The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Southern Table: A Memoir and Cookbook

ALSO BY RICK BRAGG

My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story

The Most They Ever Had

The Prince of Frogtown

I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story

Ava’s Man

Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

All Over but the Shoutin’

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2018 by Rick Bragg

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Peer International Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt of Waiting For A Train by Jimmie Rodgers, copyright © 1929 by Peer International Corporation, copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Peer International Corporation. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bragg, Rick, author.

Title: The best cook in the world / by Rick Bragg.

Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2018] | A Borzoi Book.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017024979 (print) | LCCN 2017028840 (ebook) | ISBN

9780525520283 (ebook) | ISBN 9781400040414 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Bragg, Rick,—family. | Cooking, American—Southern style. |

LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX715.2.S68 (ebook) | LCC TX715.2.S68 B725 2018 (print) |

DDC 641.5975—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017024979

Ebook ISBN 9780525520283

Cover design Stephanie Ross

Cover photograph courtesy of the author. Colorization by Dana Keller

ep_prh_5.2_148356982_c0_r8

To the cook

Contents

Cover

Also by Rick Bragg

Frontispiece

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

It Takes a Lot of Rust to Wipe Away a General Electric

1  Them Shadows Get to Dancin’

      Butter Rolls

2  Salt Is Good

      Cream Sausage Gravy, Buttered Grits with a Touch of Cheese, Sliced Tomato, the Perfect Fried Egg

3  A Man Who Knew Beans

      Pinto Beans and Ham Bone, Creamed Onions, Buttered Boiled Potatoes, Carrot and Red Cabbage Slaw, Cornbread

4  Sweeter, After the Frost

      Collard Greens, Baked Hog Jowl, Baked Sweet Potatoes

5  A Chicken…Ain’t Likely to Ketch On

      Chicken Roasted in Cider with Carrots, Turnips, and Onion, Chicken Gravy, Mashed Potatoes

6  The Fourth Bear

      Cornmeal Porridge with Chicken and Watercress, Stewed Cabbage, Fried Apples

7  The Falling Cow

      Beef Short Ribs, Potatoes, and Onions

8  Hard Times, Come Around No More

      Sweet Potato Pie, Sweet Potato Cobbler

9  A Ham Hock Don’t Call for Help

      Pan-Roasted Pig's Feet (with Homemade Barbecue Sauce), Chunky Potato Salad

10  Cakes of Gold

      Meat Loaf, Scalloped Potatoes, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

11  Sis

      Sis's Chicken and Dressing

12  The Second Ghost

      Cracklin' Cornbread

13  Bitter Weeds

      Poke Salad

14  Still Hard Times for an Honest Man

      Vegetable Soup in a Short Rib Base

15  The Pie That Never Was

      Chocolate Pie, Toasted Coconut Pie, Buttermilk Pie

16  Ribs in the Dead of Night

      Spareribs Stewed in Butter Beans

17  Clementine

      Fried Chicken, Fried Chicken Gravy (Water Gravy), Fresh Green Beans with Golden Potatoes

18  Tomatoes Without Taste, Tomatoes Without End

      Ham and Redeye Gravy over Fresh Diced Tomato

19  Didelphis Virginiana

      Baked Possum and Sweet Potatoes

20  Stairway to Nowhere

      Real Biscuits, with Sausage, Ham, Fatback, Fried Potatoes, Spanish Scrambled Eggs

21  People Who Cook

      Buttermilk and Cornbread Patties

22  Blackberry Winter

      Wild Plum Pie, Blackberry Cobbler

23  Till It Thunders

      Turtle Soup

24  Offerings

      Smothered Cubed Steak

25  Government Cheese

      Cheese-and-Sausage Pie, Macaroni and Cheese, Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Pear Preserves or Muscadine Jelly

26  Sometimes the Pies Just Call Your Name

      Pecan Pie

27  Red’s

      The Hamburger Steak with Brown Gravy, The Immaculate Cheeseburger

28  When Momma Was All Right

      Tea Cakes

29  Monkey on a String

      Barbecued Rag Bologna Sandwich Dressed with Shredded Purple Cabbage Slaw

30  Edna’s Ark

      Fried Fresh Crappie, Hush Puppies, Tartar Sauce

31  Staggering to Glory

      Barbecued Pork Chops and Ham Slices, Deviled Eggs, Baked Beans with Thick-Cut Bacon, Jalapeño Cornbread

32  The Runaway

      Roast Turkey

33  Untimely Figs

      Ray Brock's Fig Preserves

34  Spring

      Fresh Field Peas with Pork, Stewed Squash and Sweet Onions, Fried Okra, Sweet Corn, Fried Green Tomatoes

EPILOGUE: THE RECIPE THAT NEVER WAS

Quick Fried Apple Pies

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

_148356982_

Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.

COLOSSIANS 4:6

Good stuff always has a story.

