Lakeland Native Juli McShay Releases Family-Inspired Cookbook

admin November 24, 2023

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Living far from family during the pandemic inspired Lakeland native Juli McShay to write the cookbook, “Not by Bread Alone: Taking the F’s of Life & Making Them Work for You.”

The theme of the recipe book, which was recently featured in the national women’s health and wellness magazine Heart and Soul, is that food alone can’t sustain us; we also need our faith and community to survive.

“Life requires more than money, food. We need people. We need one another,” McShay said, adding that the book goes beyond recipes and includes anecdotes about our experiences in life involving faith, family, and financial hardships.

McShay, who grew up near Simpson Park in Lakeland’s northwest corridor and attended Lake Gibson High School, said the recipe book fulfills her lifelong dream of writing a book. Physical or digital copies are available on Amazon and ebooks are sold on her website.

“I knew I would write books. I just never imagined a recipe book would be the first one,” McShay said, adding that her mother, Yvonne, is a retired English professor from Polk State and also an author. One of her mother’s books, “Our Lakeland: The other end of Florida Avenue,” describes the journey of 31 prominent members of Lakeland’s African American community.

Juli McShay currently lives in Houston, TX, where she is a professor of government at San Jacinto College. She jokingly said “being a Black woman from the south,” is what helped her learn how to cook, adding that numerous women in her life including her mom, aunts and a friend, who is a caterer, taught her how to season food properly.

While she has a law degree, and a bachelor’s and master’s degree in public administration, she’s never had formal training to be a chef. She said cooking comes naturally to her, to the extent that she doesn’t use measurements and intrinsically knows how much of an ingredient to add to make a dish flavorful.

“I love food and I enjoy cooking. It’s been therapeutic through the years to cook,” she said.

While cooking has always been her hobby, it was a neighbor who encouraged her to write down her recipes. During the pandemic, she’d cook for him as he fought financial challenges. He’d put pictures of her meals on Facebook, and then tell her that his friends were raving about her meals and that they wanted the recipes.

But writing down the recipes proved challenging, since she mostly cooked from taste and memory.

“It was really hard. With (community) service and work demands, (I) let any excuse get in the way,” McShay recalled, adding that imposter syndrome played into it.

After two years of fine tuning the 17 recipes in the book, and gathering pictures for each of them, she published the book on Mar. 7, 2023.

“I learned to always bet on me,” McShay said. “It’s such an accomplishment to know that you did what God gave you to do. I don’t take any sale for granted…I hope people find magic and joy in these recipes and great memories. I want people to know that the recipes are made with magic and love.”

Unlike several other African American cookbook authors, McShay said her book has only one soul-food recipe: smothered turkey wings. Instead, it highlights recipes for popular dishes found all over the world and includes lots of sauces and soups. In fact, McShay’s favorite dish in the book is Pho, a popular Vietnamese soup dish.

“Pho is the all-star. People ask me to make it for them,” McShay said. “If there comes a time for me to open a food truck or a walk up place, it would be with pho.”

McShay said she has always had an affinity for Asian food. During the early days of the pandemic, she was ordering pho for takeout on Doordash and eventually decided she’d try making it herself. She said she found a way to make it while also respecting Vietnamese traditions, and now also sells her own seasoning packs for it, which she dubbed “Pho my Goodness: Pho at Home,” to cut down on the food preparation time.

McShay said she’s now working on her second book, related to how we’re all connected and interwoven through faith. She hopes to have an event in Lakeland to celebrate her cookbook.