Lee Ann Flemming has been cooking since she was a child.
She began when she was about 7 or 8 years old. “My mother was a home economist with the Extension Service, and she just always cooked,” Flemming said. “Mother is an excellent cook and her mother, my mamaw, was an excellent cook. I’ve just always been around good food, and I’ve just always enjoyed cooking.”
Flemming shares her recipes each week with Commonwealth readers in her Weekend Edition food column in the newspaper’s Lifestyles section. This week, Flemming has reached a milestone — column No. 1,000.
“I cannot believe it’s been 1,000 articles,” she said. “I can remember the 100th one, but I didn’t really think about it that much then, but 1,000, that’s a lot, that’s an awful lot.”
Flemming and her husband, Steve, reside in Cruger, just 15 miles from Greenwood. She teaches sixth grade at Benton Academy, where her husband is the headmaster. They have a son, Steven, and daughter-in-law, Stephanie, and a granddaughter, Leila Rose, who is a student at Pillow Academy.
Flemming’s first food column was published in the Commonwealth on Aug. 10, 2003.
Lee Ann Flemming, left, is with her granddaughter, Leila Rose Flemming, at her dining room table in her home in Cruger. Leila Rose is about to take a bite of chocolate pie — Lee Ann’s recipe that she used when she was a food stylist for “The Help.” Lee Ann’s food column on Page 7B is No. 1,000. Her weekly column has appeared in the Commonwealth for almost 20 years. (By Ruthie Robison)
Her columns have been popular with readers for almost 20 years now. Each week, she writes about her life, her family and friends, her career as a teacher or topics she finds interesting.
Sometimes her columns are humorous, making the reader laugh out loud. Sometimes they are serious, where she speaks from her heart. Some weeks, she shares special moments in her life, such as when she wrote about the birth of her granddaughter, who is now 11.
At the end her column, she includes several of her tried-and-true recipes, each with ingredients that can be found at local grocery stores and with directions that are not too intimidating, even for novice cooks.
She began writing her food column right after her only child, Steven, went off to college, beginning his freshman year at Mississippi State University.
During his senior year at Pillow Academy, “I remember thinking that’s the last football game, the last basketball game. Graduation didn’t bother me,” she said. “But when we left and took him to State and moved him in, I mean I went to pieces. It was terrible.”
Up until that point, a major part of her life revolved around her son’s ballgames and getting home to prepare supper for her family every day. After their child began college, the Flemmings’ home felt empty.
“Steve was coaching, so he didn’t come home until 5:30 or 6, and I would come home to this empty house,” she said. “A lot of my friends said, ‘You just have to get out of this slump. You’re not even yourself anymore. You’ve got to find something to do.’”
Flemming was known to be a good storyteller with humor and wit. She was also known for her cooking. With encouragement from her friends, she came up with a way to combine two of her strengths.
“I used to always love years ago Mrs. Celia Emmerich’s food column on Sundays, and I always loved reading it,” she said.
That’s when she began thinking about writing a weekly food column. So she called up the Commonwealth’s publisher and editor, Tim Kalich, and pitched her idea.
She still remembers her first column, with the headline of “Just call me Southern.”
She wrote about her love of cooking, and her first cooking experience as an 8-year-old:
“For my 8th birthday, I received my first cookbook, titled 'Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook for Hostesses of Tomorrow.' The first recipe I chose to try was peanut butter cookies. What a disaster.
“To this day, page 44 has a big black X covering the entire page. I used ¼ cup of salt instead of ¼ teaspoon as listed in the recipe.”
“They were a little bad,” she recalled. “So I blamed it on the cookbook, and I scratched it out and it was the cookbook’s fault and not mine.”
One of the recipes she shared in that column she still considers as among her most special, and she wrote about why:
“In 1981, as a young bride of 22, I had just settled in the Mississippi Delta, and I entered the annual Greenwood Commonwealth Recipe Contest. To my great surprise and pleasure, I won first prize for my recipe.”
