Comedy defangs the taboo, so Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert have decided, at last, to tell the dreaded spoon story. The two have celebrated milestone anniversaries, welcomed three children and one dog, and now released the cookbook Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves. Secure in that solid foundation, Colbert and McGee Colbert conceded the time had come to revisit what has come to be one of the defining moments of their union.

It goes like this: The Colberts were just married and living in Chicago, where Stephen Colbert launched his career performing with Second City, when McGee Colbert took a metal spoon out from a drawer and scraped it across the surface of their pristine set of Calphalon nonstick pans.

Off in the distance, but almost visible from the porch of their home on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina where this interview took place, Fort Sumter marks the ground where the Civil War broke out in 1861. The stakes of this inciting incident were only somewhat less consequential.

“We move into this apartment,” McGee Colbert recalled, “and I think we’re going to be chopping basil and cooking together and drinking wine and listening to Chet Baker.” Her new husband wasted no time disabusing her of those notions. “He’s like, ‘You shouldn’t do that,’” she said.

“I believe I said, ‘How about a wooden spoon?’” Colbert countered, head in hands.

McGee Colbert dropped her weapon and withdrew. She took one look at the man to whom she had pledged her troth and declared that there would be no more “having a fabulous time” in the kitchen. Colbert could have his mise en place and sparkling cookware. In the parlance of Top Chef, she packed her knives and went.

“I was like, ‘I’m out,’” McGee Colbert said. Next to her on a rattan couch in the humid Charelstonian summer, Colbert wiped his brow and groaned.

Separate domestic spheres

For almost three decades, McGee Colbert kept her promise. Colbert snagged jobs writing and performing, rising to correspondent on The Daily Show and later starring in The Colbert Report. All the while, the two maintained their separate domestic spheres. When their children were small and fastidious eaters, Mr. Colbert took to preparing “beautiful things for dinner, and then I would feed them,” McGee Colbert remembered.

The Colberts had their relationship endure, even in the years when Evie McGee Colbert studiously avoided cooking with her husband. Picture: Getty Images

“We still drank a lot of wine,” Colbert insisted. “We just didn’t do it while cooking.”

But then the pandemic descended and Colbert — the kind of master of the universe for whom the term “control freak” might be an honourable distinction — had no choice but to collaborate with his wife. Hunkered down in South Carolina to ride out the crisis, he had to host The Late Show — which he took over in 2015 — with no on-site staff and minimal equipment. McGee Colbert soon assumed the duties of several production departments. “I couldn’t believe all the lights and the wires. It was chaos,” she said. Within a few weeks, she appeared as a guest, running up from the ad hoc control room to brush her hair and put on a blouse.

“I said, ‘You’ve never had someone do all of this! I’m the guest. I’m the director. I’m the sound.’” McGee Colbert said.

“I was so nervous,” Colbert said. “And in the middle of it, she said, ‘You’re so nervous!’ And I said to her, ‘I’m worried you’re not going to have fun!’” But she did have fun. And so did he.

“And that was the beginning of 15 months of doing that together,” Colbert continued.

Colbert had once been pitched on a cookbook, but he hadn’t been interested in conceptualising one alone. When Celadon Books revived the proposition at the end of 2021 and expressed openness to McGee Colbert’s participation, the couple was game.

“We had become a tag team,” Colbert said. And while Teflon “can’t heal,” as he pointed out in a hushed tone after McGee Colbert went inside, she and he had grown.

“It was kind of perfect timing,” McGee Colbert said. “Because I was rediscovering the recipes I grew up with.” The Colberts met as adults, but both were raised in Charleston. McGee Colbert’s sister lives across the street from their current home. The cookbook is dedicated to McGee Colbert’s mother, whose house was two blocks over. In the middle of a progressive illness, Patti McGee pored over passed-down recipes with her daughter. Her choicest selections made it into Does This Taste Funny? — minus the Jell-O salads.

During the pandemic shutdown, Stephen Colbert did The Late Show from home, with Evie McGee Colbert helping him in all aspects, including appearing as a guest Picture: Getty Images

Catching fish and cleaning them

No cottage cheese-accented ambrosia in the finished product, but Colbert said he had retained some reverence for the old formulas. The taste of his childhood is still recipes cribbed from the back of ketchup bottles and soup mixes. His mother — who had 11 children and had to raise Colbert and his siblings on her own after his father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash in 1974 — was a pragmatic and frugal cook. Twice a month, she loaded up on discount bread and Tetris-ed the loaves into the back of her station wagon. Colbert can reconstruct the taste of powdered milk even now. She was not the kind of mother who took requests for dinner, although Colbert’s sister Elizabeth Colbert-Busch remembered she did like to experiment with international cuisines. “One night we would have German food, one night we’d have French food, and then we would all get dressed up,” she said. “You can see where the theatre came in with the cooking.”

When the extended clan gathers now, Colbert-Busch knows it is her brother’s show. “He is so polite,” she said. But she validated McGee Colbert’s experience of Colbert’s meticulousness. Once, she brought over a bunch of “beautiful” heirloom carrots to prepare at his house. “I was to clean the carrots, wash the carrots, and put them to roast in the oven, so I did — at least, I thought I did,” she said. She couldn’t help but notice Mr. Colbert pacing behind her.

Colbert started preparing his own food as a child, catching fish and cleaning them, but it was working as a waiter while he tried to break into acting that formed his real education. “I love it,” he said. “I love the magic of it — how this thing becomes another thing.” He has long felt a kinship with the show Chopped on the Food Network in which contestants are tasked with combining discordant ingredients to make one cohesive dish. “That’s what it’s like to do our show,” he said. “You get in there, and it’s like, ‘What are the ingredients? What is the national conversation in the last 24 hours? And how is that a meal?’”

Despite their shared love of food, Colbert and McGee Colbert were conscious of the limited impact of a warm and winking cookbook, released on the eve of another election cycle in the United States.

Colbert does not believe that a series of dinner parties can solve political polarisation. “I mean, how good of a meal are we talking? What are we serving?” Colbert asked, with a smile.

But after a pause, he reconsidered. There were whole swaths of people with whom he would rather not share pearlescent shrimp paste and burnished cheese biscuits, but he wasn’t proud of it. “I do think that’s a failing,” he said. “I would like to be a person who could do that.” His Catholic faith compelled him to at least aspire to better. “It’s at the heart of the Mass,” he continued. “That’s what it’s about.”

Among the recipes in the couple’s new book is one for Sullivan’s Island Shrimp Paste Picture: Eric Wolfinger

Asked whether a bad meal or a bad performance was worse, he did not hesitate. When a dish collapses, an evening can be salvaged. “Wine’s cold,” he said. A sleeve of Ritz crackers and a well-made espresso martini — a more recent fixation for Colbert, who whips them up with a Nespresso machine that his old boss Jon Stewart gifted him — can cover a multitude of sins. But a disastrous show? It leaves a sour taste.

An hour later, he was still thinking about it. “The reason the bad show is worse is because you never get another swipe at it,” he said. “You never get that box of ingredients again. With cooking, you keep getting to try.”