How Pamela Anderson rediscovered herself in the kitchen

“I always thought that’s the symbol of success, if you can open your refrigerator and it’s just packed,” Anderson, now 57, told me one recent September morning.

The sight of stacked fresh produce was an unfamiliar one to Anderson. The three-room cabin with a shingled roof where Anderson grew up on Canada’s Vancouver Island usually didn’t have much more than half a jar of pickles and powdered milk. “I don’t want to make my mom upset by saying there were a lot of TV dinners and hot dogs and things like that,” she said. But that was her reality.

That salad opened up an entirely new dimension to Anderson. “That food doesn’t just come from a grocery store, vegetables don’t just come out of a can: I think that was a big realization for me,” she said.

Get the recipe: Vegan Swedish Visiting Cake With Grapefruit

That sincere wonderment with nature’s edible possibilities streams through “I Love You: Recipes From the Heart” (Voracious, 2024), the Hollywood icon’s debut cookbook, publishing this week. Its plant-based recipes trade on her longtime animal rights activism: She folds ribbons of mint leaves into pockets of pierogi dough with potatoes and peas, frying them gently in pools of plant butter until their bellies turn golden. She tickles a Swedish visiting cake with grapefruit zest and stipples it with sliced almonds. Anderson’s sprawling garden in Ladysmith, B.C., where rose beds and ground cherries bloom, plays a starring role in the cookbook. Its whimsical, fairylike photos, by Ditte Isager, suggest a self-possessed woman at utter peace with herself.

After years in the Hollywood spotlight, Anderson returned to her roots on Vancouver Island around the time of the coronavirus pandemic. It was there, in the place that taught her how to be a cook, that the seeds of “I Love You” were planted. A few years back, she wanted to create a housewarming present for her two adult sons, Brandon and Dylan, and their girlfriends. She found a tattered recipe-card box on Etsy and began documenting her culinary knowledge. She wrapped it in linen, the words “I Love You” engraved on the front. Her sons persuaded her that it was a book.

Things have changed now. The faces she once associated with the island are gone. A few days before our initial conversation, she received word that her onetime neighbor Mrs. Atkinson — the woman who opened the world to her through cooking — had died. The two hadn’t spoken in decades, but a wave of sadness washed over Anderson when she relayed this news. She wrote the cookbook, in part, to pay tribute to women like Mrs. Atkinson: the ones who saw pride in the role of homemaking, cooking included, and taught her to do the same.

Anderson has a generous outlook in the kitchen, hesitating to smack any dogmatic labels on her book. “I also don’t judge other people for how they’re eating, and that’s why I didn’t really want this to be a typical vegan cookbook, so it gets pushed down to the vegan section of the cookbooks,” Anderson said. “I just kind of want it to be a celebration of my garden and vegetables. It just doesn’t leave anybody out that way.”

“I Love You” opens with an admission that writing a cookbook may surprise people, as Anderson knows the public may never have expected her to embark on such a project. “This is all home-taught, but all the recipes were tested by professionals, so I’m not poisoning anybody,” she said, laughing. “And I learned a lot along the way. I’m still learning.”

Anderson speaks with a fluttering, honeyed cadence. It’s a voice that conveys ease and vulnerability in the same breath. She sports the same maquillage-free look that has dominated press coverage of her in recent years, her face framed by dark, thick-rimmed glasses.

“I Love You” arrives at a moment when Anderson has begun to wrest control over her public image — one that outside parties have sometimes shaped on her behalf, and not always with her consent. A well-received stint starring as Roxie Hart in Broadway’s “Chicago” in 2022 was followed with a bruising memoir, “Love, Pamela” (Dey Street, 2023), and corresponding Netflix documentary, “Pamela, a Love Story” (2023), in which she laid bare her survival of abuses that began early in life. Her acclaimed performance in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” in theaters later this year, is generating talk of a potential Academy Award nomination for best actress. She is headlining an eight-episode Food Network Canada series on vegan cooking set to premiere in early 2025.

