A South Carolina lobbyist dishes out special recipes and Statehouse lore in a new cookbook

No third-grader has ever stood up on career day and chirped, “I want to grow up to be a lobbyist.”

But that’s the career path Mary Martha Greene chose. She grew up in Beaufort and has spent 47 years winning friends and influencing people in and around Columbia.

These places and people are the main ingredients in her new cookbook from the University of South Carolina Press: “The Cheese Biscuit Queen, Kiss My Aspic!”

The subtitle is: “Southern Recipes, Saucy Stories, and More Rambunctious Behavior.”

It is a sequel to her 2021 book, “The Cheese Biscuit Queen Tells All.”

In the new book, Greene mixes the stories of life in both Columbia and Beaufort with 80 recipes, a combination aimed at satisfying the soul.

Her premise is that we all have stories of family and work and food and fellowship that we need to write down and pass around like biscuits before they get cold.

Greene certainly has some lobbying wins to write home about, especially her work on the staff of Gov. Richard Riley when the landmark Education Improvement Act became law in 1984, pumping new money into the public schools, targeting basic skills and adding accountability for underperforming schools.

But it’s more fun to traipse along with Greene on trips to the old Elite Epicurean restaurant, Edisto Island and a skybox full of interlopers at the 18th green of the Harbour Town Yacht Links on Hilton Head Island.

The book is not a tell-all, and no one is thrown under the bus.

My favorite look inside the legislative process is her chapter on “Legislativisms,” where in the course of civil debate, legislators sometimes mangle clichés and carve up “mute points.”

They have faced “two-headed swords,” and told one another that the “fruit is in the pudding.” They have wondered if an amendment would pass “constitutional mustard.”

Greene also shares the legendary Statehouse story of the time when House Speaker Sol Blatt Sr. called a freshman representative into his office after he voted against a bill the speaker favored.

Blatt, a Blackville native and the son of Jewish Russian immigrants, served 54 years in the House, and was speaker for 32 years.

The story goes that Blatt told the freshman something that pretty well defines our political world today.

Greene tells us that when the young man told the speaker he couldn’t vote for something that was against his principles, Blatt responded, “Son, sometimes you just have to rise above your principles.”

Closer to home is the heart-warming story of one senator’s reaction when the Lowcountry’s Sen. Clementa Pinckney was murdered in his Charleston church in 2015.

Then-Sen. Joel Lourie of Columbia recalled during a moving tribute on the Senate floor a Jewish tradition of not letting the deceased be alone after death. As a result, every single member of the Senate took turns in pairs at Senator Pinckney’s side as he was lying in state in the Capitol rotunda.

You’ll have to read the book to get the ingredients for the eggnog of Columbia “force of nature” Elsie Nixon Lamar, and to see how she got it after she moved to the Episcopal retirement home Still Hopes.

You’ll also have to read the book to learn about Greene’s grandmother’s famous Sunday school lesson on “the five fingers of prayer” and to find out how Beaufort camellia king Walter Jenkins won best in show from beyond the grave.

Two of my former newspaper colleagues have done what Greene is having so much fun doing today. Former Beaufort Gazette editor Jim Cato produced a cookbook full of Beaufort lore called “Friends, Family & Food” in 1999. And Jeff Kidd produced “Wilson Grub: Eating Our Way from the Appalachian Foothills to the Lowcountry of South Carolina” in 2013.

It’s important to hand down both recipes and stories.

I haven’t produced mine yet, but it will certainly include stories that my 96-year-old mother laughed at anew in her nursing home bed last week.

Mama said her grandmother never heard the term “women’s lib,” but when her husband told her the tea tasted funny, she said, “Well, drink it and laugh.”

Then, when the preacher came for Sunday lunch, he piously asked, “Shall I keep my fork?” when the plates were being taken from the table.

Granny snapped, “You can keep it if you want to, but that’s all you’re going to get.”