In the know.

Gay Thompson has had a longtime love affair with cooking. “It has always been my go-to escape,” she shared, “I came from a family, and married into a family of excellent cooks, our family has always gathered around the table.” After all three of her children had grown and married, she discovered a    common theme among this age group who all seemed to need help creating menus which inspired her to develop a cookbook.

But Thompson says the true origin story goes a bit further than that. “Suzanne and Jim Porter moved from Mississippi to become our neighbors, so I brought them a loaf of bread.” As the story goes, Suzanne gladly received the bread and called Jim at work shortly after tasting the bread saying, “You have got to get home and try this bread.”  Later on, the two couples would sit down to enjoy a dinner together when Jim exclaimed, “Everything we have eaten tonight needs to be in cookbook!”  Gay and Suzanne both reacted to this statement by confessing that they had each dreamt of doing that very thing. “We didn't realize that night we were starting a business,” recalled Gay with a laugh.

All in all, the ladies would end up selling 26 thousand of these custom cookbooks, printing the book six times to continue to fill the demand. Initially the pair ordered only 5,000 thinking this was sufficient to sell among family and friends, but the book sold out in the first week prompting them to order more, a pattern that would repeat again and again. Gay admits, “There was never really much profit in it, it was really just more fun than anything else.”

They thoughtfully named the cookbook, Of Magnolia and Mesquite, filled with their own recipes from their families. Gay explained, “There really isn’t a bad recipe in there!” The book was organized a bit differently than most cookbooks that were in print at that time. The book was categorized into four parts: breakfasts and brunches, lunches, dinners, and special events with the menus fitted to the number of people you’d be serving. Whether you were serving two or two-hundred, the recipes were easy to follow. The other unique component in the cookbook is the additional poems that can be found throughout the publication. “I have always loved piddling around with poetry,” she said. She went on to explain the similarities between cooking a meal and composing a poem saying that both are born from love.

“For me, it’s always been an expression of love,” she said with a smile.