The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  “A man has to eat to swing a ax or a hammer, and a woman’s got to eat to work the field, and to bring the children into the world…” which might have sounded a little backward, but hardly so for 1924. “But you shouldn’t just have to eat,” the old man would tell her, and he would say it over and over, across the months and years. “You ort to want to eat. Poor folk ain’t got much more’n that, not these days.”

  Some people have Commandments or Golden Rules. He had this. He went about his cooking with the same single-minded purpose that he went about drinking and fighting with, and if the food had no taste, if the biscuit was burned or the meat was tough, he had failed, failed at what he saw as a fundamentally simple task.

  “Salt is good,” the old man told her. “It says it in the Bible.”

  She rolled her eyes. If the old man had opened the Good Book, she believed, it would have turned to ashes in his hands.

  “How do you know?” she asked, smug.

  “ ‘Can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt? Or is there any taste in the white of an egg?’ ” quoted the old man.

  She stood amazed.

  “I believe that’s Job,” the old man said.

  “I know that,” she said, even more amazed that this old sinner had taken the fight to her on her own high ground.

  He would tell her, one day, that such things tended to stay with you when they were beaten into you, and that was as close to an explanation of his nature as he offered anyone, that we know. But it stuck with her forever; in a harsh time, when “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not just cliché but the law of the land, she would never be that type. Her children would not walk through this life grim and hard, but would laugh out loud, and tell tall tales and stories. But although the old man seemed to take little joy in anything else, there was an odd, grim satisfaction in him in the preparation of good food, and even, in time, in the teaching of it. It might not have been joy that he found, exactly, only something like it.

  Cream Sausage Gravy

  The smoked sausage that Jim used, which was the only sausage he had to work with then, in the twenties, is probably easier to prepare than the fresh sausage recommended in this dish. It is already cooked and only has to be chopped and rendered a bit to bring out the flavor and provide the fat needed to cook the flour, but may require, as Jim’s dish did, a little extra pork fat to form the roux.

  But my mother insists that, since the invention of the refrigerator, only fresh pork sausage will do for this dish. Fresh sausage was a true delicacy then, available only in hog-killing season. I like them both, but since this is her story, and her modern-day recipe, we will hold to her ingredients. Smoked sausage is also much more likely to contain sugars, which will affect the flavor.

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  ¼ to ½ pound fresh mild pork sausage, or equal amount smoked sausage

  1 teaspoon minced raw onion (no more)

  ¼ cup flour (no more)

  Bacon grease (optional)

  2 cups whole milk

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon black pepper

  1 dash cayenne pepper

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Turn your stove eye to medium. My mother cooks damn near everything over medium. In a 9-inch cast-iron skillet, scramble the sausage, and brown it till the pink has begun to fade, then toss in the minced onion. Continue to fry over medium heat until some of the scrambled sausage begins to crisp the slightest bit, and the onion has gone clear. The bits of crisped sausage, the nice brown, will add nice, nice flavor.

  The rest of the process happens quickly.

  Leave the sausage in the skillet, and sprinkle in the flour, still over medium heat, stirring as you go, till all the flour has been incorporated. “Just say ‘mixed up good,’ ” my mother said.

  There should be plenty of fat from the rendered sausage to do the job, and you should stir until you have a smooth consistency in the cooked flour. If there is not enough fat and the flour is still dry and crumbly, quickly add a little bacon grease to thin it a bit, or the gravy will clump. Do not just add cooking oil, such as vegetable oil: “It will have a taste to it, a whang, if you do, no matter what kind of oil,” my mother believes. Mixing pork fat and butter is always a good idea; mixing pork and other fats, like vegetable oil, is not.

  The flour will cook quickly. She does not particularly like white gravy, which she believes can have a raw, chalky taste, so the cook has to be aware of nuances here, she believes. As soon as the fat and flour are well mixed and smooth in texture, and the flour has begun to take on a little color, to darken just a bit, you are ready to add the milk.

