To earn her daily bread, Rebecca Wood never intended to cook. She intended to manage offices and was doing just that for an architectural firm in Atlanta when the Great Recession of 2008 happened. Time to reinvent. Rebecca went part-time, had a baby and started baking. Within six months, she had space in a commercial kitchen.
But Rebecca and husband – musician Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers – decided in 2012 to decamp to Nashville. Rebecca began working as an administrator for Zach Brown’s recording studio. When the Wood Brothers came in to record, she cooked them dinner as a strategy to spend time with her husband. However, her home-cooked meals proved a hit, and soon Rebecca found herself cooking for all the artists recording at the studio.
She cooks with the seasons, sourcing her ingredients from Nashville Grown and S.E. Daugherty & Sons Farm. And, unless a musician has an allergy, the band gets what she cooks. Her food isn’t precious, canned and clichéd but relevant, fresh and good. As she says, “my superpower is being able to think on my feet, figure it out and take a basket of random ingredients and make dinner.” Such a dinner is Last-Minute Session Soup, which she constructed from the packaged riced cauliflower at Trader Joe’s. She published a cookbook last year, The Studio Mama Cookbook: A Collection of Cherished Southern Recipes, Real-Life Stories and Star-Studded Menus From the Music City. It’s full of studio anecdotes and delicious, sometimes comical recipes.
Today, Rebecca runs Hearts in the Mix, a thriving catering business that meets the gastronomical needs of a number of recording studios in town. In addition, she also runs Studio Mama Supper Club, a concert series that takes place in The Studio Nashville. Her supper clubs are intimate events for 30 people with a family-style meal and music by a different artist each time.