The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  • • •

  Beef Short Ribs, Potatoes, and Onions

  If you have selected good meat, this dish needs no beef stock, no wine, no thickeners for flavor. Just about every culture has some version of it, but this is the simplest, yet richest, I know.

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  7 or 8 beef short ribs, as meaty as possible

  1 smidgen bacon grease, or 1 tablespoon cooking oil

  1 tablespoon salt

  8 medium-sized white or golden potatoes, quartered

  4 medium yellow onions (or 2 large ones), quartered

  ½ teaspoon sugar (no more)

  1 teaspoon black pepper

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Select short ribs that have a good amount of fat and lean. Lean ribs will not provide the flavor, and some short ribs are carved so close to the bone that there is really nothing left but soup bones. Shorter ribs are easier to work with, so have the butcher cut them if need be. The more fat the short ribs have, of course, the better, and more succulent, this will be.

  In a large pot—my mother says you will need a thick, sturdy one for this—melt just a tad of bacon grease or about a tablespoon of cooking oil in the bottom of the pot, then lightly brown the ribs on both sides, just enough to give them a slight color and a little sizzle. Cover the ribs with water, and bring it to a slow boil over no more than medium heat. Add the tablespoon of salt at this point. You can add salt later, to taste, if needed, but be careful. This dish is so rich you do not want to make it salty, too.

  It seems a universal point in my mother’s recipes, but, again, the secret, the whole ambition, is to cook this dish with no more water than is necessary, or you will wind up with a watery, bland stew. Pay close attention to the cooking, and as you add water, add as little as possible to keep the ingredients from sticking and burning. This is the key to the castle in Southern mountain cooking, in so many dishes.

  Over medium heat—or less, depending on your stove—cook for about 1½ hours. Add the potatoes, onions, sugar, and black pepper, and cook another 20 to 30 minutes, or until the potatoes have just begun to come apart, the onions have begun to slightly, slightly caramelize in the beef fat, and—and this is most important—there is little or no liquid left in the pot. All the good stuff from the rich beef ribs should have evaporated into the potatoes and onions, and a lovely, clear tallow should have formed in the bottom of the pot.

  Some people like a hint of garlic in this, and some of my people toss in ¼ teaspoon minced garlic, or a good couple of shakes of granulated garlic, but absolutely no more. Believe it or not, in a dish so rich, the garlic can mask some of the finer flavors.

  You can, at the end, slightly raise the heat, and finish it, stirring to keep it from burning, to cook out the last of the liquid, and to get that lovely, just-right texture to the potatoes and the color in the onions.

  The potatoes should be flaky, almost puffy. The onion should be all but melted away, though any whole pieces left will be delicious. The beef will be fork-tender, and rich.

  “The beef will be good and done, and some of the fat should have melted off the ribs, and you can slip the bones right out of ’em, easy, if you want to. But you don’t want no water, no real liquid at all, except what has melted off the beef ribs. But this is also where you have to be real, real careful not to let it burn.”

  Just as Jimmy Jim did with the original dish, serve this with cornbread, carrot-and-cabbage slaw, and a side of sweet peas or green beans, fresh if possible, or home-canned. Be sure to season both with a little salt and some butter.

  I asked her if there was a secret she was not telling me, since my version of the dish is always a little lacking.

  “I have put a little pat of butter in the pot of beef and taters, right at the very end. You know, just a little, little-bitty pat.”

  “So you cheat?” I said.

  * * *

  • • •

  We call it just that, beef and taters, a vernacular that reaches back to a time in our family history when it really was the only beef my people had, when butchers would save the rib bones for poor men and women who came for scraps, in the worst of times. The ribs in the dish have gotten some good bit fatter and richer since then. Now, when I eat this at my mother’s table, even if I eat sparingly, I rise from my chair with that strange, drunken feeling I had been told about, as if I had savored a glass of brown whiskey, as if there really is some kind of spirit in it, in the taste itself. But that is foolish, of course.

