by Rick Bragg
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It is one of the ways we keep the calendar down here. We remember with food. In my uncle William Bundrum’s mind, the storm and that wonderful cornbread would always be linked, so that you could not tell about one of them without telling of the other. But, then, at our table, it seems there was a story in every plate, and a plate in every story, except maybe artichokes. Nobody liked to remember artichokes.
For years after Ava passed, we held a great feast the second weekend in June to celebrate her birthday. We gathered behind her little frame house next to my aunt Juanita and uncle Ed’s, which had been closed up tight after her death and would never be lived in again. It was her house. I often caught myself glancing at the windows, as if I might glimpse her there, as if she were merely waiting to join her party when she damn well wanted to.
In the yard, a swaybacked picnic table creaked from the weight of the food piled on top of it, in aluminum foil and wax paper and Tupperware. There were four kinds of pan-fried chicken, barbecued chicken, fried pork chops, barbecued pork chops, barbecued center-cut ham slices, deviled eggs, baked beans with slab bacon, green beans with salt pork, pinto beans with ham, three types of potato salad, fried squash, sweet corn on the cob, creamed sweet corn, sliced red tomatoes, cucumber and Vidalia onion, pickled pepper, macaroni and cheese, macaroni salad, three kinds of coleslaw, carrot salad, casseroles beyond counting, homemade rolls, coconut cake, brownies, chocolate cake, blueberry-and-cream-cheese pie, strawberry shortcake, still-warm biscuits, and a sweating mound of cracklin’ cornbread covered in aluminum foil.
That made my uncle William think of the miracle of ’41, and that is where he told it to me that first and only time, a square of that cornbread balanced on a paper napkin on his knee. He broke it in two—cracklin’ cornbread somehow tastes better if you can see the inside—then pulled forth one of the nuggets of pork fat and ate it with such genuine relish that I could almost taste it. “Nobody made cracklin’ bread like my momma,” he told me, “but this is pretty good, son.” It was his mother’s recipe from that night, almost seven decades later, rendered and baked by one of her children, or grandchildren; we’re not quite sure.
It was early in the new millennium, and he was in his eighties then, tall and thin. The wicked little boy had vanished inside an easy old man in a brown-checked felt fedora with a golden feather jutting from the brim. He told the story the way he did everything else, smooth, cool, and steady, as if the jerks and snatches that disrupted and impeded other men’s lives had nothing to do with him. He talked easy, and walked easy. He had poured steel before he retired, running a giant crane mounted on railroad tracks at the big plant in Gadsden, Alabama, tons of iron and other men’s lives in his hands. It was not a job for a twitchy man. He retired in his sixties and walked off into the autumn of his years, in Hush Puppies. I asked him, that day, why he’d never told me that story before, in all those days at our house, at all those suppers, and he just shrugged and said, in that easy way, “Well, I guess I just never thought of it, son.”
The miracle has dwindled, I suppose. My uncle James, the great storyteller and liar, might have told and retold it many times around campfires or on riverbanks, as a jug went round and round, or as he stood on the sidewalk outside the Food Outlet in town to chat up the widow women. But my aunts say it would have been indistinguishable, in time, from all the other tales in his unlimited repertoire, and likely passed unnoticed. Still, it seems to me that such a miracle should be more revered, more robust than that, not allowed to fade like a newspaper left in the back window of an old Chevrolet.
But sometimes, my uncle William wondered if there was maybe more to it, not less, than first appeared. His mother, in that time, stood in contrast to the people of her mountains. In a land of hard manual labor and deprivation, she could read Shakespeare. She quoted Scripture from thin air, and spouted poetry, though her education had ended before high school. She knew lore, and myth, and her Bible. Her mind was not yet tortured. Her mind was beautiful, and even as she began to decline we all saw glimpses of it, in the stories she told. What must she have been like in ’41?
William was not a churched man, either, but he saw what he saw that day of the storm. He was also his mother’s son, however—smart, and hard to bamboozle. And every now and then, he wondered. With the End of Days upon them, Ava would not have wanted the last thing in her children’s minds to be fear. Ava, in those terrible seconds, might have tried anything to spare her children, in what she must have believed to be their last seconds alive, even if all she could do was cast some kind of veil, to fill their eyes and ears with something, anything. Maybe it does not even have to be one thing or the other; maybe, my uncle William wondered aloud, it was both. “Momma,” he said, “was smart.”
It’s easier, better even, just to say she turned it.
“It’s a better story,” he said, “ain’t it?”
I told him it was a pretty good story either way.
My uncle James, all bones and elbows, ambled over from the picnic table, and took a seat beside us on the concrete stoop of my grandmother’s house. He had lost most of one ear somewhere along the way, and wore the same khaki work shirt he probably wore in ’53, with sawdust in the cracks in his leather work boots older than me. There is nothing on God’s earth that old man could not build with a hammer, a handsaw, and an apron full of tenpenny nails; people said he could have hammered together a stairway to heaven if he had not had to stop every fifth or sixth step to try to quench an unquenchable thirst. He stopped swinging a hammer as he passed eighty, and spent most of his time flirting with every slow-moving woman in town, laughing at his own outrageous stories, and slapping his own knee. It was said he had taken to hanging out at the city cemetery, not out of any great melancholy over his impending demise, but because that was one more place the widow women congregated.
