Dianne Evans wrote her first cookbook in 1964, in Jesup GA, where she had a 30 minute daily women’s radio show on the local radio station and her listeners sent in recipes that she shared on the air. These recipes eventually became her first book.

    Not afraid of challenges, she once took 500 gift-size loaves of homemade bread to the “Stay & See Georgia” week-long event at Lenox Square in Atlanta.  It resulted in a camera-man from Brown’s Guide to Georgia, showing up at her front door in Thomasville GA to do a story for the magazine. (Complete with photographs of her actually baking!)

     By special invitation, she and her husband, Emery, were once flown to New York City to serve a southern fried chicken dinner to the Laurence Rockefeller family. While there, they catered a luncheon for the 70 members of the New York Botanical Society, where Emery opened a bushel of fresh oysters and made Oysters Rockefeller for the delighted members.

     She has owned a bakery/catering business, ran several Plantation/Hunting Preserve Main Houses in south Georgia and north Florida.  Horseshoe Plantation in Tallahassee FL and Gillionville Plantation in Albany GA were two places she cooked for the rich and often famous guests of their owners. In 1981, Campbell Soup’s CEO John Dorrance moved her and her family to Gladwyne PA to be his personal chef. Mr. Dorrance’s father, John Dorrance, Sr. invented condensed soup in 1914.

     Dianne is the mother of six children, grandmother of eight, great-grandmother of seven and wife of 67+ years.