MARGARET BRAGG

• PROLOGUE •

IT TAKES A LOT OF RUST TO WIPE AWAY A GENERAL ELECTRIC

Three generations of great cooks, from left to right: Great-Aunt Plumer, Aunt Juanita, Cousin Mary, Cousin Betty, Aunt Edna, my mother at 13, Cousin Louise, Aunt Jo, Cousin Norma Jean, Grandmother Ava, Aunt Sue, Aunt Fene, and Cousin Jeanette in diapers

SINCE SHE WAS eleven years old, even if all she had to work with was neck bones, peppergrass, or poke salad, she put good food on a plate. She cooked for dead-broke uncles, hungover brothers, shade-tree mechanics, faith healers, dice shooters, hairdressers, pipe fitters, crop dusters, high-steel walkers, and well diggers. She cooked for ironworkers, Avon ladies, highway patrolmen, sweatshop seamstresses, fortune-tellers, coal haulers, dirt-track daredevils, and dime-store girls. She cooked for lost souls stumbling home from Aunt Hattie’s beer joint, and for singing cowboys on the AM radio. She cooked, in her first eighty years, more than seventy thousand meals, as basic as hot buttered biscuits with pear preserves or muscadine jelly, as exotic as tender braised beef tripe in white milk gravy, in kitchens where the only ventilation was the banging of the screen door. She cooked for people she’d just as soon have poisoned, and for the loves of her life.

She cooked for the rich ladies in town, melting beef short ribs into potatoes and Spanish onions, another woman’s baby on her hip, and sleepwalked home to feed her own boys home-canned blackberries dusted with sugar as a late-night snack. She pan-fried chicken in Red’s Barbecue with a crust so crisp and thin it was mostly in the imagination, and deep-fried fresh bream and crappie and hush puppies redolent with green onion and government cheese. She seasoned pinto beans with ham bone and baked cracklin’ cornbread for old women who had tugged a pick sack, and stewed fat spareribs in creamy butter beans that truck drivers would brag on three thousand miles from home. She spiked collard greens with cane sugar and hot pepper for old men who had fought the Hun on the Hindenburg Line, and simmered chicken and dumplings for mill workers with cotton lint still stuck in their hair. She fried thin apple pies in white butter and cinnamon for pretty young women with bus tickets out of this one-horse town, and baked sweet-potato cobbler for the grimy pipe fitters and dusty bricklayers they left behind. She cooked for big-haired waitresses at the Fuzzy Duck Lounge, shiny-eyed pilgrims at the Congregational Holiness summer campground, and crew-cut teenage boys who read comic books beside her banana pudding, then embarked for Vietnam.

She cooked, most of all, to make it taste good, to make every chipped melamine plate a poor man’s banquet, because how do you serve dull food to people such as this? She became famous for it, became the best cook in the world, if the world ends just this side of Cedartown. But she never used a cookbook, not in her whole life. She never cooked from a written recipe of any kind, and never wrote down one of her own. She cooked with ghosts at her sure right hand, and you can believe that or not. The people who taught her the secrets of Southern, blue-collar cooking are all gone now, and they did not cook from a book, either; most of them did not even know how to read and write. Every time the old woman stepped from her workshop of steel spoons, iron skillets, and blackened pots, all she knew about the food left with her, in the way, when a bird flies off a wire, it leaves only a black line on the sky.

It’s all I’ve ever been real good at, and people always bragged on my cooking…you know, ’cept the ones who don’t know what’s good, she told me when I asked her about her craft. "When I was little, the old women used to sit in their kitchens at them old Formica tables and drink coffee and tell their fortunes and talk and talk and talk, about their sorry old men and their good food and the good Lord, and they would cook, my God, they could cook….And I just paid attention, and I done what they done…."

Most chefs, when asked for a blueprint of their food, would only have to reach for a dog-eared notebook or a faded handwritten index card for ingredients, measures, cooking times, and the rest.

I am not a chef, she said.

Yet she can tell if her flour is getting stale by rubbing it in her fingers.

I am a cook.

I remember one night, when she was yearning for something sweet, she patted out tiny biscuits and plopped them down in a pool of milk flavored with sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and cubes of cold butter. She baked this until the liquid, half whole milk, half thick, sweetened condensed milk, steamed into the biscuits, infusing them with the flavors underneath. It created not a dense slab, like a traditional, New Orleans–style bread pudding, but little islands of perfect sweet, buttery dumplings; the spacing, not the ingredients or cooking time, was the secret here. Momma taught it to me, and Grandpa Bundrum taught it to her, and his momma taught it to him, and…well, I guess I don’t really know no further than that.

In the roadside cafés, cooks in hairnets with Semper Fi on their forearms taught her to build the perfect burger from layers of charred, thin patties, melting cheese, rings of sweet Vidalia onion, and wheels of fresh tomato. They taught her crisp, fork-tender chicken-fried steak, and how to dress steamed foot-long hot dogs with homemade hot chili, just the right trickle of yellow mustard, and lots of finely diced onion, to make the pulpwooders weep. She learned to slow-cook pork barbecue from old men who lived in the smoke itself. "The workin’ people wouldn’t pay good money for food that wasn’t fit to eat. I didn’t make no money in a café…fourteen or fifteen dollars a week was the most I made. But at Red’s café we got all the puddin’ we could eat. Your uncle Ed’s momma, Granny Fair, waitressed at Red’s when I was there. You remember her? She was kind of a big woman? Well, she’d bust through the double doors to that kitchen, snatch up one of them little chocolate puddin’s, and eat it in three bites on a dead run—and not miss a step."