  This will not be the rich yellow of chicken gravy, more a nice tan. Continue to stir as you slowly pour in the milk. Some people use a whisk. She does not; she thinks cooking with anything but a big spoon is just putting on airs (and, besides, the damn thing is hard to clean). The flour-and-milk mixture will begin to thicken immediately. Reduce the heat, add the salt and peppers, and continue to stir. If it does not thicken, you can turn the heat up a little to finish it off. This is no great sin, and will not hurt the taste at all. If you fear you have browned the flour a little too much before adding milk, do not panic; the milk will lighten the color, and, in a way, the taste. You’ll see what she means, in time. Gravy is a more subtle dish than most cooks concede, but it can also be forgiving.

  Thickness is a matter of preference. We like it not too thick, not too thin, but right in the middle. If the gravy is too watery, it will make the biscuits soggy. I know that sounds perhaps a little persnickety, but the first time you slop watery gravy on a good biscuit you will know what we mean. The gravy should not lie thick, like a paste, either. It should just kind of linger there, running down the sides to pool on the plate.

  “That sounds about right,” my mother says.

  It is incomplete, as Jimmy Jim told Ava, without a slice of cantaloupe, or a slice or two of ripe tomato, on the side. This balances the richness of the dish, and if you try hard enough, you can almost convince yourself it makes the dish a little healthier.

  “Sausage gravy,” she said, “ain’t that hard to do, to tell the truth. But really good sausage gravy may take a time or two, to get just right. The thing about cooking is to not get mad at yourself too much. In the old days, if you messed up, you might not have nothin’ to do with for a while. But there ain’t no need to get mad at yourself too much now.”

  This gravy is so rich, so satisfying, that sometimes we cook it for supper.

  “The good thing about bad gravy is, it don’t never go to waste, even if you do mess it up,” she said. “The dogs love it. The grease is good for their coats. Makes ’em shiny.”

  Buttered Grits with a Touch of Cheese

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  2½ cups (more or less) water

  1½ cups yellow grits

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ¼ cup whole milk

  ¼ teaspoon black pepper

  ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  ¼ cup salted butter

  ¼ cup American cheese shredded or torn into small pieces

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Bring the water to a boil, add the grits and salt, and stir. Reduce the heat and let it simmer, being sure to continue to stir, for about 15 minutes. Grits will stick, she warns, “if you don’t pay attention. They’ll go gluey.” As they begin to thicken, add the milk. If the grits seem to thicken too much or too quickly, add a little more milk, for a little more creaminess. Add the black pepper, cayenne, butter, and cheese, and cook over low heat, continuing to stir, until the cheese is mixed in good and melted thoroughly.

  Grits are not hard to cook if you pay attention, but like to spit at you as they thicken, my mother says. Expect it. The first time you get burned, you’ll know what she means. This is a sign that the heat may be too high.

  Thick grits are good, even if they seem a little too thick, she said, parroting her own mother, who was parroting Jim. Watery, thin grits are always a
n abomination, a thing not even food. Some chefs try to mask this by serving grits in a bowl, as if they meant them to be a watery mess. Grits should not be served in a bowl, like, ugh, cream of wheat, but should be thick enough to hold up in a pool or puddle on the plate. They should not need butter, salt, or pepper after the fact, but some people like saltier grits and more buttery ones. Some people go crazy and put diced ham or bacon in them. These people are Philistines. The cayenne will give them a little heat, but not so much as to be silly.

  The switch from Jim’s cheddar to American cheese is her only other real alteration, besides the sausage. The hard cheddar adds a nice bite, but it melts poorly and gives the grits an irritating stringiness, whereas the American cheese adds a nice creaminess to balance the little kick of cayenne. Grits, as Jim declared, should have taste. This is how you know you are not at the breakfast buffet at the Marriott, or the Hilton, or any other place that boils grits in unsalted water and serves them to human people that wretched way, unbuttered, unsalted, without care or conscience or consequence, because they know that by the time you have worked up a real good mad you will be on a crowded airplane or in a rental car on your way out of the time zone. It is no wonder that Northerners, after tasting grits for the first time in Southern restaurants, either make a face like they just ate a stinkbug, or make a U-turn and flee for Grand Rapids.

