jim Wright
Her Frozen Single-Serve Meals
The star partnered with Conagra Brands to make four frozen single-serve meals inspired by the Southern comfort recipes she grew up on: Beef Pot Roast, Chicken & Dumplings, Country Fried Steak and Shrimp and Grits.
In a May 2025 interview with PEOPLE about the launch of the items, she called them “the perfect little sisters to the other things that we had going.”
“If you love good, hearty food, especially Southern food, I think you’re going to love it,” she said of the lineup, adding that she was involved in tasting the dishes to ensure they were “hearty and tasty and did deserve the name ‘Southern.’”
She added that it was important for the dishes to be easy to make, as she had a busy schedule herself.
“Because I’m so busy now, I created this for myself as well as for everybody else, because I want to be able to open my own refrigerator when I come home and not be too tired to cook, right? I can just get this out and eat something I really like,” she said.
“If you’re on a diet, it’s not low calorie, for sure, but it’s good! It just depends on what you’re what you’re into,” she said.
“These are single-serve, but there’s plenty of it. If you’re not a hog, it would serve two, but I’m a hog,” she said, laughing.
Credit: JB Rowland, courtesy of Dolly Parton
Her Duncan Hines Boxed Baking Mixes
Any grocery store shopper will recognize the hot pink Duncan Hines Dolly Parton boxes emblazoned with an image of Parton, including her wavy golden hair. With items like a Banana Flavored Cake Mix, the products have brought Parton’s family recipes to tables since 2022.
The entrepreneur launched even more flavors in 2024, including Chocolate Cake Mix, Yellow Cake Mix, Cinnamon Crumb Cake Mix, Blueberry Muffin Mix and Banana Nut Muffin Mix.
“They’re like having kids. They’re all my favorites,” Parton told PEOPLE of the mixes. “It just depends on the time of day and what kind of mood I’m in and what my tastes are calling for.”
“My husband’s a big chocolate fan, so I’m always cooking him chocolate,” she said of her late husband Carl Thomas Dean, who died in 2025.
The Dolly Dollop
Referenced in Good Lookin’ Cookin’, the unofficial measurement refers to a heaping spoonful.
“I just like sauces, and I like creams,” Dolly said in the 2024 interview with PEOPLE. “There’s never enough for me. So when I do a Dolly Dollop, I just do a good, good, good hearty spoonful.”
Credit: JB Rowland, courtesy of Dolly Parton
Her Dad’s “Left-Handed Gravy”
Parton had a sweet nickname for the gravy her father used to make.
“Our daddy was left-handed,” she told PEOPLE in 2024.
“So if Daddy was making his gravy, when our mom would be sick he’d make the breakfast, he’d stir it with his left hand,” she said.
“We always thought that his gravy was so much better than Mama’s because it was left-handed gravy,” her sister, Rachel, added.
“And it was,” Parton said.
Pork Roast and Cornbread
In the May 2025 interview, Parton told PEOPLE, “I love pork, you know, like a good pork roast, in addition to a beef pot roast, I do a good pork roast as well.”
She said that she loved making the roast with “a big old pan of cornbread.”
She said making these meals allowed her to “just do the stuff that I grew up loving, and watching my mom cook, and just kind of being nourished with that kind of food and loving it.”
In the 2024 interview with PEOPLE alongside her sister Rachel, Parton said, “I still love the smell of bread cooking… whether it just be some loaf bread that Rachel’s doing or some cornbread. I just think nothing says [home] more than just the smell of bread.”
Credit: Conagra
Rural Tennessee Dishes
The singer grew up in Tennessee alongside 11 siblings, and her family was poor. Parton told PEOPLE in 1977, “We never actually starved, but sometimes we never had quite enough to eat.”
However, she credited her mother with making great food.
“Mama used to make groundhog,” she told PEOPLE in the 2024 interview. “That was Daddy’s favorite thing. A groundhog is just like a big fat hog that runs around in the woods. But mama used to call them whistle pigs because they were that much like a pig. It tastes very much like a pig, but I wouldn’t want to eat one now.”
She added, “We always loved rabbit and squirrel, because our brothers hunted with our uncles and dad. They would often bring home rabbits and squirrels and that’s some of the best eating you’ve ever had.”
Stone Soup
Parton’s Stone Soup, featuring ham hock, potatoes, vegetables and other hearty ingredients, is inspired by a fable that her mother adapted for the family.
She told PEOPLE in 2024, “She’d tell us that when things were kind of running low. ‘Well, tonight we’re having stone soup.’”
Parton shared that her mother would then have her and her siblings gather and wash stones and choose one from “the child [that] needed the most attention” and cook it.
“We just all felt proud that we just helped feed the family for a day,” she said. “That whole story of just making do with what you got is what it amounts to. With some spices and a few little things, you can make anything taste good if the story’s good enough.”
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