Chef and restaurateur Nancy Silverton wasn’t sure what to expect when Anderson — this “very visible, very photographable, iconic television personality,” as she put it in a call — invited her to film a segment of her cooking show. Silverton has known her fair share of celebrities who have muscled into the lucrative food television space and “were just riding on the laurels of their success,” she said, but are clueless and incompetent in the kitchen. But Anderson was the real deal, possessing genuine culinary technique.

“I have to say, I was very surprised, and I was very happy, to know that I was being paired with somebody that really is an enthusiastic cook and entertainer,” Silverton said. “She certainly is, and she certainly knows her food.”

Before she was spotted on a Jumbotron at a Vancouver football game in 1989, before the flock of Playboy covers catapulted her to the status of America’s sweetheart, before that five-season run on television’s “Baywatch” from 1992 to 1997 launched her into the stratosphere of superstardom, Pamela Denise Anderson was a curious tomboy with a hyperactive imagination who longed to get out of that “tiny little house” of hers on Woodley Road. She would scamper through the woods and pluck sour grapes off vines; she’d climb up crab apple trees, eating the fruit around the wormholes. “People thought that was gross, but I thought it was great,” she said.

She forged a kinship with animals early on, finding that they were easier to trust than people. “I had a cat that walked sideways,” she said. “I had a three-legged dog, or a bird with a broken wing. I was always the one surrounded by misfits.”

A sobering encounter around the time she was 6 solidified her compassion for animal life. Her father, who hunted as a hobby, had a pump house that was off-limits to young Pamela. One day, she peered inside to find a muscular, decapitated deer suspended upside down, its lifeless head resting on a blood-soaked stump nearby. “When I realized that was meat, I thought, ‘I can’t do that,’” she remembered.

But the women in Anderson’s immediate orbit were such genial cooks that she learned there was a world beyond eating meat: That neighbor, Mrs. Atkinson, taught her the simple beauty of massaging raw garlic on toasted baguettes, or how the snap of a crisp celery stick could feel infinitely more satisfying if you dipped it in a bowl of sea salt. Her Great-Aunt Eoleia “Vie” Zapshala (“Auntie Vie”) ran the table at every pickle and mustard contest on the island (a variation of her dill pickles features in “I Love You,” but with a rose petal twist), wearing a comically tall Philip Treacy hat as she judged poutine competitions herself. “She was quite the character,” Anderson said, before slipping into her own comedy routine: “I think I’m turning into her!”

Anderson carried the lessons these women imparted to her as life took her away from the island and toward the mainland, then down to Los Angeles in 1989. This gave way to a period in the 1990s and beyond when her visage was so inescapable in American culture, her personal life (particularly her marriage to rocker Tommy Lee) dissected so forensically in the press, that she became a figure of fantasy and derision in equal measure.

It was a few years later, into the new millennium, that the editor Brenda Copeland met Anderson, who was penning a novel, “Star” (Atria Books, 2004), a parable of a wide-eyed girl who makes good in Tinseltown. (Sound familiar?) Copeland, Anderson’s editor on the book, knew the public was predisposed to regard Anderson with blithe dismissiveness, if not gleeful cruelty. “It’s easy to make fun of a large-breasted, pretty young woman, right?” Copeland said in a phone conversation.

But Copeland — herself from Canada — had always felt an affinity toward Anderson for “her fresh-faced beauty, her Canadian honesty and niceness,” she said, also finding her to be a “natural storyteller.” Only recently have the cultural tides shifted toward sympathy for rather than disparagement of Anderson: “What has come out in later years, too, is just what that fresh-faced innocence had to put up with.”

Watching Anderson from afar with each passing year, Copeland has come to see her as less a survivor — a word that might imply listless passivity — than a “victor,” a woman who has persevered in the face of punches, coming into her own with each turn in her career, whether it be her casting on Broadway, her starring role in a dramatic film or, now, this cookbook. After decades of being target practice for tabloids, Anderson has, at long last, had the chance to frame her story on her own terms.

“I guess what I really love about Pam — and I think this is a very female thing, too — is that she has evolved, she has changed, she has adjusted,” Copeland added. “But she has also very, very much remained true to herself.”

Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of “Taste Makers” (2021) and “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star” (coming 2025). He is a 2025 fellow at New America.