  * * *

  • • •

  The old man left them, not long after that.

  He told the girl, a young woman now, to try to remember as much of it as she could. After a few years, she would not have to try. She would just know it all, like the words to a prayer, or a song.

  He was not a warm and hopeful man, but he wished them well, and just walked away.

  He would say, now and then, that if he had known how hard times would get, he might have stayed. But no one guessed how hard, or how long.

  “I can’t really remember him that much, because I was so small, but Momma talked about him so much sometimes I forget and I think I did,” my mother said. He left her father and mother’s house before she was born. “I heard my momma and daddy talk about him when they cooked, and Momma would say things, sometimes, about cooking with him, and I’d ask her how she knew this thing, or that thing, and she’d say, ‘Oh, because your grandpa said so,’ and so it was kind of like he was with us, you know? It was like he was still there in the kitchen with us. I know what he looked like, from that one picture we had, and I know the things he said, and how he cooked, because it’s how Momma cooked, and so it’s how I cook, too. Of all the stuff I cook, it’s that old stuff, the oldest stuff, it seems like people remember the most.” She still thinks of him, and his pupil, when she reaches for the saltshaker, and the pepper, and the bacon grease…even sometimes when she touches a hot pan, or the hot handle of those old steel spoons, which he touched in another time. So I guess some of our kin were right about that, when they damned him all to hell. The old man returned to the fire after all.

  * * *

  • • •

  He had one chapter left to write in his life, or at least have written for him, after he walked out the door of the house that last time. He met and married a lovely young woman, which was the custom there for old widowers like him, and it is said that he treated the woman well, and that he might have been happy for a while. But he lost her, and a baby girl, soon after their marriage, in childbirth. The life just went out of him then, my people remember, as so much of the meanness had before.

  He would, in his last days, remarry yet again, and even father another child before he died. He is buried across the state line in Summerville, Georgia, where there are still no warrants out on him, I suppose.

  * * *

  • • •

  I heard all about him there at the foot of the bed, and in my grandma’s kitchen, which always smelled of tea cakes and frying chicken and sometimes Bruton snuff. But her mind always seemed to loosen somehow at night, and she lay awake with three or four quilts pulled to her chin and a daub of Juicy Fruit stuck on the bedpost, with me curled up on the foot of the bed like some small dog. We listened to her AM radio, the one with the missing dial that you had to tune with a pair of needle-nosed pliers or by slipping a dime into the notch in the grooved post. We mostly just left it alone, and listened to the Grand Ole Opry, and wrestling from Boutwell Auditorium, and preachers who convinced me that I was pretty well predestined to burn in hell. As it played, she talked, and talked, and talked. She did not mention the mean ol’ man every night, but it was odd how often he would become entangled in the fairy tales and tall tales and memories she told to me, so often that I was greatly surprised, when I was older, to find that he was flesh and blood, that he was, at least mostly, real.

  She loved my grandfather, and of this we have no doubt, though, if you believe his stories, she had once tried to
starve him to death. But I came to realize, when I was a little older, that it was the old man who had become what they called a kindred spirit, and so became, in time, her one great, true friend.

  By second or third grade, I was too old to sleep there at the foot of the bed like a baby and moved across the hall, to a bed of my own. But I could still hear her when her mind wandered, hear her pad through the tiny house, into the kitchen, and sometimes call his name.

  · 8 ·

  “HARD TIMES, COME AROUND NO MORE”

  Sweet Potato Pie, Sweet Potato Cobbler

  My uncle Jimbo, keeping the world safe for democracy

  1933

  CHARLIE BUNDRUM waded through a wide field of yellow broom sage with the seat of his overalls eaten out by hard times and asbestos shingles, but the double-barreled 12-gauge in his hands gleamed with good oil and loving attention, and the stock shone like new money. Through it all, the Belgium gun had never failed, never been dropped, never misfired, not since the time of the Yankee war. Jim left it to him when he disappeared into the mountains one last time, riding off in his funeral black, and this time he would not return. He did not make any ritual of it, and made no speeches. He did not even hand it to his boy. He just left it propped behind the door when he left, as if he had forgotten it there somehow. Still, it was a fine gun.

