Paula Deen: Food Network Gives Her the ax

[Beacool]

61. You lost me because I didn't know what you were referring to.

I had to Google the reference. It came from her memoir.

Along with these incidents from her youth, Deen also wrote with a surprising lack of self-awareness about a situation that occurred after she began her television career when she wanted to make a recipe she called the “Sambo Burger” on her show:

“I’ll never forget the day I was doing hamburgers, and I was cookin’ what ended up being called a Beau Burger, which was topped with a fried egg. Actually I wanted to call it a Sambo Burger. It came about when this motorcycle-driving, long-haired lawyer named Sam told me about his favorite little hamburger joint owned by a guy named Beau. When Sam was out tooling along on his cycle, he’d stop off for the best burger in town, topped with a fried egg, some melted cheese, a load of grilled onions—out of this world! One day, Sam was on my set because we were doing a show about motorcycles, and we were standin’ around talking about these burgers and I told him, ‘Sam I am going to do that burger on the show. We’ll call it after you—the Sambo Burger. You know—Sam, Beau. Sounds great, doesn’t it?’”

Deen claimed her producers forced her to rename the burger.

“My producers said no—I had to find another name, because some people associated the name with an old children’s book that was insulting to black people,” wrote Deen. “So we called it a Beau.”