Her big sister, Edna, taught her to fillet catfish, crappie, and tiny bream with a knife as thin as aluminum foil. A brother-in-law, a navy man, taught her how to pat out a fine cathead biscuit, but could only bake them a battleship at a time. Her mother-in-law showed her how to craft wild-plum pies, peach, apple, and cherry cobblers, and cool banana puddings, all in pans as big as she was. Her daddy shared the secrets of fresh ham and perfect redeye gravy, and tender country-fried steak. And her momma taught her to do it all, even with a worried mind. Then, finally, it was her time, and it has been for a long, long time.

I have to talk to myself now to cook, she said. I have to tell myself what to do, have to tell myself to handle the knife by the right end. I have to call myself a name, so I’ll know to listen to myself.

By what name, I asked, beginning to be concerned, do you call yourself?

"Why, I use my name, hon. I ain’t so far gone I don’t know my name. I’ll say, ‘Margaret, don’t burn yourself,’ and ‘Margaret, close the cabinet so you won’t bump your head.’ It’s when I do call myself by somebody else’s name that y’all got to worry about me. Till then, hon, I’m alllll right."

She had hoped for a daughter to pass her skills and stories to—that or a thoughtful son, someone worthy of the history, secrets, and lore; instead, she got three nitwit boys who would eat a bug on a bet and still cannot do much more than burn a weenie on a sharp stick, and could not bake a passable biscuit even if you handed us one of those whop-’em cans from the Piggly Wiggly and prayed for bread. We ate her delicious food without much insight into how it came to be, which was not all our fault. She banned us from her kitchen outright, much of our lives, because we tracked in red mud, coal dust, or some more terrible contaminant, or tried to show her a new species of tadpole as she made biscuit. We are still barely tolerated there, though I have not stomped in a mud hole or hidden a toad in my overalls for a long time. So she would be the end of it, then, the end of the story of her table, unless we could find another way.

I made up my mind to do this book not on a day when my mother was in her kitchen, making miracles, but on a day she was not. Most days, unless she is deep in Ecclesiastes, or Randolph Scott is riding a tall horse across the TV screen, she will be at her stove, singing about a church in the wildwood, or faded love, or trains. In the mornings, the clean scent of just-sliced cantaloupe will drift through the house, mingling with eggs scrambled with crumbled sausage, and coffee so strong and dark that black is its true color, not just the way you take it. At noon, the air will be thick with the aroma of stewed cabbage, sweet corn, cornbread muffins, and creamed onions going tender in an iron skillet forged before the First Great War. Some nights, you can smell fried chicken livers as far as the pasture fence, or barbecued pork chops, pan-roasted pig’s feet, potatoes and pole beans, or blackberry cobbler in a buttered biscuit crust. But as I walked into the house in the winter of 2016, to find some clothes to take to her hospital room, the kitchen smelled only of lemon-scented dishwashing detergent, and a faint aroma of old, cold, burnt iron.

• • •

In her life, she saw weeds creep over the Model T, and church steeples vanish beneath the man-made lakes of the TVA. She saw great blast furnaces go up, and go dark, and ancestral mountains clear-cut down to bald nobs. She saw circus trains, and funeral trains, and the first gleaming diesel engine roar through these hills. She saw a Russian monkey in a spaceman suit, and figured, well, now she had seen it all. "It made me sad, when they shot him into outer space. They showed him on the TV again when he come back down, but I ain’t sure it was the right monkey, you know, the same one." The point is, I had convinced myself she was somehow immune to passing time, that she lived outside and above the events of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first. She could no more wear out than the whetstone she used to sharpen her ancient butcher knives, even if she had seasoned most of the vegetables she ever ate with pork fat.

Gettin’ old ain’t easy, she told me, as she passed seventy-nine, but it’s best not to try and fight it too much. You know how I live with bein’ old? I just don’t look in the mirror, ’cept when I part my hair.

She passed eighty in April of 2017 with a baseball bat beside her bed, for assassins. In the past five years, she survived heart failure, serious cancer, dangerous surgeries, and harsh follow-up treatments that left her thinner and weaker over time. Still, I rarely saw her stumble, or waver in her resolve to live as she always has, to walk her garden, gripe about the weather, and rattle her pots and pans. She survived everything, but in the late winter of 2016, the hospital entrance had become a revolving door, and she was admitted and readmitted for regimens of strong medicine and rest. Again, the young doctors said she would recover, if she would eat the dull, bland food and drink the foul-tasting medicine that was made, she believed, from the manure in her donkey pasture. She could go home again, the doctors told us, if she would behave herself, and if, after so many hard, hot, long days, she still had the will. She was not an ideal patient.

