For 20 years, she focused on cooking for her family because it was something she could do without leaving the house. “I could concentrate on what was in my pots and block out what was in my head,” she said. Shame and bewilderment prevented her from seeking help, she said, and no one except her husband knew the depth of her illness.  “Some days I could get to the supermarket, but I could never go too far inside,” Ms. Deen said. “I learned to cook with the ingredients they kept close to the door.”  Through sheer repetition, she mastered the Southern classics her grandmother Irene Paul had taught her: fried chicken and collard greens cooked with fatback or hog jowl, pickled green beans and okra, fried peach pies, sour cream pound cake. “It was real farmhouse cooking, the kind that takes all day,” she said. The process itself was therapeutic, providing structure and purpose to days that otherwise would have been overwhelmed by panic.  Ms. Deen consulted her pastor, who let her cry for an hour and then called her a “spoiled brat” in front of her husband; she set aside enough grocery money for one session with a psychiatrist but couldn’t afford to go back. “In those days, in Georgia, nobody was going to a psychiatrist just to mend your spirit,” she said. “It meant you was crazy.”  Finally — and, in retrospect, appropriately — she was saved by television.  In 1989, after she and her husband were divorced, Ms. Deen happened to watch an episode of “The Phil Donahue Show” that provided a name for her illness. Forced to make a living, Ms. Deen ventured back into the world armed with $200 and a brown paper bag in the glove compartment to breathe into in case of panic attacks.  She had years of practice packing lunches for her two sons, so she made sandwiches of ham salad, chicken salad, and barbecued pork, added a cup of custard or banana pudding, and sent the boys to downtown Savannah to sell boxed lunches to office workers. She developed a regular customer base and opened a small restaurant. In 1996, she followed it with a bigger one near the Savannah waterfront, The Lady and Sons, that got her on an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” devoted to women who’d started successful businesses in their homes. Savannah happened to be drowning in tourists at the time, drawn by John Berendt’s best-selling Southern Gothic murder tale, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”  When the QVC shopping network picked up her first cookbook in 1998 and sold 70,000 copies in one day, her success was sealed.  “Now I’m done fightin’ and I’m done hidin’,” she said last week, gazing raptly into a mound of ham salad as if it might contain an offer to be a guest host on “The View.”  Today, Paula Deen’s empire includes two restaurants, two television shows, five cookbooks, a cooking/decorating magazine, and a line of baking mixes and seasonings, including “Paula’s Butt Massage,” a rub for pork. Ms. Deen’s lasciviousness is one of her trademarks, but as she is also round enough to be relatable, and gray enough to draw loyal older viewers, it is more theatrical than threatening.  Even by the high standards of cable television — home of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” — Paula Deen has become an unusually extroverted woman. Rachael Ray, who is hardly known for hermit-like tendencies, conducted her 2005 wedding off-camera; not so Ms. Deen, who married for the second time in 2004 with a Food Network crew filming every moment from bridal shower to prenuptial spray tan. She has hauled her two sons, her brother, first and second husbands, various stepchildren, childhood friends and strangers into the glare with her: recent issues of her magazine, Cooking with Paula Deen, featured photographs of her newborn grandson, the powder room in her new house in Savannah, and even her 36-year-old son Bobby’s bedroom. “When I see something like that, it represents all those years of hard work that me and my mom and Jamie put into the business,” Mr. Deen said.  “I am as fascinated by the change in her as anybody,” he said. “We never talked about her agoraphobia, but we lived it for years.”  Some viewers are put off by her relentless self-exposure, Mediterranean-diet advocates might wince at her food’s saturated-fat content, and some Georgians are mortified by her exaggerated drawl.  But Ms. Deen has quickly developed an audience whose appetite for detail about her life seems bottomless. “I am Paula, and Paula is me, that’s about it,” said Mary Ellen McLeod, who lives outside Atlanta and posts frequently to Paula Deen fan Web sites. Ms. McLeod says that she loves Ms. Deen because “she’s not a size 2, she eats what she wants, and she put up with a lot of crap from men but still got that fairy tale ending.”  