The Pioneer Woman and the Fairy Tale of Country Cooking

What does the word “country” mean? Does it mean anything on its own or does it just color in Americans’ fuzzy sense of what constitutes Americana?

This is Store-Bought Is Fine, a monthly column by Rax King on TV chefs, food media, and the class barriers of cuisine.

As a little kid, I was a painfully fussy eater. Pretty much all I liked was bread, in any form—Wonder Bread, dinner rolls, corn bread, a French baguette, as long as it was relatively unadorned. I liked butter, but not cheese. Peanut butter was fine on bread, but jelly wasn’t. There were lots of rules.

This was devastating to my grandma, who was an exceptionally accomplished home cook. She didn’t have fancy toys—no pasta arm on her sink, no Le Creuset. Hell, she even favored an electric stove over gas. But decades of homemaking meant that she knew an impressive range of recipes deep in her muscles. Her preferred culinary idiom was cheap, greasy American comfort food. I wouldn’t touch any of it. Just sat at her table nibbling at a King’s Hawaiian roll. “At least put some ham and mayo on it,” my grandmother begged. Nope. “A hot dog? Shug, you need to eat!” Nothing doing. My parents ignored the fussing, relieved, maybe, that someone else was having this argument with me so they could take a break from it.

I love this food now, but I wanted nothing to do with it at the time, despite the fact that I fondly remember my grandma as a kitchen whiz. But I do have one memory that still hits me, so to speak, from brain to mouth to stomach. My grandma is whipping milk with great force into a mixing bowl, from which a mushroom cloud of flour is bursting. Her nose dotted by pinpricks of flour, she holds out her wooden spoon so that I can taste the dough and check for flour lumps, although really it’s so I can taste the dough because she knows I like it.

“Good?” she asks, watching me smack my little lips.

“All clear,” I say.

“Wanna do the honors?”

And I ladle clumsy, softball-sized lumps of dough into the ancient cast iron pan, feeling terribly important. I am the reason this dough is lump-free; I am the sculptor of its shape. In twenty minutes, the softballs will be drop biscuits, and when I eat one I will feel proud of my role in making it so.

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On Ree Drummond’s cooking show The Pioneer Woman, the act of cooking isn’t exactly the point. While some of Drummond’s recipes do sound great for a tailgate party, people don’t just tune into her show because they like great tailgate party food. They watch because her show also serves generous tastes of her house, her land, her family, her rustic-chic lifestyle. The whole show is beautifully lit and lush in a way that looks deceptively approachable. The Drummonds’ land and livestock are just as stunning every time they appear, which is often. All this is a holdover from Drummond’s blog, which kick-started the Pioneer Woman franchise. Her photos were uniformly super-edited and Easter-hued, to a point of catching flak from critics for her unrealistic rendition of country life. But even when Drummond jokes about the trials of her manure-scented Versailles, she’s still selling a daydream. It’s only appropriate to the brand that Drummond’s country be daydream-colored.

What does the word “country” mean? Does it mean anything on its own or does it just color in Americans’ fuzzy sense of what constitutes Americana? Because while the Drummonds’ lifestyle is rural, the Drummonds are also fiendishly rich. In particular, family patriarch Ladd is basically landed gentry, a scion of multigenerational ranch-owning wealth. In 2016, his family was listed in the Land Report 100 as the twenty-third biggest landowner in the country with 433,000 acres. Jeff Bezos lagged behind them at a puny 400,000 acres, though he remained on the list the following year and the Drummonds were dropped. Others on the Land Report’s 2016 list include Ted Turner, the Hearst family, and a couple of logging and fracking heirs.

The Pioneer Woman is filmed in “the Lodge,” or the Drummonds’ guest house, whose folksy name belies the staggering size of the place and how exquisitely appointed it is. The Lodge is, if you believe Drummond’s 2008 blog post detailing her renovations there, 5600 square feet. Rural homes are typically more spacious than city ones, but even when I try to account for that, I’m forced to conclude that the kitchen alone in Drummond’s guest house is bigger than my entire apartment. Sure, farm and ranch wealth isn’t always liquid, and tends to be tied up with the land to which it’s attached. But even so, Ree Drummond is a household name who owns an obscenely popular restaurant and bed-and-breakfast. Any way you slice it, these people must have a massive amount of money.

But as far as coast dwellers are concerned, the country is where they drink gravy straight from the boat and lose all their teeth to dip tobacco or cattle accidents. It’s not a place for patrician landowners, unless they flee there after making their city money to retire in cozy anonymity. We’re married to our vision of the country as a place without sushi or SoulCycle or money, because that vision allows us to believe that we can still get away from it all, should it all need getting away from someday. Meaning, the country is a place with less cultural stuff, where our problems will miraculously disappear.

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Ree Drummond’s book Black Heels to Tractor Wheels is equal parts sweet love story and smart branding. Drummond was an upper crust girl who’d just moved back to Oklahoma from LA and was headed to Chicago for law school. Then, one night, she met a young cowboy in a bar and ditched law school to pursue a romance with him. That young cowboy was none other than Ladd Drummond, nicknamed the Marlboro Man in her blog and books. She downplays his wealth in favor of cheeky asides about his country manners and his beer-swilling masculinity, a hallmark of her brand. In Drummond’s telling, the Marlboro Man has no patience for city boy frippery. He has a rough-around-the-edges charm. He holds open doors like a gentleman but says exactly what he’s thinking like a cowboy. He honestly sounds pretty hot, and when I watch The Pioneer Woman, I struggle to square the easygoing sweetheart from Drummond’s book with the awkward masc-bot of her show.

