by Rick Bragg
The old ways are hard to discard. The secret to good collards is the old admonition to pick them, or buy what you believe to be fresh-picked greens, after that first frost, which might sound like folklore but may have some scientific basis.
“It ain’t no myth. It’s nature.”
You cannot trick nature by just chucking them in the freezer for a minute or two, she believes. Frost falls from heaven, my mother says, as dew. Dew does not exist in a Frigidaire.
Baked Hog Jowl
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 pound or so fresh or smoked hog jowl
1 tablespoon cooking oil
HOW TO COOK IT
This is not a pork roast. The cooking is more a rendering, and the finished product should be flaky, crumbly pork fat, similar to a giant cracklin’.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Mix your salt, black pepper, and red pepper in a small bowl, or shaker.
The cooking time, and seasoning, will depend on whether you use fresh or smoked meat, of course. If you are ambitious, select a piece of fresh jowl of between 1 and 1½ pounds. Rub it all over with a little oil, then sprinkle it with your spices and rub it in.
There is no need to add oil or water to the pot, as long as you have a raised rack inside it.
In a baking dish, bake the jowl, covered, at 350 degrees for about 1 hour to 1½ hours, or until the flesh has rendered to the point where it is golden brown and almost comes apart at the touch.
Save the fat in the bottom of the pot; it is excellent, seasoned lard, and can be used in other dishes, for cooking eggs, or just to add a little flavor to beans or greens; it’s excellent on green beans.
When you are ready to serve it, carefully remove the jowl onto a platter or cutting board, and slice with a sharp knife. It is so rich that a little bit goes a long way, so do not cram a big piece of it in your mouth and expect to be pleasantly surprised, any more than you would take a huge bite of expensive chocolate, or knock back a tin of caviar.
“This is maybe the easiest way to do it, to just bake fresh hog jowl start to finish, but sometimes I like to boil mine for about an hour, on medium heat, till it’s done through, and then bake a little, to render it. I think it makes it a little better, but that’s just me.” That is her way of saying, “But what do I know? I’ve just been cooking for a hundred years.”
The smoked jowl is a little quicker and easier. If you use smoked jowl, it has already been slow-cooked in the smoking process and already contains salt, so lower or even eliminate your salt, rub with black and red pepper, and bake for 1 hour or less, again checking to make sure the color and texture are correct.
“I don’t know about that smoked flavor,” she said, “not done in no factory.”
Then she made a face.
I told her it might just be that they smoke it in bigger batches than her grandfather did, with his mysterious pig. But, as with most things in her cooking, she trusts no smokehouse she cannot see leaning on a hill. She has not had a decent slice of bacon in a half-century or so.
Baked Sweet Potatoes
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
4 sweet potatoes (or 1 for each person, with 2 extras)
½ stick butter
1 tablespoon cooking oil
HOW TO COOK THEM
She does not like to cook the sweet potatoes in the baking dish with the hog jowl, as Jimmy Jim did, because if you add them at the time you begin baking the pork they will likely overcook and shrivel to wretched lumps, and if you try to add them during the cooking you may guess wrong and get both burned pork and raw potato, or fricassee yourself with the hot pig fat. It happens.
Plus, the hog jowl is so rich that you may want a cleaner taste in your sweet potatoes, for balance, though there is no denying that a good sweet potato perfumed with the rendered fat is perhaps one of the most decadent tastes—and smells—in our repertoire.
“What I do is, I get me some aluminum foil, and I rub them sweet potatoes, with the skin still on, all over with the cooking oil, and then I wrap ’em in that aluminum foil. Bake 45 minutes to an hour and they’ll be done. And that oil, it’ll make that skin on that sweet potato a little crispy, and if you want to peel it, it’ll peel right off.”
Just in case she might be confused with someone attempting to cook healthy, she said the sweet potatoes are best served “mashed open a little bit, with a nice pat of butter, and nothing else.”
I told her that some people like to add brown sugar.
“Why?” she asked.
“To make it sweeter.”
“It’s a sweet potato,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“It’s already sweet,” she said.
I told her it was the same thing, the same idea, as a sweet-potato casserole, which is sweetened and seasoned with all manner of things, even marshmallows. Sweet potatoes are just not sweet enough for some people.
“I never have liked marshmallows,” she said.
“Some people are just different from us,” I said.
“Then they prob’ly won’t like the hog jowl,” she said.
Serve the greens in a generous mound in the middle of the plate, with a slice or two of the hog jowl on the side. Unwrap the foil from the sweet potato before you slice it, lengthwise, down the middle, mash it carefully from the sides to get it to open up, and then butter it. Be sure to take the foil off before you prepare the potato, and certainly before you eat it, she warns. “Aluminum ain’t like iron. It ain’t good for you.” When I told her the discount steakhouses, like Western Sizzlin’, left the foil on, she did what she has done all my life. She told me I was not Western Sizzlin’, was I? Besides, there is just something unnatural about eating something from a blanket of tinfoil, something that reminds her of powdered orange drinks, and lunar modules, and that wayward monkey from outer space. They wrapped him in tinfoil, too, or so it seemed, and look what happened to him.