The recipe was Seafood Rice Salad.
“I got $250. When you’ve just gotten married and you don’t have a whole lot money, $200 is like $10,000, and I didn’t know about the prize,” she said.
She continues to make the recipe, and it’s always a crowd-pleaser. “It’s delicious, and it makes a lot. I take it a lot of places.”
She also begins her cookbook, “Recipes and Remembrances,” with the way she started her first column and includes the recipe.
After her first column was published, it was a hit with readers, and Flemming was asked to keep the columns coming.
“I said I’d keep it up as long as you want me, and 1,000 articles later, here I still am,” she said.
For almost 20 years, her column has appeared every week but one. “I’ve only missed one Sunday in all these years, and my mom was in the hospital in Jackson, and it was right after the holidays,” she said. “That was very disappointing to me, but that’s the only one I’ve ever missed.”
Flemming now writes for four newspapers and two magazines. One of her bigger opportunities that developed from her weekly column in the Commonwealth, however, was when she received a call to work as a food stylist on the Academy Award-winning movie “The Help,” which was largely filmed in Greenwood in 2011.
She remembers that call vividly. Her granddaughter had just been born, and she was with her husband on the drive home from the hospital in Starkville.
“I told Steve, ‘We are so lucky. We have a wonderful son, a beautiful daughter-in-law and now we have this beautiful granddaughter, and I don’t know how life could get any better.’ And that split second, my phone rang,” she recalled.
Working on the movie was “a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she said.
After “The Help” premiered, Flemming began making promotional appearances, and her recipes have been featured in national publications such as Glamour magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Food and Wine. Then, she became a much sought-after event speaker, presenting programs about her experience working on “The Help” to civic clubs and garden clubs from Laurel to Southaven.
What Flemming is most famous for is being the creator of the pie that appeared in the movie — the infamous Minny’s Chocolate Pie.
“I can’t tell you how many times people have asked to take a picture with me and that pie,” she said.
When she takes the pie to events, she is often asked, “Is this a good pie or a bad pie?”
Lee Ann Flemming's Minny's Chocolate Pie
“I can’t imagine not having done this. It just amazes me. It’s had such an impact on my life,” Flemming said. “It’s amazing how one job like that can change your life, but it really did.”
While Flemming has enjoyed sharing her experiences working on the movie, she said her favorite columns are the ones she writes about being a grandmother.
After Leila Rose was born, Flemming wrote a column about meeting her granddaughter that was published on June 6, 2010:
“She is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen in my life. ... Everyone had told me how having a grandchild is the most wonderful thing in the world — they were right. I could just look at her for hours on end.
“I held her for the first time when she was about 15 minutes old. She looked at me with her big blue eyes and grasped my finger with her little hand and took my heart away right then and there.”
After 1,000 columns, Flemming continues to come up with new ideas for topics to write about. Thinking about the milestone, she said, “I just can’t believe I’ve written that many articles, and I can’t believe all the changes that have gone on in my life. It’s just still an honor to do it, and I just appreciate people reading it and enjoying it. It just makes me happy to do it.”
- Contact Ruthie Robison at 581-7235 or rrobison@gwcommonwealth.com.
In Lee Ann Flemming’s first column published in the Commonwealth, she wrote about winning the newspaper’s former recipe contest in 1981
and shared the recipe. Here’s her prize-winning recipe:
SEAFOOD RICE SALAD
2 cans shrimp, drained
1 can tuna, drained
3 cups Minute rice, prepared and cooled
½ cup finely chopped onion (Now, I use green onions.)
½ cup finely chopped sweet pickle
1½ cups finely chopped celery
½ cup diced pimiento
3 hard-cooked eggs, chopped
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 cup mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste
Combine all ingredients in the order given. Toss lightly, season to taste and chill before serving. Serve on salad greens, and garnish with tomato wedges.
- This makes a large amount of salad.