They were greatly different men, the brothers. But even if you looked down on them from space, you could tell they were Charlie Bundrum’s boys.
“How you been, Uncle Jim?” I asked him.
“Oh, son, it’s been awful,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Well, son, I’ve quit lying.”
“It’s been hard on you?” I asked.
“ ’Bout kilt me,” he said.
“How long you been quit?” I asked.
“ ’Bout fifteen minutes,” he said.
My uncle William just smiled ruefully. He had seen it coming. After so much time, all the foolishness is a little thin from use. They shook hands across me—the last time they were in the same place at the same time, at least that I can recall. I asked James if he remembered the day Ava turned the storm, and he said he did, of course, said it was a sight to see, son, and then it occurred to him that he had not yet had any coconut cake. He shuffled off to get a slab of it, saying he would be right back. That was ten years ago.
My mother, so young at the time of the storm, only knows what she saw from behind her momma’s blowing skirts. “The Bible says the Lord touches people in desperate times,” my mother said when I asked her what she believed. “Momma had the Holy Ghost when she was young. It’s a sin to have it, I believe, and not make it known.”
It may be that we just like to imbue our old people with something more than they are. But someone else will have to say that out loud; my people, truly, would never feed me again.
My uncle William died just a few years after that birthday dinner. A stroke almost killed my uncle James but instead just took some of his memories, the true and the untrue. He is in his nineties now, and still terrorizing nurses. He has resumed lying, I hear. No reason to make things harder than they are.
The other day, I saw him driving. I didn’t know he still had a license…like that ever mattered.
“I fish all day and I hunt all night,” he tells anyone who will listen.
“What do you hunt, Jim?” the gullible ask.
“Why, women, son. Wome
n.”
I thought I might ask him again someday about the miracle on the Dalton Road, but most likely I will not, will just leave it as it lies. If I wanted another taste of it, I would have to look for it on a plate.
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But that, too, had all but faded from existence. Of all the recipes my mother tried to translate for me, the one for good cracklin’ cornbread is one of the most ambitious and difficult for modern-day cooks, give or take a mean snapping turtle, which can maim you, and poke salad, the poisonous weed. Cracklin’ cornbread is not complicated, only time-intensive, and of a world, and a mind-set, so very different from now. Still, as much as anything she shared with me about her cooking, it promised a genuine taste of the past. “Oh, I cooked it over the years,” my mother told me. “You just wasn’t nowhere close, and so you didn’t get none of it.” I asked her if she might try again, since I had obviously not been sold to Gypsies, either. But she told me some dishes get to be antiques after a while; the world spins on without them, and the days grow too short for a dish that takes so long and takes such care. She said she would try, though, if we could find the essential ingredient: fresh, perfect, pristine pork fat.
She said it was increasingly hard to find decent cracklin’ meat unless you raised and butchered your own hogs, something we did for the last time a few years ago. It had to be pure, white, glistening fat, sometimes still attached to a clean white skin, and sometimes with a thin—barely there—streak o’ lean. The lean would burn in rendering, and too much would destroy the delicate process. When she tried to get it at the grocery stores, the young butchers looked at her as if she had asked for wildebeest.
A good butcher shop might have it, she said, but most of our butcher shops have vanished in the rural, blue-collar South, and certainly in the poorer counties, even the most rural ones. How odd, that the only people with access to cracklin’ meat, the poor folks’ delicacy, would be the ones in the country club, the carpetbaggers, the ones least likely to realize the true value in a slab of unadulterated fat.
You can buy precooked cracklin’s in groceries, she said, but those are a packaged mess. They quickly go stale, and have an underlying taste and smell reminiscent of a smoldering city dump. I held a package up to her once from the meat cooler, and she made a face of unmitigated revulsion.
We had all but given up. Then, one day in the early fall about three years ago, we got lucky. We had gone to a butcher shop in the country called Valley Meats, in the community of Alexandria, in northeastern Alabama, to buy a pork roast, some salt pork, and some good sharp black-rind cheddar cheese. The shop had its own slaughterhouse, and killed, carved, and packaged pork for the few farmers who still raised their own pork. It was a go-to place for fresh chops and spareribs and thick-cut bacon—not that awful thin stuff that crisped up like burned tissue paper. As we walked into the small shop, the butchers were loading pounds and pounds of beautiful cracklin’ meat into brown paper sacks, for an older gentleman I did not know.
I have never seen such avarice in my mother’s eyes as when she looked on all that pork fat. She has not flirted with a man for twelve lustrums, but I think she would have winked at the old man if she thought he would share one of those bags of pork.
“Is there any left?” she asked the butcher.
“No, ma’am,” said the young butcher, “I’m sorry to say.”
She looked like she was going to cry. The young butcher ducked into the back—to hide from her, I believed. He came back a few minutes later with twenty or so pounds of cracklin’ meat that had been reserved to mix with scraps to make sausage, or to be sliced and salted, but I guess he just could not break the old woman’s heart. As I carried it out, I believe she would have skipped if she had not been afraid of hurting herself.