* * *
• • •
The old man told Ava that she was already on her way to knowing much of what really mattered in mountain cooking: beans, greens, potatoes, and that essential Southern vegetable, cream gravy.
She knew a few simple ways to cook pork, and was beginning her mastery of the more complicated staples of cornbread and biscuit.
But there was still much, much to learn, and he was very, very old.
Which was, she thought, a shame.
It was about then that she had ceased wishing that he was dead.
· 5 ·
“A CHICKEN…AIN’T LIKELY TO KETCH ON”
Chicken Roasted in Cider with Carrots, Turnips, and Onion, Chicken Gravy, Mashed Potatoes
My uncle James, left, and Grandpa, Charlie Bundrum, in a borrowed soldier hat
1925
SOMETIMES, in the dying light of evening, the old man liked to sit on the porch and watch the chickens peck. He got cold more easily now, and wrapped himself in a half-mile of woolen shawl and a long gray army-surplus campaign coat from the First Great War, as if he were building a shed around his aging bones to keep out that yammering girl. Uninvited, she often sat there beside him anyway, and tried to engage him in conversation, since even a mean, mute, glinty-eyed ol’ blasphemer and swine thief was better than sharing her thoughts with the lone cow, or hopping crows, or creaking pines. Sometimes the old man would even nod the slightest little bit, his face and glowing pipe hidden deep inside his shawl and upturned coat collar, blue smoke rising from inside his failed, imperfect solitude.
This day, he tried to ignore her altogether.
“Hush,” he hissed.
“Why?” she said. “You ain’t doin’ nothin’.”
“I was,” he said.
“What?” she asked, and was further ignored. The old man just clenched his corncob pipe in his teeth and, like a divining rod, swept it slowly across the yard, back and forth, back an
d forth. Now and then, it would hold still for a deliberate second, before beginning to track again, back and…
Finally, the trajectory of the pipe ceased, and he held it ominously still on a belligerent young rooster that was worrying an uninterested hen.
“I don’t see why I can’t talk? It’s my damn porch,” the girl said, and the old man, finally losing his temper, rose to his feet with such force and with such a bellow that the chickens in the front yard burst, shrieking, into the air around him. Chickens do everything like it is the end of the world.
The girl backed up, but only a step or two. She had figured out, early, that the old man would never put a hand on her; he only looked at her as if he would like to murder her in her sleep. He sank back wearily into his chair, and gathered his greatcoat around him against the chill of the gathering dusk.
“I am trying,” he said softly, “to choose.”
The old man eased back down to his chair, the storm passed, and, as patiently as possible for a man like him, he tried to explain to her the ritual of the sacrifice.
* * *
• • •
“Got my mouth set,” the old man said, “on some chicken gravy.”
City people like to think my people just grabbed a chicken up off the yard or out of the coop at random, just snatched up whichever unlucky bird wandered within our grasp. This is untrue. There was a process to it, almost a kind of science. But it was a personal thing, too, a kind of blood reasoning.
The actual capture, up to a point, was not difficult, the old man told her.
“A chicken is not a intelligent critter,” the old man said, and so “ain’t likely to ketch on” when there is murder in the air. The problem is, they are just as apt to run from a flower blowing on the breeze as from a hydrophobic fox. A chicken cannot reason, he said. It might think, and react, but it cannot reason. A fox can reason, and a cat, and a bear. A chicken would react, like a tick on a hot rock.
A chicken lived every situation, every moment, like it was brand-new, and so lived in a constant state of wonder and surprise. “It’s hard to get clos’t to a chicken goin’ at him head-on,” the old man said, because, though chickens had tiny brains, most of these brains seemed devoted to suspicion. But chickens, he told her, are easily bamboozled. “And once you’re clos’t…” and the old man made a twisting, wrenching motion with his two big hands; that might have made some girls wince, but it made this one smile.
First, he said, you sit in judgment.
“It’s best to go with a young rooster,” he said, and her second great lesson had begun. She had hoed in her momma’s vegetable garden and understood something, at least a little, about planting, tending, and harvesting growing things, but she had never before spilled blood for the sake of the table. She listened, for a change, with great interest. A lot of religious people are like that, as to bloodletting; read the New Testament, let alone the Old one, and measure the wars and sacrifice and endless smiting therein.
“Roosters is good for only two things: for eatin’, and for gettin’ with hens,” he said, and a smart manager of the chicken yard had to play God routinely, to cull the weaker or apparently brain-dead roosters regularly from the flock, or a chicken apocalypse would befall. Too many roosters in one barnyard, and they would kill each other off to establish dominance, but till then they would also worry the hens to death, like a ship-full of sailors on leave in New Orleans, the old man explained, as much of the story of the birds and bees as he was willing to impart to a Pentecostal.
He hated to kill a truly good fightin’ rooster, he said, a real neck-cutter and eye-pecker. He felt a kinship with them. Game roosters fight from a hatred of their rivals that most men will never understand, but a game rooster that dies in battle is useless for the pot, unless you discover the loser quickly, and roosters did not always have the good manners to perish on the doorstep.
