Liz Smith 'Dishing'

Liz Smith has been dishing celebrity gossip for five decades. Now she serves up something new in her latest book, "Dishing: Great Dish and Dishes From America's Favorite Gossip Columnist."

And she visited The Early Show on Tuesday to talk about it. To read an excerpt from the introduction, click here.

The book is about her love of food, but isn't a cookbook. It's a collection of stories about food and recipes she has collected from others. And, of course, it includes stories from New York society.

"A couple years ago, I wrote a memoir called 'Natural Blonde,' and this seemed like a sort of perfect p.s. to it," Smith told co-anchor Julie Chen. "I start thinking about all the famous people I had broken bread with, all over the world, and the wonderful experiences I had when I first came to New York, like learning to eat caviar and stuff I had never heard of."

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Smith's said the only dish she knows how to cook is Chicken Fried Steak and she had some with Chen and talked about celebrities, of course.

"Julia Roberts loves biscuits and gravy," Smith said. "She doesn't want you to mention them to her because she will have to stop and eat some. She's a typical southern girl who is always struggling against her eating roots."

Nicole Kidman is not finicky about her food. "Kidman eats just anything. She could eat this whole table, and probably would, and she wouldn't gain any weight," Smith says. "She is a big eat person, If you ask her at end of a six-course meal, 'What would you really liked to have?', she'll say, Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I think it's revealing what people eat, their attitudes about food."

Included in her book is a recipe for Katharine Hepburn's brownies. Asked what it was like eating at the late star's home, Smith says, "It was an act of discipline, total discipline. You had to arrive precisely in front of her house at 6:00 p.m. If you got there at 6:01, she'd really let you have it. She wouldn't let you take anything in to the living room, like an umbrella or briefcase or anything. I mean you have to sit here, do that. Then, when she wanted Nora, her housekeeper, to come up, she didn't ring a bell or do anything fastidious. She'd go, 'Yo!' and Nora would say, 'Yes, Miss Hepburn.' She outdid Sylvester Stallone."

So what makes a celebrity a celebrity?

"A celebrity is somebody you don't have to identify," Smith says. "You don't have to say Liz Smith, the gossip columnist - that's not a celebrity."

Just the name alone stands by itself.

"Dishing" is published by Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS' parent company.