That stent they put in my heart a year or two ago, well, they didn’t really have to do that, she grumbled from her bed. "That was just the style then. Ever’body was gettin’ one. I didn’t need it. I was fine."

She spent most of the spring on an IV. While she slept, my big brother and I talked quietly beside her bed about being boys, running buck wild through her kitchen, about big fish, and ugly dogs, and a pearl-white ’67 Camaro he never let me drive. The past is where we go when we are helpless; the past, no matter what the psychiatrists say, can’t really hurt you much more than it already has, not like the future, which comes at you like a train around a blind curve. But our conversation always circled back to the thing that mattered most. I am not a particularly optimistic man, and feared for her. Sam told me I was being foolish. She would get better this time, too; it was just a matter of time before she got tired of this place and walked out, grumbling. He said he knew her better than I did; he was living his life within three miles of her, while I went gallivanting God knows where. He said the same thing over and over, like a prayer. That old woman picked cotton…did stuff the regular people can’t do. They don’t know who she is.

Do you remember the junk stoves? Remember that graveyard? he asked me one evening, and I shook my head. He seemed deeply disappointed in me, as if I had somehow failed my heritage by not remembering every anthill, blown-over willow tree, vicious blackberry bush, and rotted-down rope swing on the Roy Webb Road. How, he asked me, do you not remember that many burnt-out stoves?

And then I did remember them, a ragged row of scorched, rusted relics banished to the deep backyard, worn out, shorted out, and dragged out of the little frame house to a place past the rusty bicycle junkyard and the doghouse, to the edge of the cotton field. The years bring down everything here, in the heat, damp, and rot, but it takes a lot of rust to wipe away a General Electric. The number varied, but at one time there were thirteen derelict stoves abandoned there, bound to the earth by honeysuckle, briars, and creeping vines: Westinghouse, Kenmore, Hotpoint, GE, and more, in white, brown, and avocado. She used them till there was a near electrocution, or an electrical fire, till there was not a spark left.

Momma wore ’em all slap-out, one after another, he said. She cooked every meal we ate, seven days a week…except when she got us all a foot-long from Pee Wee Johnson’s café, every payday, every Friday night. To be honest, I guess most of them ol’ stoves was second- and third-hand to start with, but it’s still a lot of stoves, ain’t it? Just think…think what it took to wear out that many stoves.

I had a big forty-two-inch stove in my kitchen one time, when we lived with Momma, the old woman said from the hospital bed, her eyes still closed. She pretended to be asleep sometimes, so she could hear what was being said about her. But it wadn’t no-’count, to start with. I melted the buttons off of it.

There, in Room 411, she even dreamed of food, or maybe just remembered it. She saw herself waist-deep in rows of fat, ripe tomatoes hanging heavy on vines that ran green for as far as she could see. She reached into a vine and pulled one free, rubbed it clean on her shirt, and took a saltshaker from a pocket of her clothes. She ate it, standing in the blowing red grit, salting every delicious bite, until it was all gone, the way she’d done when she was young. She told me about it later, amid the alarms of the IV machines, the barking intercom, and call buttons that never went quiet, even at 3:00 a.m. And it just seemed so real I could taste it, she said, and I told her she must be on some fine dope if she could taste a dream.

She lay there day after day, and planned what she would cook once she got home, what she would grow in her garden and pepper pots, or gather in the woods and fields for jellies, preserves, and pickles.

I lost the spring, she told me one morning, after a particularly bad few days, and for some reason that simple declaration haunted me more than anything else. I lost one whole spring.

I would like to say that something profound happened after that, something poetic. The truth is, as my big brother predicted, she just got mad. It bothered her that she could not tell if she was dreaming or remembering, there in her narrow bed, and she told the nurses, I don’t want no more of that strong dope. She had eaten very little in the hospital; the cooks did not know how to use a saltshaker, she said. It irked her that her vegetable garden was still deep in weeds with hot weather coming on, and that she had to dream a ripe tomato to get a good one. One night, she just opened her eyes, demanded some Hi Ho crackers, an ice-cold Fanta orange soda, and her shoes. And tell the nurses, she said, tomorrow I’m goin’ home.

I told her the doctors would have to decide.

Well, she said, doctors don’t know everything, do they?

I told her a little more rest, just a few more days of care, fluids, and observation in her hospital bed, under the kind and careful watch of the fine nurses and doctors, could not do her any harm.

You don’t know about Irene, she said.

I told her I did not remember any Irenes.

"She was my cousin, I guess, and she was trouble, son, trouble all her life. She argued three days over what color dress to bury my aunt Riller in, and Aunt Riller was still alive, still a-layin’ in that hospital bed, listenin’ to her. Don’t tell me there ain’t no harm can come to you in a hospital room….

If I can just get home, I’ll cook me some poke salad, and I’ll cure myself….And I’ll tell you something else. Salt is good. It says so in the Bible.