But, as a practical measure, you only need a rooster or two to get the job done in a barnyard, he explained, and the best fighter was usually the best breeder, and the one most likely to produce the best and hardiest line of biddies. “Spare that one,” he said. “You prob’ly won’t get clos’t to that ’un no-how.”
Of those younger, inferior roosters, you went first for the peckers, the ones whose violence was not channeled, directed, with purpose. Some game roosters could be picked up and handled, like pets; some old men handled them as if they were parakeets. Those birds reserved their violence for each other. But other roosters were mindless peckers, who thought they had to assert their dominance on everything that moved, including squatting babies, small dogs, or the bare legs of just-married young women who were naturally inclined to hold a grudge.
Ava’s legs were already streaked with tiny scars, from flying blocks of wood at the chop block, briars, Johnsongrass, and mean-spirited roosters. She was, as we have said, of long memory, and already had an inventory of pecking roosters she intended someday to erase violently from this earth.
Next, the old man said, you went for the soft brains, the roosters who were not malevolent so much as just a half-bubble off plumb. Chickens are not intelligent to begin with, with brains the size of black-eyed peas. But some chickens are even dumber than average; these are the ones who suddenly begin running in endless circles for no apparent reason, then keel over from sunstroke in the middle of an Alabama summer, or go halfway across a road and forget why they were crossing in the first place. It comes to them, usually, about the time the first tractor-trailer comes rumbling down the centerline. A run-over chicken, Jim said, can be salvaged if you actually witness its destruction. These soft-brain chickens are not long for the world anyway, he said, and should be eliminated before they take their own lives, or somehow do manage to spread their affliction to offspring.
He mentioned the names of several families who lived nearby who had not been judicious in this, as to their own, human offspring, and the girl nodded that she completely understood.
“Heard about chickens in Mexico can play checkers,” the old man said.
“Uh-unh,” said the girl, but the old man swore that it was so.
“You ain’t got none of them,” he said.
He had perused the yard and decided that the smartest chicken there would drown just looking up at the rain.
If you are going to eat a hen, he told her, select a hen that is not a good mother. A hen that watches over her biddies is a valuable thing, season after season, and is a builder of wealth; a hen that ignores her biddies is just a layer, and of less value than a steadier hen that would tend her young and therefore increase the population. Ava did not like the idea, new to her, that a hen would not tend her biddies, as if she were running off to Florida in a convertible with a rooster in a plaid suit and a rakish hat.
Young chickens, pullets, were to be spared. A pullet might be more tender than an older bird, and in fat times there was nothing more delicious than a young chicken, but a mature chicken has more meat. Spare the young when you can, and let them grow into fat hens or good roosters. It might be as tough as a two-by-twelve, but would be good for broth, or dumplings, or stew.
And if you have to eat a chicken your kids have named, wait till they are visiting relatives, and blame the foxes.
Ava stood in the yard a minute or two, beside the old man, with all this running through her mind.
“I’ll pick,” the old man said, “if you got no stomach fer it….”
Her eyes settled on a young but very hefty game rooster, a known pecker, with no emotional entanglements.
“That ’un,” she told him.
* * *
• • •
They sat there on the porch, huddled against the cold, and plotted. Some people, the old man said, used a fishing pole, not with a hook and line, which would have been unconscionable even for such as him, but as a striking instrument. It is not hard to run a chicken down, he explained, if you still have your wind and are still fairly nimble and at least partly sober; but it can be tricky, th
at last step or two, as you stoop to snatch it up, and nobody runs all that good bent over. Chickens change direction much better than most humans can, leaving a whole lot of hungry people empty-handed and red-faced and cursing.
With a cane pole, a long one, you don’t have to get close to the chicken, or break stride. You just have to get within six or seven feet, and whip the end of the fishing pole with a wicked snap at the chicken’s fragile neck, and send it to its reward. His momma did it like that; she was hell on chickens, he said.
“That’s blasphemy. Beasts don’t go to glory,” she said.
The old man saw little reason to argue this; they were merely discussing technique. Some people used a broken broom handle, he said, but the cane pole gave you another couple of feet to work with.
“That’s cheatin’,” Ava said, as if it were a footrace at a July Fourth picnic.
“Well, it ain’t s’posed to be sportin’,” he said. “It’s gettin’ groceries.”
“Do you use a cane pole?” she said.
He sniffed, offended. “O’ course not.”
“Tell me how you do it,” she said, so he did.
He rose to get to it, when his narrative was done.
“No,” she said. “I can do it.”
* * *
• • •
It was diabolical.
First she caught the chicken’s eye, which can be a trick in itself, when you think about it. Try it sometime. Chickens are not known for their attention span. They are physically incapable of a long stare.
She sidled to within a few feet of her victim, just close enough to get it to watch her but not so close as to spook it; this took several tries to get right. Once she got within about ten feet or so, she dropped a few pieces of crushed corn to the ground at her feet. The chicken did not trot over immediately. The advantage to being afraid of everything is that it cannot help being afraid of the right things sooner or later.