Born Prepared

In a sense, Ms. Lee is the perfect guide for this moment. She will change the way you think about a package of $2 Peeps (they can be used on cakes, to garnish cocktails or hidden in eggs in the garden), explain that if you separate two-ply toilet paper into single ply it lasts twice as long and pour you a heavy vodka and fresh grapefruit when it’s all over, which is what she was drinking during one of our calls.

(Pro tip from Aunt Sandy, as she often calls herself: If you chop the used grapefruit into fourths, you can throw a chunk of it down the garbage disposal and toss another in the bottom of your trash can. “They keep everything fresh,” she said.)

“She loves to problem-solve, so she’s a great person to call when the stuff hits the fan,” her longtime friend Dr. Rosemarie Ingleton, a dermatologist in Manhattan, said over the phone this week.

Sandra Lee grew up on food stamps, bouncing between homes after her mother dropped her and a younger sister off at her grandmother’s house when Sandra was 2 and didn’t return for several years. She learned to be creative with cooking in part to stretch her family’s welfare checks and help care for three more siblings who arrived.

“We made simple bargain cuisine, not because we wanted to, but because we had to,” she wrote in her 2007 memoir, “Made From Scratch.”

Eventually, Ms. Lee turned that thriftiness into a business: first with a curtain line started in the bedroom of her aunt and uncle’s house and later with a QVC show, and eventually, a cooking empire.