Kardea Brown’s 8 Pantry Staples Every Southern Cook Should Always Have

It’s safe to say Charleston-born chef Kardea Brown knows her way around a kitchen.

The author of Make Do with What You Have recently joined fellow chef Katie Lee Biegel’s podcast in an episode aptly titled Stop Overthinking Dinner, Your Pantry is Enough with Kardea Brown, and shared eight pantry essentials that help her create delicious meals.

“The pantry gotta have rice … grits, beans of any sort—canned, dried—brown sugar, granulated sugar, always keep that on hand. Cornstarch, flour, cornmeal. I always keep that on hand,” Brown told Biegel during the episode.

The Emmy Award-winning host of Food Network’s Delicious Miss Brown credits her grandmother for her ability to create delicious meals at home.

“She is the reason why I cook the way I do. She and my mother were both very instrumental in my style of cooking,” Brown shared. “Watching my grandmother in the kitchen and watching my mom in the kitchen and how they maneuver, how they put recipes together and things together with little to nothing.”

Brown recalled opening the refrigerator as a child and seeing nothing to eat and begging to go to McDonald’s.

“But my mom would open the fridge or my grandmother would open the fridge and it’s like, this is there and we got a little bit of that (and) I can make that with that,” Brown said of her mother and grandmother’s ability to improvise. “Learning that type of skill from them at a very early age has helped me so much in life.”

Brown’s latest book, Make Do with What You Have, is an ode to that mentality.

“This book gives you that encouragement to see things in your refrigerator and your pantry different. You may only have onions and carrots and celery and maybe some type of smoked meat or maybe no meat, but you have flour and oil and butter and a little bit of milk. Maybe a cobbler can be made,” Brown said, adding that it often feels good to see a meal come together. “It does feel good because it’s like, oh, I did find something—and I didn’t have to leave the comfort of my home.”