Stephen Colbert and Wife Evie McGee Colbert’s Cookbook Is a ‘Little Peek’ Into Their ‘Very Private’ Family (Exclusive)

Stephen Colbert and his wife Evie McGee Colbert have largely kept their kids out of the spotlight — until now.

The Colberts, who share three adult children, Madeleine, 28, Peter, 26, and John, 22, teamed up on a new cookbook, Does This Taste Funny? (out now). In it, they offer “a little peek” into their quiet family life.

“It’s an interesting step for us,” says Evie, 61, who is a guest food editor in this week’s issue of PEOPLE along with Stephen. “We are very private, and we’ve sort of kept our family and our children and everything away from what you might want to call fame. But they’re adults now, and they all willingly participated.”

“It’s a little peek into our family,” she adds. “It’s not like we’re going to be a reality TV show, but it’s just a teeny little bit of hanging out with us in the kitchen.”

Does This Taste Funny? celebrates lowcountry cooking, which is classic, coastal South Carolina cuisine heavily influenced by West African cuisine. (Stephen and Evie are both from Charleston, S.C.) The likes of red rice, crab cakes, okra and more delicacies all make up the fare fabric of their cookbook.

The hilarious couple, who have been married 30 years, weren’t always so synchronized in the kitchen. They stopped cooking together early on in their marriage after a dispute involving a metal spoon.

“We didn’t cook together originally,” Stephen, 60, tells PEOPLE.

“When we were first married in 1993, we were sent Calphalon non-stick pots and pans,” adds Evie. “We lived in Chicago and [the kitchen] was like the size of a closet. I’m not exaggerating! It was the tiniest little kitchen.”

“And we’re married and I’m like, ‘I’m cooking. This is great.’ And Stephen looks down and he’s like, ‘You are using a metal spoon in that nonstick pan?’ And I was like, ‘Is that a bad thing?’ And he almost was like, ‘I’m not sure we can be married anymore,’” she recalls. 

Stephen interrupts: “This is why I don’t want you to tell the spoon story because that’s not what happened!”

In his version of the pair’s early relationship lore, Stephen says his wife used a metal spoon to “get the stuff off” the bottom of the pan as they cooked a sauce. He says he handed her a wooden spoon and just said, “It hurts the pan.” He grew up using non-stick pans and “it was beaten into us as children not to use a metal spoon,” he says.

Whatever the truth, the infamous spoon story taught them a valuable lesson. “You have to compromise and be patient with each other,” says Evie, “even in the kitchen.”

“And then wait 30 years before you write a cookbook together,” jokes Stephen.

True to their real-life relationship, their cookbook is filled with quippy stories with recipe headnotes in a dialogue format. 

“It’s meant to be what it’s like to hang out with us while we’re cooking,” says Stephen. “The best podcast feels like you’re just hanging out with the people; we want it to feel like that.”

After “resisting” professionally working together for the majority of their marriage, Stephen admits the pandemic changed that. While quarantining in South Carolina, Evie was her husband’s “only crew and only audience” on The Late Show as they filmed at home. Once they passed that test, they knew that it was time to revisit cooking together again. 

“After we’d found out that we worked well together, we thought, ‘Well then we should do something together.’ And then this sort of fell into our lap,” says Stephen.

At home in Charleston for five months, Evie said it was “wonderful timing” as they “rediscovered a lot of the recipes that we’d grown up with.”

And it certainly was healing after their newlywed spoon debacle. “I think it surprised both of us how well we worked in the kitchen together,” she admits of the process. 

Each of their children chime in on recipes that mean the most to them. John even has five pages dedicated to his sourdough expertise. 

“I don’t think we said we’re going to write a family cookbook, but it turned into a family cookbook,” says Evie. “Because we have such a large family — Stephen’s one of 11, I have one sister — but we sort of said to everybody, ‘Hey, we’re writing a cookbook, what do you think?’ And then everyone of course was like, ‘Well, you got to put my this or that in.’” 

For more from the Colberts, including recipes from their cookbook, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.

The book is dedicated to Evie’s mom, Patti McGee, who died in Nov. 2022 after a long illness. “We spent all this time together with her just going through finding the old recipe boxes,” says Stephen. “That is one of the most wonderful aspects of it to me.”

Adds Evie: “It really was this collaborative effort.”

Does This Taste Funny?: Recipes Our Family Loves from Celadon Books is available now, wherever books are sold.