I asked her if we would have cracklin’ bread for supper that night, but she said she needed a day at least to think about it, and maybe even pray over it. Cracklin’ cornbread—real cracklin’ bread—is a two-step process. Anyone can do the second part, the cornbread, but even a seasoned cook has to take care with the first. “It ain’t complicated to make cracklin’s,” my mother explained, “but you can burn the house down if you ain’t careful. That’s why Momma did it outside.” The secret is to make it in smaller batches, resulting in smaller fires. “I’d do it in the yard now if I had a good iron wash pot. But you can’t find them no more, either.”
In her youth, the job was done by the oldest, wisest, and most trusted, the same elders who laid out the rows of the garden and took ticks off babies and said the prayer at Thanksgiving and Christmas. She had to watch the rendering process for years before she was left to do it by herself, in her teens, when she was deemed mature. It is not a job for a chucklehead, and the most experienced cooks burned themselves rendering lard; more burned the lard, just by turning their attention from it for even a scant moment.
“You cannot do this and not pay attention,” she warned, one more time. From the doorway, I watched her cut the meat up into two-inch cubes, with unerring precision. “They don’t have to be perfect size, or perfect square,” but they were. She carefully set the heat, added the perfect amount of water, and for hours tended her pot, stirring every few minutes, patient, vigilant. She stared into the pot for a long time, but I doubt if that was all she saw.
Cracklin’ Cornbread
The cracklin’s are not the main purpose, traditionally, of rendering lard, only a tasty by-product. When the last of the cracklin’s are rendered, let the lard cool in the cooking pot until it can be safely removed to store, and use it to make biscuits, or grease a cornbread skillet, or fry good eggs. It can also be used to add a touch of flavor to green beans, greens, dried beans, or other vegetables—in fact, use it for anything you want to taste good. My people do not refrigerate lard, claiming that changes its flavor.
Ask the butcher for cracklin’ meat specifically, what some call fatback. Ask for pure white meat, with no more than a trace of lean, or—better—none at all. The skin can be left on, but for best results trim it away, my mother believes. Skin will make cracklin’s chewier in the cornbread. Some people like that. “Some people don’t know better,” my mother says.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED (FOR THE CRACKLIN’S)
6 to 8 pounds cracklin’ meat
1 cup water
HOW TO COOK IT
Cut the cracklin’ meat into cubes, about 2 inches square. They will shrink considerably as the fat is rendered.
Empty the cup of water into a thick-sided 2-gallon pot—this will help prevent the cracklin’s from burning as the first of the fat begins to melt—and set over medium heat. Add the cracklin’ meat, and cook, stirring at least every few minutes, until the water is cooked out and the fat has begun to render in the bottom of the pot. When the water is cooked out and the rendered fat has begun to pool, reduce the heat to low or at most low to medium, just hot enough to keep the rendering process going, and continue to stir.
Do not leave the cracklin’ meat unattended, or unstirred, and do not try to rush the process by using higher heat, which will cause burning or uneven cooking. This is a slow, slow process, taking hours. You render the pork fat. You do not fry the cracklin’s. If the hot fat spits at you unduly, lower the heat slightly.
Timing varies greatly, depending on the fat itself, and not all the cracklin’s will cook at the same time. The cracklin’s will be done when they float to the top; they should be a light-golden color. They will burn quickly at this point, so fish them out as they rise to the top, and allow the rest of the meat to continue to cook. If a cracklin’ is dark brown, it has cooked too long, like overcooked bacon. Do not salt the cracklin’ meat as it renders. Do not introduce any foreign matter, such as cayenne pepper, into the still-cooking cracklin’s, no matter how good an idea it might seem at the time. It will only corrupt the process and taint the lard.
“Don’t use no seasoning,” my mother warns. “The cracklin’ has got all the flavor in the world in it.”
Every batch is slightly different. Do not be alarmed if it takes hours to complete the process—even between 4 and 6 hours for larger batches—or disappointed in the skimpy amount of cracklin’s you take from the cookpot. Two gallons of cracklin’ meat will produce only about a quart or so of cracklin’s. That, too, will vary.
They will keep, unrefrigerated, for days, and can be refrigerated and even frozen, or home-canned if sealed in canning jars. If they are going to be eaten as is, taste them before you season them in any way. They require no salt, but can be salted to taste if you are the kind of person who ignores perfectly good advice, or even dusted with cayenne or other spices, if you insist. But my mother says only a Philistine would ruin a good cracklin’ with “a bunch of junk.” If no one is watching, and you do not feel the need to comply with your physician, eat the still-warm cracklin’s one after another, like M&M’s.
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Now, if you have any cracklin’s left, you need to concoct some cornbread. Follow the cornbread recipe from Chapter 3, but stir in 1½ cups cooked cracklin’s. It will cook the same.
Most people do not butter cracklin’ cornbread before eating, because of the fat in the nuggets that permeate the bread. Eat it hot, as hot as you can stand it.