Regina King Shares the Family Recipes That Keep Her Holiday Memories Alive

Ray IsleTue, November 10, 2026 at 1:00 PM UTC

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Credit: Food & Wine / Caitlin Cronenberg

“I mean, I’m not going to lie,” Regina King says. “Whenever Grandma would come to town, we would get intimidated about cooking.”

King is an actor, producer, director, and, now, vintner — “I never thought I’d be doing that” — who first hit the public eye in the 1980s as a teenager, playing Brenda Jenkins in the TV series 227. Since then, she has appeared in movies as far-ranging as Jerry Maguire and If Beale Street Could Talk (for which she won an Academy Award) and will be seen as Queen Nehanda in the upcoming Children of Blood and Bone this January. But when it’s time for a holiday dinner, you’ll find her far from the lights and the cameras, in the kitchen in her home in Los Angeles, most often with her sister Reina, cooking for family. “I love to cook,” she says. “I just don’t like to clean up. But my grandmother, she loved to cook.”

King largely grew up in Los Angeles, but the majority of her holiday memories revolve around going to Cincinnati to visit her grandmother Loretta. “That’s where the bulk of my mother’s family is,” she says. “Some years it’d be like 30 people because there’s a lot of cousins, and everyone wanted to have Loretta’s food. And every year, even though she was cooking for all of us, she was also making cakes for the even more extended family — German chocolate cake for this family, pound cake for that one, lemon meringue pie. Everyone knew her for those.”

Loretta’s recipes, like her slow cooker brisket with gravy, corn pudding, and collard greens, are mainstays for King’s own holiday dinners today. Although, she notes, “The sweet potato cobbler recipe, that was my stepdad, Fred. After he passed, in 2023, it took my stepsister Stephanie and me a moment to figure out his cobbler. She came over after work and we started trying to cut the potatoes long ways like he did, and I was like, ‘Steph, my shoulders hurt.’ And she was like, ‘Girl, that man had strong-ass hands.’”

All of this paints a rosy picture of the holidays, but in recent years, they haven’t been an easy time for King. Her son, Ian, died in 2022 at age 26, a heart-shattering loss. Part of the way back from that was King’s decision to create a wine tied to his presence in her life. MianU, an orange-hued blend of Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay, came out of Ian’s love of orange wines and King’s memory of how he introduced her to them, first at a restaurant in Los Angeles they both loved.

Related: Regina King’s New Orange Wine, 'MianU,' Honors Love, Loss, and Every Shared Sip

Regina King holding a glass of MianU, the orange wine she makes in memory of her son Ian.Credit: Food & Wine / Caitlin Cronenberg

“Ian’s always been about discovery and sharing what he discovers,” she says. “And I feel like that’s behind how we ended up at MianU. It’s the journey that Ian and I are on together, while he’s in another place and I’m still on this place called Earth. Because wine does literally tie people together. I call it my ‘Ianspiration.’ A way of making new memories when you won’t be making new memories anymore.”

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MianU

During the holidays, Regina King likes to pour her own MianU orange wine for her friends and family, partly to bring the presence of her son, Ian, to the occasion, and also because it’s exceptionally food friendly. A low-intervention, minimal-sulfur California blend of organic Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay grapes, MianU is sunset orange in color, with bright, citrusy flavors that deepen toward warm apple notes. Orange wines are essentially white wines where the grapes have been left in contact with their skins during fermentation, giving them some of the structure you’d normally associate with reds, so it also has enough tannins to give it the substance to go with main-course dishes like King’s slow-cooker brisket.

King says, “Ian has always been all about discovery and sharing what he discovers, so I would love for people to be able to say that the first time they had orange wine was when they had MianU. That’s the dream I had when I went on this winemaking journey.”

The best place to find MianU is direct from the winery: mianuwines.com.

These days, holiday dinners are in Los Angeles, not Cincinnati. King is thoughtful as she says, “You know, Fred’s not here. Ian’s not here. Nariah hasn’t been here for a while, and it’s just, Christmas sucks to be in the location where all of those people were. So I’d just finished doing a lot of landscaping on my house, and my sister Reina and I talked, and we were like, ‘Maybe Steph and mom can come here for Christmas. Let’s do that.’ So now our new tradition is the four of us spending Christmas together in Los Angeles. We do puzzles, play records, cook all kinds of different things on different days, you know what I mean?” And the holiday music is always going. King laughs. “I will be playing holiday music until I get on everyone’s nerves. ‘Thank you, Regina, enough holiday music!’ But I’d be playing holiday music in September if I could.”

All those memories are there, too: “The first time I ever made cornbread, I made it in my grandmother’s cast iron skillet because honestly, I thought that was the only way to make cornbread. But that’s the beauty of recipes, right? Those stories live on. Just recently, I was talking to a young girl at a festival in Miami, and she was asking me what advice I would give her. And I said: ‘Find out your grandma’s favorite recipe and how to make it.’ Because there is something continuous about making something that your grandmother made and then your mother made, and that you make now. That’s how legacies live on. It sounds so trivial, but yes, through our recipes. That’s how our stories survive.”

King falls silent, thinking for a moment of her son. Then she seems to find comfort in one of those memories. She says, “It’s crazy — I mean, I have this skillet that’s older than I am. But that fact, it’s like, I can’t let this go. My grandmother cooked in it. My sister has cooked in it. I’ve cooked in it. And Ian, when he found out it was my grandmother’s skillet, he couldn’t wait to cook in it to tell her that he cooked in her skillet. How many great-grandchildren get to tell their great-grandma that? And she just smiled and was like, ‘That’s good.’”

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