You learn, if you live long enough down here, not to push too much against what these old, hardheaded people believe. If an old woman tells you there is magic in an iron pot, you ought not smile at that. The iron gets in you, through the food, she believes. It gets in your blood, and strengthens you. I have heard French chefs say the same, but the old people who raised her believe the iron left something much more powerful than a mere trace of mineral; it left something from the blast furnace itself, a kind of ferocity. But how do you explain that to heathens? She has cooked in iron all her life, and she is cooking in it now.

But since that day in her cold kitchen, I knew I had to convince her to let me write it all down, to capture not just the legend but the soul of her cooking for the generations to come, and translate into the twenty-first century the recipes that exist only in her mind, before we all just blow away like the dust in that red field.

• • •

I am a roving gambler

I’ve gambled all around

And wherever I see a deck of cards

I lay my money down, lay my money down

I lay my money down

She came home to her small, cluttered kitchen and the aroma of one-hundred- and two-hundred-year-old recipes and the words to even older songs again drifted through her cedar cabin, which rises, like it grew there, from the ancient rocks, oaks, and scaly-bark trees in the lee of Bean Flat Mountain, in the hilly north of Calhoun County. It always made me smile, how she would not sing a note unless she was alone in her kitchen, at work. All my life, I’ve listened to my mother sing, faintly, through walls, and through the kitchen door.

I’ve gambled down in Washington

I’ve gambled over in Spain

I’m goin’ down to Georgia

To gamble my last game

Gamble my last game

The Scripture says we are not supposed to glory in the things we make with our own hands, she told me, not long after she came home from the hospital, in the late spring. But when I got out of that place, that last time, I stood in my house and it just dawned on me, ‘I’m home. I’m back in my own house. I’m back in my own kitchen.’ And God forgive me, but I gloried in that.

The day after she got home, she went to her flour barrel, sniffed it, made a face, and cooked a big pan of biscuits and a massive iron skillet of water gravy, for the dogs. Then she scattered the remainder of the abomination into the front yard, for her birds; I sniffed it and it just smelled like flour, but she could not rest, knowing stale flour was in her house. She sent me to the grocery with a list written on an old water bill in No. 2 pencil, and it occurred to me that those lists, saved in desk drawers and sock drawers and between the pages of books, are the only record of her food I had. I will keep them the rest of my life.

It was a hard life, she told me once, but we ate like we were somebody a good bit of the time. They worked hard for it and prayed over it, even when, sometimes, our ancestors had to steal it. If I could capture just some of that, somehow, it would be a book worth doing, not a broad or deep treatise on the history of Southern cooking—of plantations, cotillions, and divinity candy—but of one old woman’s story of working-class mountain food, or, as she calls it, plain food, well seasoned.

I could claim a more cosmic reason for doing it. In a South that no longer seems to remember its heart, our food may be the best part left. It is the opposite of the bloody past, the doomed ideals, and our still-divisive, modern-day culture; it is a thing that binds us more than it shoves us apart, from each other and the rest of the world. It is the one place in our culture where living in the past makes a lovely sense, not an antidote for all the rest of it, but a balm. There is a reason why many black Southerners—and some white ones, like my mother—still call this kind of cooking soul food, because it transcends the pain and struggle of the everyday, a richness for a people without riches. We are not so arrogant as to believe that the genre of Southern country cooking hangs by a thread as thin as ours; it will live on, of course, carried from the kitchens of other old women and men like her…but not just like her.

Mostly, I just wanted to hear her talk about her food.

My mother is not a student of haute cuisine and would not care about it even if she was altogether certain what that was. She has heard that old people are supposed to keep learning and trying new things, so as to remain relevant. She would rather remember and preserve, rather remain a master of simple ingredients we grow ourselves, or forage from the Winn-Dixie, or find in an ever-shrinking wild, like the highland cress she wilts in an iron skillet with a little bacon grease and slivered green onion. I ain’t doin’ no yoga at my age, she said, and made a face. She pronounces it yogurt, and she is not doing any of that sour mess, either. But she will have a cold glass of buttermilk, thank you, and a slow walk to the mailbox.

She laughed out loud when she first heard the term farm-to-table. They had it in her day, too; they called it a flatbed truck. She knows her food is not the healthiest, yet her people live long, long lives, those not killed by gunfire, moonshine, or machines. She has never tasted ceviche or pâté, but can do more with field-dressed quail, fresh-caught perch, or a humble pullet than anyone I know. With a morsel of pork no bigger than a matchbox, salt, a pod of pepper, and a sprinkle of cane sugar, she can turn collards, turnips, cabbage, green beans, and more into something finer than the mere ingredients should allow. With bacon grease and two tablespoons of mayonnaise, she turns simple cornmeal into something more like cake. I watched two magazine photographers eat it standing up in her kitchen, with slabs of butter. I do not believe they were merely being polite. They even eat the crumbs, she said. They were nice boys.

