Oprah Winfrey's career has been defined by a love-hate relationship with food. For more than 30 years, the audience has watched as the rags-to-riches media mogul has publicly waged a personal battle with weight.
So after setting out to write her much-awaited memoir, Winfrey realized she needed more time to tell the complicated story of Oprah, and decided to take a personal detour: a cookbook.
"Food, Health and Happiness: 115 On-point Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life" (Flatiron, $35) turned out to be so much more, becoming for Winfrey as much a cookbook as a memoir about a celebrity's relationship with food going back to her days as a little girl living in inner-city Milwaukee.
The week before the book was released, a trimmed-down Oprah graced the cover of People magazine, sharing how she used Weight Watchers points to shed more than 40 pounds while consuming fried chicken, wine and bread. Recently, she announced a partnership with Kraft Heinz to make healthier ready-to-eat meals more available.
The book, which was released Jan. 3, came about in the months after her 2015 return to Weight Watchers, this time not only as the point-based dieting company's public face, but also a board member and a 10-percent owner.
The recipes are mostly from chefs that Winfrey has employed over the years. There's no grandma or mom here, she said in a recent interview, days before her 63rd birthday.
"I don't have any of those kinds of memories," she said. "And anything my mother was making in the kitchen, you couldn't put in this cookbook. 'Cause my mother actually put butter in her turnip greens. Anything that might be healthy is going to be smothered in butter and pig fat."
But she shares how her childhood has affected her relationship to food in other ways. The basis for a chapter on soup comes from the TV show "Lassie." As a 6-year-old, Winfrey remembers watching the show, not for the misadventures of a talented dog and Timmy, the little boy she saved week after week. It was the Campbell's Soup that Timmy's mom gives him at the end.
Years later, Winfrey learned that Campbell's sponsored the show for 19 years, "but back then, product placement was the furthest thing from my mind," she writes. "All I knew for sure in those days was that my world would be perfect and we'd all live happily ever after as the credits rolled if my mom would ladle up a great big bowl of Campbell's soup just for me."
For Winfrey, that was "out of the question," she writes. Her mother was a maid. "Even wishing such a thing was absurd. My mom did the best she could do, but to this day I have clear memories of putting grape Kool-Aid on my cereal because we were too broke to buy milk. The truth is, I remember time when we couldn't afford any food."
That's why she begins the book with 19 soup recipes. "Every one of these soups gives me a deep and instant sense of well-being."
Recently, Winfrey took a break from filming the movie adaptation of "A Wrinkle in Time," the 1960s-era, science-fiction, fantasy children's novel by Madeline L'Engle, to talk with Newsday about writing the cookbook, her public battle with weight gain, why the standard is not the same for overweight men, and her current obsession with cacio e pepe, a simple pasta of noodles, water, pepper and cheese that can be the ultimate bowl of comfort when the ingredients meld.
Q: What made you want to finally write a cookbook?
A: I was supposed to be writing a memoir, and I realized how hard it is to write a memoir and to do it well. I really needed more time to think about the entire story of my life. But the story of food was something that I could articulate, and form a story around and meet a deadline. Number two, I had started the Weight Watchers program, and everybody who came to my house was asking is this on Weight Watchers ... meaning the pasta, the tacos, the stuffed tortellini. So I just woke up one day thinking, oh, what if I did a cookbook? Maybe I can tell my story of food along with recipes and ideas for other people who find it unbelievable that you can eat regular food, delicious food and still lose weight. So it's a combination memoir cookbook.
Q: You have a knack for connecting with people. How did you envision doing this through the cookbook?
A: My whole life is about story. That to me is what makes us human. You may like the story or you may not like the story, but that's at least how you get to know somebody. To know that it's not just a bowl of soup for me, but what soup represents.
Q: What did you learn about yourself as an eater and your very public battle with weight?
A: I have struggled my whole life with it. I have used food as my drug of choice, as my comforter, as my solace. Am I tired? Am I hungry? Let me eat to decide if I'm tired or hungry.
It's about choosing more wisely, with a smarter sense of yourself and what you want, then just eating everything you want. I bring my lunch to set and I have them make it in the hotel, so I know how it is made. So, I am the person in the kitchen in the hotel, saying to the guy, "I want potato leek soup, but I don't want any butter in it, I don't want any cream in it. Puree the potatoes, don't leave them lumpy. They're very familiar with me in the hotel kitchen. They give me a little Tupperware, plastic thing every day and I bring back my Tupperware, 'cause that's what a good neighbor does.
Q: One the of the first things you mentioned to TV executive Dennis Swanson when he offered you a job in Chicago was being black and overweight. How long have concerns about your weight played a role in your life and why do you think they still exist?
A: I think it's the last great prejudice that people hold. People who are overweight are discriminated against all the time. It's just not politically correct to say it. I've been overweight walking into a store as Oprah Winfrey, cause who else could I walk in as, but I have been overweight, and I've been the weight that is best for me. You still get treated differently. Because everybody knows even when you're overweight and you got a lot of money you can't wear anything in this store. So there's a certain air, treatment about that. It's like let me show you some shoes, or let's move to the glove section. I have been so overweight that I've been in stores and that's all I really could wear.
Q: Do you think men like former Fox News executive Roger Ailes worry about their weight?
A: No I don't. I don't think very many men do. But let's not even kind of pretend that there isn't a double standard. Of course there is. I don't spend a lot of time focused on the fact that there is a double standard. I recognize that there is one. I didn't decide to go to Weight Watchers because I wanted to please anybody or I wanted to look a certain way for the audience. It has worked both ways for me. I remember when I got really, really, really skinny ... and people turned on, because the women who were overweight felt that they had someone like them who represented them on television. It works both ways.
Q: Is there another cookbook in the works?
A: Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Right now the only thing that is in the works is me trying to finish this movie. I have never done wire work before where they shoot you up and you're hanging from the ceiling and trying to fly and trying to balance yourself. It's fun, but it's also exhausting.
Q: What have you really been into cooking lately?
A: The easiest thing to cook in the book, and I can't get enough of it, is called pasta cacio e pepe. That's my favorite thing. It's three ingredients. I have all these girls from South Africa who are in school, and they now have their little hot plates, and they're making pasta in their room, and they're like, "I did it." Well, it's kind of hard not to do it. It pasta, it's water, it's pepper, it's cheese.