Indeed, Ms. Deen has now acquired many of the trappings of celebrity — including a personal assistant, a self-effacing second husband, a mink coat with her name embroidered in the lining and a rehearsed answer for almost every question — but she remains refreshingly unafraid to air out the uglier parts of her life. Most celebrity chefs stick to talking about food, preferably fond memories of mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen. But in addition to speaking out about her agoraphobia, Ms. Deen spikes her new memoir with unhappy moments of racism, infidelity, maternal rage — and even smoking. (Despite constant efforts to quit, she still goes through a pack a week.)  She even takes the opportunity to confess to 50-year-old offenses. Ms. Deen recounts an incident of her own mindless childhood cruelty, when she took a bolo bat (a wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached) and used it to smack open the painful blisters that covered a playmate’s hands. There were adult repercussions: the girl’s mother, who was Ms. Deen’s babysitter, spanked Ms. Deen for it — and because the woman was black, Ms. Deen’s grandfather was able to have the woman arrested and jailed. “Now I know I sure had it comin’,” she writes. (The entire memoir is written in Ms. Deen’s speaking voice.) “All this time it’s bothered me.”  Today, the people Paula Deen is likeliest to offend are a small but sensitive cadre of Southern food purists who see dessert topping and canned peaches as the culinary equivalent of Sherman’s burning of Atlanta: the end of a whole way of life. Like her Food Network colleague Sandra Lee, Ms. Deen is an unabashed fan of cake mix and instant pudding. “My grandmother Paul thought these were the greatest products,” she said with enthusiasm on a 2003 episode of “Paula’s Home Cooking.” “She knew how to take them and bring the flavor up to homemade.”  One of Ms. Deen’s most popular desserts is Better Than Sex cake, a confection of yellow cake mix, instant vanilla pudding, canned pineapple, “dessert topping” and toasted coconut flakes.  It’s just the kind of dish that makes cooks like Debbie Knox of Greenville, S.C., gnash their teeth.  “She isn’t a Southern cook, she’s a convenience cook” said Ms. Knox, whose family cooking traditions, she says, reach back 300 years into Southern history. “And deep-fried collard greens just seems like a publicity stunt to me.”  Ms. Deen is so popular that the title “Queen of Southern Cooking” is already bestowed on her by some fans (and her many publicists). But the purists still reserve that title for the venerated chef and writer Edna Lewis, who died just over a year ago. Miss Lewis, who was born in 1916 and raised in a rural Virginia community built by freed slaves, was a a quietly powerful ambassador for the traditional cooking of the South. “Miss Lewis stayed very, very close to the agricultural roots of that food,” said Scott Peacock, an Atlanta chef who worked closely with Miss Lewis and co-wrote her final book, “The Gift of Southern Cooking.” “You have to remember that she made everything from scratch, even her baking powder.”  Ms. Deen’s own kitchen roots mean that she is not unaware of the shortcuts and compromises she sometimes makes. “It’s scary,” she said of the extent to which she and other modern cooks have abandoned the slow cooking of their ancestors. “But let’s be honest, a pot of real greens, to wash ’em and strip ’em and simmer ’em — you’re talking about four hours. Who has time to watch a pot of greens for four hours?”  Not Paula Deen. But that’s not to say that her palate is undiscriminating. In my New York kitchen, she missed the sharpness of the cheese she usually buys for pimento cheese, the particular savor of her favorite yellow mustard, and the heat and sweetness of the pickle relish she adds to ham salad. Presented with a full-sour pickle from Zabar’s as an alternative, she took a polite bite. Shock and horror at its bitterness registered on her face, but she swallowed it down. “Honey,” she said to me, gently. “Y’all need to come down and taste some real pickles.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Phobia to Fame: A Southern Cook’s Memoir. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
She may now be as perky as a cheerleader, but Paula Deen had to conquer agoraphobia to become the Food Network’s queen of Southern food.