Her food is not the world-class cuisine of Charleston, Savannah, or New Orleans, not reliant on the Gulf, or the Atlantic, or estuaries of the coast and the Low Country. It is the food of the high places, of the foothills, pine barrens, and slow brown rivers. It is not something done by the great chefs in Atlanta or Birmingham for people who spend more on a table for four than a working family spends on groceries for a month. It was never intended for everyone, but for people who once set a trotline, or slung a wrench, or rose from a seat in the city auditorium to testify during an all-night gospel singing.

Her brothers would pitch legendary drunks when they were younger men, and would inevitably wind up on our couch to sleep it off. My brothers and I, little boys then, used to stand and stare at them, thinking perhaps they might be dead. But my mother cooked for them as if they were sultans or senators, cooked to bring them back to life. Sometimes, if they had the terrible shakes, she had to help them to the table for plates of baby limas, backbone, corn muffins, stewed cabbage, and tea as black as her coffee, but not so sweet as to be silly. My uncle Jimbo is not a gourmet, or an unbiased and veracious critic; he once ate a bologna sandwich sitting on a dead mule, to win a bet, and can out-lie any man I have ever known. But he would tell her, hot tears rolling down his cheeks, that he had not eaten stewed cabbage that fine since his momma was alive. My mother never needed much validation beyond that, no grander praise.

It truly never occurred to her to open that lore to a wider world and share her skill with cooks she never even met, to translate into the twenty-first century recipes from a time when marching off to war meant foraging for shell corn in the Cumberland, and people still believed that if you chopped a snake in two with a hoe the pieces would rejoin in a circle and roll off like a hula hoop. It would be like singing a song to people in a language they do not understand, or one they knew long ago, as children, but can no longer recall.

A person can’t cook from a book, she told me.

Her mother, Ava, baked tea cakes and put them in a clean white flour sack to keep them soft and warm, because even a Philistine knows they taste better, somehow, lifted from that warm cloth. My mother would feel foolish, she said, trying to explain why such things should be honored in a modern world.

A person, she said, can’t cook from numbers.

She believes a person learns to cook by stinging her hands red with okra, singeing her knuckles on a hot lid, and nicking her fingers on an ancient knife as she cuts up a chicken, because a whole chicken tastes better than one dissected in a plant and trucked in from Bogalusa. You learn by tasting and feeling and smelling and listening and remembering, and burning things now and then, and singing the right songs. Jimmie Rodgers, who sang of trains, chain gangs, and the shooting of untrue women, lived in our kitchen. We had a whole big ol’ box of his records that we played on the Victrola, before the awful summer of ’47, when they warped and melted in the heat. The great Hank Williams lived there, and the Dixie Echoes, Patsy Cline, the Carter Family, and anyone from the Heavenly Highway Holiness Hymnal. "I guess you can learn to cook from a book, she relented, if it was a real, real old book.

It takes an old person to cook, or… She struggled to find her meaning, but the closest she could come was a young person with old ways, with an old soul. The recipes inside her head come from across an ocean, from the French countryside, where my mother’s people once lived, and from the Irish, English, Scots, Germans, even the Nordic people. Others came from those already here, from the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee, as the blood of them all mingled over the passing years. There is a recipe for coconut cake that, we are pretty sure, tumbled straight from God. "Young people can cook some stuff, I suppose, she said, grudgingly, but, you know, they’d have to go to school."

I told her we could preserve it all, dish by dish, not by doing merely a litany of recipes, as in a traditional cookbook, but by telling the stories that framed her cooking life and education, from childhood to old age. The stories behind the food would not be difficult to gather; they well up here, from a dark, bottomless pool. The harder part would be the recipes themselves, the translation from the old ways, and her own peculiarities in the kitchen.

Does that mean I am peculiar? she asked, when I read her this.

Well, I said, yes.

She does not own a measuring cup. She does not own a measuring spoon. She cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as "you know, hon, just some. In her lexicon, there is part of a handful and a handful and a real good handful, which I have come to understand is roughly a handful, part of another handful, and some." It would be romantic to believe she can tell, to the tiniest degree, the difference in the weight of a few grains of salt or pepper in one cupped hand, but it would be just as foolish to say she guesses at the amounts, or cooking times, or ingredients. She just remembers it, all of it, even if she cannot always remember when or where she learned, and you can believe that or not, too. She can tell if her cornbread is done, and all the rest, by their aromas alone—that, or the angels mumble it straight into her ear. It’s not the clock that tells you when it’s done; the food does.

She does not own a mixer or a blender. There is a forty-year-old lopsided sifter for her flour, and a hand-cranked can opener. She mixes with a bent fork and a big spoon, smelted, I believe, during the Spanish-American War. We got her a microwave once, which lasted one week before the first nuclear accident and resulting blaze; I am pretty sure she did it on purpose. Her stainless refrigerator, which she does not approve of and secretly wishes would die, is shiny, new, complicated, and as hard to operate, she complains, as a rocket ship. And it’s too quiet, she says. You don’t know when it’s working. She preferred her old Frigidaire, purchased during the Johnson administration, even though she had to chip out her Popsicles with a butcher knife. It ran like an International Harvester, shook the floor every time it throbbed to life, and caused lights to flicker as far away as Knighten’s Crossroad.