  The only real thing you need to know about grits is that they are not a thing unto themselves, any more than a blank, white canvas is a work of art.

  “Grits is to carry the other flavors of stuff,” my mother believes. “Grits ain’t nothin’ just left by their self.”

  The Perfect Fried Egg

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  Lard

  Eggs

  Luck

  Salt and pepper (to taste)

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Obviously, you get to fry your eggs to taste, and if you like over-easy, sunny-side-up, or more hard-cooked fried eggs that have the rough texture of automobile upholstery, this recipe is simply unnecessary. But all eggs in her kitchen, all my life, have been medium, neither hard nor runny, with perfectly done whites (because nothing is so awful as a runny egg white), a firm but not well-done yellow on the bottom, and molten yellow on the flip side. This is how she does it, which was how her momma and the old man did it, which is the ultimate answer just about every time I ever asked, “Why?”

  The greatest mistake in the long history of egg frying is trying to cook too many eggs at one time, my mother believes. Cook two or at most four at a time, unless you are cooking for Napoleon’s army; when they are done, just ladle them onto a warm ceramic plate at the back of the stove to keep them from turning cool.

  “Use brown eggs when you can get ’em,” she said. “They’re more like real eggs.”

  You will need a cast-iron skillet. She refuses to recognize any material that has come into vogue since the Iron Age, and Teflon might actually have been invented by space aliens. Place about 3 tablespoons of lard in it. You want about ¼ inch of lard to work with, at least. You will have more fat than you are probably accustomed to using for the average, more healthy egg. Turn the heat to medium, and heat till the fat begins to roil and spit just a little.

  Make sure it is lard, or—if you must—Crisco.

  “Bacon grease is not perfect for eggs,” she believes, “and ham grease is worse. The eggs will stick in bacon grease, and really stick in ham and sausage grease, and really, really stick in smoked-sausage grease, ’cause it’s all got sugar in it. The best thing for eggs is good lard.” When I asked why, she answered: “ ’Cause it is.” When I asked her what she would recommend for people who did not want to go through that much trouble for a fried egg, or just had a natural disinclination toward lard, she suggested this:

  “Scramble.”

  Do not, no matter how health-conscious you are, lubricate your skillet with cooking spray, and shame on you for thinking about it. She would no more spray a skillet than she would braid the hair of her dog, and thinks PAM is an airline Elvis used to ride on to make a picture in Miami.

  Assuming you have adequate good-quality, properly heated, lightly spitting grease, lower the heat to medium-low, crack two eggs into the fat, and then, as the undersides of the eggs cook, use a large spoon to ladle the hot fat over the top of the egg white, which will cook the surface slightly as the bottom cooks quickly, in seconds. If you like your eggs sunny-side-up, this method will lightly, lightly cook the sunny-side whites, avoiding awful still-raw whites. Do not try just to manipulate the skillet, as Jimmy Jim did, because your chance of slopping hot grease into the stove is too great, and no egg is worth a paramedic.

  As Jim believed, this method of spooning the fat onto the sunny side lightly cooks the whites and firms up the top of the eggs so that when you flip them they will hold together much better, and will not require so much direct heat to finish the process. Or she may just like to do it that way because her people did it that way. “There ain’t nothing wrong with that, is there?” she asked, but it did not sound like a question.

  Then, carefully, flip each egg, being mindful not to spill the fat into the stove eye and burn the house down. A few seconds more, and your eggs should be ready. My mother does all this by sight, not time, and using only the spoon, as Jim did, but most people in the twenty-first century like a spatula.