  The gangly boy had not yet fully disappeared inside this lean, hawk-faced man, but the times had ground him down a bit. He cradled the Belgium in his left arm, the barrel resting across his forearm, so that he could slide his right hand into the curved grip, slip his finger into the trigger guard, and snug the stock into his shoulder with one smooth, clean motion. He had loaded the gun with bird shot, for the pasture and tall broom sage and other, clearer places where they might scare up a bird, but had a few loose shells loaded with buckshot and big lead punkin balls in the pockets of his canvas work shirt, for something bigger. He was not hunting for anything special, just anything at all for the cookpot; he would have run down a groundhog if he had seen one. The Depression still had its teeth in them now, good and deep, and in the fall of 1933, a poor man with a family to feed did not get to be particular.

  But even in such grim times, he hated to be without his blood. It must have appeared an unusual hunting party that autumn day. My grandfather walked a few steps ahead of his raggedy gun-bearers, the Belgium pointed safely away, so as not to shoot his progeny. He was flanked by raggedy miniatures of himself, almost identical little boys in almost identical worn-through overalls, one boy lugging a rusty, ancient .22 rifle with a cracked stock wrapped in black electrician’s tape, the other stumbling, whispering curses as he dragged a crusty, bloodstained burlap game bag. Jim had left the family with more than recipes and one good gun; the boys could curse with words they did not even yet understand, and were prone, now and then, to thievery. But they were Charlie’s, and he liked to have them at his side.

  They were begrimed, scabbed over, and skinny, kicking up dust for the joy of it, yammering underneath woolen peaked caps so moth-eaten and decrepit they seemed about to disintegrate upon their burr heads. Their pockets bulged with hickory nuts, for throwing at mailboxes, squirrels, their little sister, and each other. The fact they had made it this far with two eyes apiece Ava could only lay at the throne of God. If they had lived in a city, people would have called them delinquents, urchins; in the hills, there was no adequate name for them. Just that month, they had crawled under a neighbor’s house and used a brace and bit to drill through the floorboards and into the bottom of a five-gallon whiskey barrel, then lay on their backs to gulp the dripping liquor and giggle till they were both as tight as Dick’s hatband and unable to walk home. Charlie had to carry them back, one on each shoulder. The county might have taken them, but the county wanted no part of it. James, the oldest boy, was seven years old, and William was six.

  “Hush,” he told them, for the hundredth time.

  This time he put some edge to it, and glared that glare, which, I guess, he also inherited.

  The ragamuffins went sullenly silent.

  There were four children now. Juanita, the baby, had come just that year. Right then, Charlie Bundrum would have swapped any two of them for a good bird dog. He never had a good one, at least one that his children remember. Bird hunting, in his time, was a rich man’s thing. So he made do with a coonhound, a redbone that had never pointed at anything in his life except a gravy-and-biscuit. But the big, sloppy dog flushed game by pure accident. He blundered, crashing, through the dry, brittle sage, not altogether sure what he was looking for, and quail and doves would explode into the air with that rustling, whirring noise, and Charlie would snug the shining wood of the stock into his shoulder and pull twice—left barrel, right barrel—and the birds would fold their wings in onto their bodies and fall from the sky. The boys would drop their burdens into the dirt and bolt after the birds, because if the hound got there first he would snatch one up and run off to eat it at his leisure, growling if the boys tried to take it from him, usually on the front porch. Still, together, they all got the job done, somehow.

  Sometimes, mostly by accident, the clumsy dog would flush rabbits from the sage, and Charlie would track them with the blue steel of the barrel, though there was little meat there, just a good start for dumplings, or porridge, or a good soup for the children. It seemed, these days, even the wild things were skin and bone. Now and then, the dog would tree a squirrel, and Charlie would reach for the busted-up single-shot .22. It was cheaper; there was no profit in swapping a shotgun shell for a plate of damn bony squirrel.