I don’t like new stuff, she likes to say, usually as she stirs a pot so battered and dimpled it will not sit flat on the stove and spins on the red-hot eye like it has been possessed. Her knives, most of them, are as old as she is, the wood handles worn to splinters, the blades razor-sharp and black with age. She had to dig her nine-inch iron skillet, her prized possession, from the ashes of her burnt-down house, in 1993. Well-meaning relatives offered to get her a new iron skillet, but she said she would have to season a new one to get it to cook right, and that could take the rest of her life. She would just keep the old one, thank you very much. How do you hurt a skillet, anyway, in a fire?

Other well-meaning people send her gadgets and diamond-coated pans and garlic presses, and even cookbooks on Southern country food; she sells them at yard sales, next to her pickles and preserves, for ten cents apiece, and she worries that she is asking too much for something of so little practical use.

That said, she recognizes progress when she sees it, or tastes it. Self-rising flour and cornmeal were perhaps the finest inventions since the polio vaccine, and even canned biscuits and store-bought pie shells have their limited use. Electricity was, she concedes, also a fine idea. But she would like to meet the man who invented the telephone, she says, and smack him a good one.

Progress is fine, in all. But with food, she says, you should not be able to taste it.

You should taste the past.

What would you even call it? she asked me, of a cookbook on her food.

"The Best Cook in the World," I said.

I wasn’t even the best cook that lived on our road, she said. Your aunt Edna was a fine cook. Our momma was a fine cook.

I told her we couldn’t call it The Third-Best Cook on the Roy Webb Road, because that just didn’t sing.

She thought about that a bit, about its veracity, and her reputation. Her momma was an excellent Depression-era cook, but was widowed young and never had the variety of ingredients to flex her muscles in the kitchen the way her daughters would, in somewhat gentler, fatter times. Edna Sanders, my mother’s oldest sister, was a true master of Southern country food, in every way, who could grow it from the dirt, fish for it, run it down and kill it, skin it, and make gravy from it, on dry land or floating on a houseboat or bateau. I guess me and Edna did run a pretty good race, my mother said, her humility slipping a little bit.

I told her I believed she was the best cook in the world, and I got to say.

Well, she said, I did wear out eighteen stoves.

I told her there were only thirteen stoves, off and on, there in the weeds.

I wore out some since then, she said.

I could tell, after a while, that I was beginning to wear her down. She is otherwise humble, a woman who buys her clothes at the City of Hope thrift store on Highway 431, and has been to the beauty shop twice in forty years. My cousin Jackie cuts her hair in the living room, the same style for sixty years. But she can be a hardheaded old grouch when it comes to cooking. Though her face has been on the cover of a great many books, her food is her identity closer to home. And it saddens her that her iron skillet might one day become a relic, a curiosity, like a butter churn or a flea-market lazy Susan, or that her home-canned vegetables, peppers, jellies, and jams would be something vaguely remembered, like the name of that third cousin who moved to Detroit in the fifties to work on the auto assembly lines, or like a long-gone dog.

We already live in a culture where people line up at buffets of canned turnip greens cooked to green ooze, macaroni and cheese that glows like a hunter’s vest, and vacuum-sealed coleslaw that went bad on the back of a truck somewhere on Interstate 59. She has seen home-cooking recipes dwindle even from the kitchens of her kin, slowly fading, generation by generation. She has watched the cafés, truck stops, and barbecue joints of her youth—places that took pride in their simple, savory food—go out of business forever, to be replaced by themed restaurants, and kitchens that produce what could be called food only in the most generous sense. Southern is more a fashion, a marketing tool. She knows there are world-class restaurants out there that produce fine, fine Southern food, but she will never sit down in one, most likely, nor will most of the people she has ever known, most of the people she has cooked for in her lifetime.

She wondered, aloud, if people outside the family even see value in food like hers anymore.

What if people don’t like it? she asked.

I told her some people don’t like Patsy Cline.

The culture around her has changed, of course; country means something different now. The entire region walks around in camouflage, to belong, and the last of the Roosevelt Democrats have long vanished in the mist, with the last panther, and the last local dairy, and most of the good butchers. The fish in the Coosa River, fish that fed generations, are unfit to eat, and the wild things in the forest taste different now, she believes; the venison tasted better when our men walked in the woods without a GPS, and deer did not hurl themselves into every third Subaru on a six-lane thoroughfare. Wild turkey roam subdivisions now, and can be shot from the bathroom window by a data processor in his Scooby-Doo drawers. Thank God, she says, she can still see the fresh-turned red earth of gardens in the springtime, mostly in the yards of old people like her, who will cling to their traditions, and their hoe handles, till the bitter end.

But mostly, outside the living museum of her kitchen, she has seen a great silliness envelop Southern cooking, something she sees when we drag her, griping, to eat catfish or barbecue, or to the last few meats-and-threes; she sees no reason to drive a half-hour to a strange place, to sit on a hard bench built from two-by-fours so as to appear rustic, just to be sad. She believes that most outsiders, including Southerners who have never stood in a field and salted a tomato, have forgotten what Southern country food used to be, or ought to be. "I mean, it ain’t s’posed to be easy."

