In July 2020, TAB published a story about Brenda Gantt, an Alabama grandmother who had gained a social media following that all started with a video of her making homemade biscuits.
At that time, she had about 413,000 Facebook followers and was “shocked” about it. Now she’s got more than 2.3 million. She has another 177,000 followers on Instagram.
Her Facebook page, Cooking with Brenda Gantt, has gotten national attention. In September 2020, she was a guest on the Kelly Clarkson Show, and in April she was on Huckabee Today and Simply Southern.
She’s been on the cover of Taste of the South, Alabama Living and Wiregrass Living magazines.
And in March, she announced the publication of her first cookbook, “It’s Gonna Be Good Y’all,” which contains more than 100 of her favorite recipes along with old and new photos and stories about her life.
It’s published by Alabama publisher Hoffman Media.
The whole thing started when Chris Harwell, a young husband at her church, kept joking with her about teaching his wife to make biscuits. Other young men at the church got on board with that idea, too.
They knew her homemade biscuits were the best.
For Gantt, a member of Bethany Baptist Church, Andalusia, cooking was second nature.
She had made biscuits for her husband, George, all through their 50 years of marriage, right up until he died in 2018.
She still cuts them out with a cut-off Chef Boyardee can she started using right after they married — a “prized possession,” she said.
“So one Sunday I was going to make biscuits, and I thought, ‘I might as well video this and put it on Facebook and these guys can show their wives,’” Gantt told TAB in 2020.
She held her phone in one hand and made biscuits in a bowl with the other hand, and then she uploaded that to her Facebook page. Within a week, the Harwells were buying White Lily flour and giving it a try themselves — and not too long after, people all over the country were doing the same thing.
For more information, visit facebook.com/cookingwithbrendagantt.
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