  Depending on skill—or, in my case, luck—you should have eggs that are neither hard nor runny, the whites done but not rubbery, one side of the yolks more firm, the other more molten—or, as she calls it, “just right.” Salt and pepper them to taste, or try a dash of cayenne pepper.

  She has, successfully, educated me on breakfast. I can make fine grits and even a good sausage gravy. The perfect egg still mostly evades me. I cannot do it more than once or twice in a row before I create an abomination. She can do it a few dozen times, maybe a hundred, without fail. I would like to meet the fool who originated the phrase “can’t fry an egg” as a minimum standard for cooking, and punch him in the snoot.

  “You ain’t got the patience for good eggs,” she told me. “You got to have patience, not to ruin a egg, or to make a good biscuit, or to cook anything, hon.”

  “Could you teach me to make a biscuit?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the old man laid down his ultimatum to the girl, after the shock of it had worn away and the subsequent plotting of his murder had gone unrealized, the girl seemed to pay a little more attention, though the old man was probably lucky that he was a light sleeper. She looked at him sometimes with hellfire in her eyes, too, but he had been right to fetch him, the boy believed.

  “Far with far,” he had said.

  Here the phrase is more than a cliché. Fire on the mountains is as much of the lore here as the black panther, or the rolling snakes, or the Mill Branch ghost. When the mountains caught fire, and they always did, there were only two ways to keep the flames from the little wood-frame houses built in the lee of the hills. You could build a break, frantically scratching the mountain itself down to the dirt with picks and shovels, till there was nothing to burn. But the fire often jumped a break, traveling on a leaf on the wind. The other way, which was tricky, was to try to set a backfire to control or alter the burn, so that when the fire raced forward it was met not with more fuel but with more fire, and behind that a landscape, for at least some distance, with nothing left to consume. Sometimes that worked, and sometimes both fires raged out of control in whatever direction they pleased, and scorched the whole damn mountain down to black trunks and gray ash and woe. This, the boy knew, was a possibility in his home, but at least they would eat.

  After the first week, the little house was still standing, though the girl had burned a few simple meals to cinder, just to show the mean old man she could. Still, he endeavored to persevere, and believed it was time to show the girl something more complicated, something that was perhaps as close to a feast
as most poor men might ever see. He began her education, in earnest, with the nature of beans.

  • 3 •

  A MAN WHO KNEW BEANS

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

  James B. Bundrum, my great-great-grandfather, who taught his son, Jimmy Jim, that a bland bean was a poor bean, and unfit for men or hogs

  1924

  FIRST he had to make the world straight, just a little bit.

  Soon after he arrived, he had taken inventory of the small, ragged smokehouse that leaned, a little drunkenly, in the far back of the yard. In the cool gloom inside, he saw only naked hooks and empty rafters; the boy had told him he was making a living, but not enough, apparently, to fill the smokehouse with even the barest essentials, and the young couple did not yet have a hog of their own to fatten and kill. The girl would never be a good cook until they had their own pork, but it could take a year to fatten a hog and slaughter it, and that was just too long. One day, the old man just rose from his chair, cursed the air around him, and left, his one great possession, the Belgium shotgun, swinging in the crook of his left arm, and a sharp, long scabbard knife riding at his side.

  The girl believed that, beaten and dejected, he had simply given up on her and walked away, and she rejoiced. She felt like doing a buck-and-wing, or maybe even a little do-si-do, but was afraid her fellow Pentecostals might catch her dancing as they passed by; a good Christian, as that harpy Aunt Riller had lectured, only danced when no one was looking. She had always loved dancing and church, but you had to be careful when you walked that fine line in the community of East Gadsden, in Etowah County, Alabama—you couldn’t swing a dead cat in East Gadsden and not hit a Congregational Holiness—so she just sat gleefully in her rocker on the high front porch, free as a bird, and rocked with wild abandon.