She believes this food cannot be purchased, only bestowed, or cooked with your own hands. Do not order it in a restaurant, at least in most of them, and assume you will be getting anything akin to genuine Southern mountain food. Think of restaurant grits, which are likely to be an inedible, watery, unseasoned abomination. Restaurant beans, of all kinds, are likely to be mass-prepared, chalky, bland, and bad, almost without exception. Try to find a piece of ham in them and you will go blind; none will have the concentration of lean ham, fat, skin, and that little something extra the ham bone brings as it disintegrates into the dish over hours of slow cooking. By the same standard, if you have ever had good sausage gravy over hot biscuits, or good greens, stewed squash and onions, fried green tomatoes, or slow-cooked cabbage, then order them in most restaurants; you will put down your fork in dismay.

I can eat it, if I’m starvin’, she said, after searching for something nice to say. I’d just hate for people to think that’s what country food is….I don’t want the people to think it’s what real food is….

It is soul food without soul, but mostly without a story.

Good stuff always has a story, she said.

The great chefs might snort at her, but she believes good Southern cooking is not all about excess or overindulgence; pork is more often served as a seasoning than a whole hog on a spinning spit, as a way to add a richness to fresh vegetables, dried beans, collards, and more. Her fried foods, like chicken, fish, or pork, or fried vegetables, like green tomatoes, squash, and okra, are dusted lightly with dry flour or cornmeal, salt, black pepper, and sometimes cayenne, not drowned in a thick dredge of gunky egg batter and deep-fried, obscuring or even erasing the flavors underneath, like a fried mushroom in a sports bar. My mother believes you can tell if a thing was cooked right by listening as people eat it. Any sound a fried food makes should be crisp, maybe even delicate. A group of people eating fried chicken should not sound like someone smashing a glass-topped coffee table with a ball-peen hammer.

She has watched the signature dishes of Southern food become parody. Hot, spicy food has become sideshow. She loves heat, and her pickled pepper would be dangerous in the hands of children, but it is not hot for the sake of heat alone. The point is to taste the food, not to take a bite, squeal, blister hideously, and flee to the closest emergency room. Her soups, relish, sauces, and chili are spicy, rich in tomato, onions, peppers, and sometimes garlic, which you savor even as it bites you a little bit. I told her about a trip to Nashville where I had hot chicken seasoned with what appeared to be some kind of nuclear runoff. It almost sent me to a hospital, to have my eyes flushed, lips salved, and stomach pumped. I literally blinded myself, temporarily, just by wiping my face with a red-peppered napkin. Seems like you’d want to taste the chicken, my mother reasoned. You ain’t supposed to burn your own fool self up. You ain’t supposed to eat nothin’ and sit and suffer. That’s just ignorant, ain’t it? I told her ignorance is in.

It is the same with sweets. She loves sugar, as most Southern cooks do, but there was once an art to it, a layering of flavors such as cinnamon, vanilla, and fruit or nuts. Now it all seems designed by a thirteen-year-old boy high on Little Debbie, as if a treacly, gritty icing will hide the fact that the cake layers are as dry as a Lutheran prayer meetin’. Her muscadine jelly is faintly sweet, a flavor that makes you think of flowers. Her cobblers taste of butter, plums, apples, and cherries. Crabapples, she said, do take a lot of sugar to cook with, and are also good for throwing at itinerant tomcats.

Not long ago, I went searching in a Piggly Wiggly for a Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico, because they still use cane sugar instead of inferior beet sugar, a thing I only recently learned. She had known it all along. They haven’t tasted right on this side of the border since Lawrence Welk was wishing her champagne dreams.

She knew that affordable, simple Southern food had turned the corner to banality when she saw that a chain restaurant had introduced a barbecue sauce purportedly flavored with moonshine. Moonshine, as any Southerner not born at a cotillion knows, tastes like kerosene. Men did not drink moonshine for its bouquet, but because they wanted to dance in the dirt, howl at the moon, and marry their relations. When they took a slash and said, hoarsely, Man, that’s smooooooth, they meant smooth for paint thinner. Her daddy made smooth liquor and peddled it in old kerosene cans; sometimes it ate through.

On TV, Southern cooks are often portrayed mixing a julep, or staggering under a Kentucky Derby hat the size of a Fiat, or planning a wedding with antebellum gowns and at least one cannon. That, or they are trust-fund bohemians in actual berets, and more pierced nostrils than a rooting hog. She has seen very hip chefs prepare things that were, in her mind, not something serious people would do, like pork-belly ice cream, or sweet meats in caramel sauce, or collard purée squeezed onto a tofu hoecake. She has nothing against fusion cooking, whatever that is, or something called, honest to God, shrimp foam, or bright rice, or recipes involving algae, or three-year-old duck eggs, or yellow catfish pounded into a fermented paste. People is used to different things now, she says, "but don’t you bring it