  Sometimes the big dog would run a deer back toward them, not on purpose, just by providence, and if Charlie’s aim was good, he would knock it down. But in hard times, the deer had thinned, too, thinned to the point where he could go weeks without seeing one, or even finding sign of them. Most days, what he brought home was just enough, just a few mouthfuls, spread around his growing family. But Ava and her husband could do wonders with next to nothing, as she built on the recipes, the foundation, that the old man had left. On the fat days, they treed a possum or a coon, and Charlie would not waste a shell at all. He would send the little boys up the tree with a hatchet or a stick and a sack, and Ava would cook it with sweet potatoes. She had not been wild about possum, but came to tolerate it over time.

  In the evenings, by firelight, her husband cooked, too. He cooked in the trees, coaxing a clear potion from a snake of copper line, drop by drop, from corn he grew himself, and fed the fermented leavings to his hog. The old man had shown him that, too. He worked all day, nailing down shingles in the hundred-degree heat, when there was work, or dug ditches, or did anything he could find, and in the cool of the evening he went up the mountain in the dark and worked until dawn, tending his mash, running off his liquor. He would go days without sleep, then sleep a day straight through. He never made much, but made enough for a few groceries, with some left over to drink, to ease his own worried mind. (There is no recipe in this book for corn liquor. I have tasted prison food, and do not want to do three-to-seven eating lunch meat and beets and working in the prison library for Baby Ruth money.) Ava cursed him for taking such a risk with all their lives, but he told her it was that or go hungry. He said it would be fine. He believed it would.

  In the sage, the clumsy dog thumped and blundered and scared up what seemed a whole covey of quail, at their feet. Charlie swiveled and fired almost without thinking. Two birds, what the rich men called “a double,” tumbled down, and the boys whooped and took off after them, in a dead heat with the hound.

  “Our luck might be changin’,” he said, as they headed home.

  He was right about that.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the house, Ava dressed the birds, fried them, and made biscuits and milk gravy. Even the children were quiet as they ate, except for the smacking. “We got to have more than a few mouthfuls of bird, now and agin,” he told her. They had put up as much of their garden as they could spa
re, but that, too, would dwindle in cold weather.

  On the days there was no work, not even a line to stand in, he walked or rode his mule deeper and deeper into the mountains to hunt. On long trips, hoping for deer, he left the boys and clumsy dog at home—no telling how much game he had lost with their help. He still-hunted, moving quietly in the trees, and sometimes, when he found a trail and some positive sign, he hoisted himself into the trees and waited, and waited, sometimes falling asleep, the sling on the Belgium wrapped once around his wrist to keep it from slipping from his grasp and falling to the ground. It had never been on the ground, except to lean on a tree or a fence post.

  He had taken to carrying a short board, like the seat on a child’s swing, with him when he hunted deer, and would fix it across two limbs with cord to sit and shoot from, or sometimes just to nap in, above all the misery below. The problem was that every other raggedy, hungry man in the foothills of the Appalachians had much the same idea, and he saw more men, even in these high, isolated places, than he saw deer or any other game, except maybe the gray squirrels. Now and then, he would ride or stride past the broken-down slats of another hog pen, and he would think of his daddy, and wonder if he might see another feral hog blunder past, or, in desperate times, a hog of any kind. But Charlie had inherited at least some of his sweet mother’s conscience, and none of the old man’s sense of humor about property, about “borrowing” things that could not be returned, or letting them follow him home just in time for supper.

  But such a hog as the one he had seen crashing through the deep brush that day, years ago, would be a godsend. Such a beast would have begotten others, which would have begotten others, in the intervening years. With all this begetting, in such a wild and distant place, there should be a lot of pork huffing and rooting around up in those deep mountains, good pork that did not belong to anybody, as far as he could figure.