That’s always been Ree Drummond’s genius. She’s gifted at a particular kind of truth massaging when it comes to her story—it’s one part fairy tale to two parts aspirational lifestyle marketing copy, and the mix is compelling. However far out of reach her life is for the vast majority of people, she makes it sound distant but feasible. You need only marry the right man and cook the right food for him. Particulars about Ladd’s enormous wealth or the Pioneer Woman’s own privileged background are fantasy spoilers, it’s true, but the more pragmatic concern is that they diminish the effectiveness of her brand. The Pioneer Woman should seem slightly more comfortable than the average viewer of her show, but not so astronomically rich that her fans turn on her or, worse, give up their efforts to imitate her lifestyle.

The Pioneer Woman is effective when I’m in a specifically urban bad mood, overwhelmed by the day’s bustle and with an inbox full of emails that all require finicky answers. Drummond’s show makes me imagine what beef tastes like when it comes, not from the supermarket, but directly from the cow, aged in my special aging shack which I get to have because in this fantasy, space is no object. I imagine the luxury of not only having a porch, but lollygagging on it for hours with a jug of freshly brewed sweet tea and a Marlboro Man of my own by my side. I imagine homeschooling my kids in between the meals I prepare for them in my matching Le Creuset kitchen set.

The fantasies inspired by Drummond’s show are not food fantasies, or even country fantasies. She’s selling me Americana and I process it within the factory of my anxious brain into an elaborate dream of slowing the fuck down. This, I think, is what we city-dwelling Americans believe the country is: a mythical land ungoverned by the despotic rule of space-time. But that’s a fantasy of wealth, not of the countryside. 433,000 acres of ranchland means back-breaking work, and the Drummonds and other country-chic lifestyle salespeople are canny enough to hide most of that work, to make it look fun when they have to show it at all.

It’s hard not to fall for this Cinderella story, with all its trappings of a screwball comedy in which a well-heeled city slicker is suddenly up to her elbows in pig shit because she fell in love with a country boy. The reason that screwball comedy is funny (that is, if it’s funny to you at all) is that it entails taking a princess down a peg. From Madison Ave to manure or, to use Drummond’s own words, from black heels to tractor wheels. And, to push that romantic vision of Americana even further: from style to substance. We believe there’s something legitimizing and edifying about the hard work of the American ranch, but we’re less interested when that hard work is being performed by underpaid workers who don’t own the land. Do these workers, too, cherish the foods that sit on the feast table of the rural American fantasy? Maybe, though it seems unlikely. The majority of farm workers are not US-born.

That American comfort food should be the entry point for all this country baggage is unfair to the food, which remains delicious and did nothing wrong. The food is a mere touchstone for the Pioneer Woman’s authenticity, which often passes muster because she’s so committed to the bit. Her cooking isn’t magnificent but it’s solid. When she cuts corners (a move I will always support), it’s with a busy mom’s wink to the camera, as if telling women in New York and LA we’re not so different after all. It’s any mom’s comfort food: perfectly good, unfussy, easy to scale up for a big family dinner or PTA gathering. Her recipe for drop biscuits looks a lot like my grandma’s and, I’d wager, every other grandma’s everywhere.

Because I genuinely love this food, I want to love Drummond. She makes it easy, too, especially in her writing—on camera neither she nor Ladd has much telegenic presence, but the entire Drummond ranch clan comes brilliantly to life on the page. The classic question here for Food Network personalities and other celebrities is whether it seems like it’d be fun to get a beer with them, and Ree Drummond passes that test no problem. My issue isn’t that I dislike her, it’s that her entire brand is at odds with an honest depiction of work and life on a ranch. In a way, that makes it harder: a person I kind of like is attempting to deceive me.

That means that when I have a hankering for drop biscuits and gravy, I won’t turn to the hammed-up rendition on Drummond’s blog (tagline: “Cowboys love it!”). Instead, I’ll remember my grandmother, with her recipe scrawled illegibly onto an index card. The biscuits were accessible to her, after decades of preparing them for her family, on the level of pure instinct. In her kitchen, she didn’t have the frenetic speed of a professional, but the grace of a dancer; she was never more than a pivot of the foot away from any key ingredient. Even when baking, she rarely measured. Her fingers knew exactly how hard to tap on her box of baking soda to release the correct amount of powder into her mixing bowl. She had no stand mixer, no food processor—she mixed her dough with her fingers, showing me the fastest way to press cold butter cubes through flour to achieve the pebbled texture that biscuit dough requires.

I cherish my kitchen gadgets and urban conveniences, but this is the way I learned to make drop biscuits, so when I have a craving for them, this is how they’re made. That’s what gets passed from one generation to the next in good comfort food: this defensive sense of having learned something from someone who really knows it, and wanting to protect it because most of the people who really know this stuff are no longer alive. My grandmother and I never would have been best friends for many reasons, but making drop biscuits together was “our thing,” bridging the gap between us with a warm shared activity. Now she’s gone, and the activity remains to remind me of her. Perhaps that’s why the Pioneer Woman’s bit feels sinister. At her most dishonest, she’s excavating the feeling of comfort food and packaging a cold distillate of it with the glossier parts of her life to sell unsuspecting consumers the West, the country, Americana. The food itself remains relatively unchanged, and behaves pretty much the way it should on the plate. The drop biscuits still taste like drop biscuits. They’re not the problem. But the packaging paints the food onto a hardscrabble country-western vision board that Drummond ultimately isn’t in a position to deliver.