The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  “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.