by Rick Bragg
“It was like school,” my mother said.
Then, in the most remarkable generosity his children could recall, Charlie fetched the gallon can of whiskey from the truck and unscrewed the lid. It would have been an even better story if he had simply handed it over to the men as a gift, but liquor is liquor and thirst is thirst. Instead, he turned his back on his children and took a long, hard pull, then poured all of the men a swallow in their cups or cans. He did not say anything except to wish them safe travels and a good night. Then he swung my mother to his shoulder, called the boys to heel, and headed to his truck. The boys lugged the pot, complaining. When they got to the old truck, Charlie reached into the bed and heaved the pine knot onto the ground.
“You can sell that, or trade it,” Charlie said to the men. “People always need fat pine, and they’ll pay or swap you for it,” and the men nodded that it was true, and thanked him as he pulled away.
My mother does not remember much after that, but she is pretty sure the tall man sang them home. She tried to tell her momma about it all, about the ax-head soup and the resurrected man and all the rest, but her momma’s heart had too many flinty places in it then, and her story could find no purchase. Over the years, though, thinking back, she believes it was the beginning of a notion she would have seized on the night of the tornado if she had not been too small to know what was happening around her.
It was the notion that there are few hard times on this earth, few sadnesses, that cannot be eased with good savory food, not just solid food that could fill your belly, but food with taste that filled up something else. It was not an original notion, not a profound or poetic one, unless it was your belly, and your soul.
* * *
• • •
My mother would no more put an ax blade, a nail, or a stone in her soup pot than she would a concrete block or a live skunk. But in many ways she has followed that simple recipe from the riverbank all her cooking life, and, like her daddy, she finds herself spooning it out to passersby and freeloaders and ungrateful children. I suppose we are all hoboes on soup day.
My brother Sam seems to have some kind of built-in sensor to alert him to the days she makes soup. I tell her she needs to call him when she mentions she is going to make it, and she just shakes her head, as if that is the height of foolishness and wasted time. At suppertime on soup days, his red Chevrolet truck will come idling up the driveway. He will say he needed to fix some fence, or work on the tractor, but what he does mostly is eat soup. He can eat a half-gallon of vegetable soup and a quarter-skillet of cornbread or half-box of saltine crackers, without the mildest distress.
But there is no radar involved, either. I learned, a little disappointed, that he knows she is making it a full day before, because it takes two days to prepare properly, holding true to the traditions of the dish, and two days is too long to keep a secret out here, true or not. I had a flat tire on my silver ’74 Firebird in front of the Gamecock Motel one summer afternoon in 1979, and everybody in town knew what I was doing.
The modern adaptation of our family’s vegetable soup remains a recipe for two suppers, not one. It relies, perhaps less than any dish in her repertoire, on exact ingredients or cooking times; it’s a dish that every cook will perfect in time, with practice. “And even if you mess it up, it’ll still be pretty good,” she said.
Her modern-day recipe, which goes back just sixty years, begins with a simple supper of beef, potatoes, and onions the day before. Any cheap, fatty cut of beef will do, from utter scrap or flank steak to soup bones or oxtails, the fattier the better, but her favorite is the leftovers from her short ribs, potatoes, and onions. Brown the beef a bit, then cook slowly until tender. Add potatoes and onions, salted and peppered to taste, and cook them until the potatoes are fork-tender. Serve it with green beans or peas or any green vegetable of your choice, and the eternal cornbread, and something cool, like slaw, for contrast.
Do not discard the leftovers of the beef dish, even if all that is left, as with Charlie’s soup starter, is the beef tallow in the bottom of the pot, or bones. “I just call it the grease, or the leavin’s,” my mother said, “but I reckon that would scare some people, wouldn’t it?” The trick is to use that essence of beef fat and the detritus of the cooked potatoes and onions as a kind of starter, to enhance the next day’s soup. “You’ll have all that good flavor boiled down already. It makes it so much richer,” she said, even if the amount is inexact.
She stresses the great flexibility in this, and if there is more leftover beef, potatoes, and onions than you believe you need to provide that seasoning, use it anyway, to strengthen the flavor. The more you have of the tallow, the richer it will be. “But even a few tablespoons of that beef flavor will make a big difference in the taste of the soup,” she said. Plain vegetable soup is bland.
Refrigerate the starter. “The next day, you’re ready to make some soup,” she said. It can hold a day or two, but do not wait longer than three.
“Why don’t you just add some beef to the ingredients, some stew meat, the day you make it?” I asked. She and Sam were sitting down to have a bowl of soup. Sam just stared at me as if I had been adopted. He does that a lot, now that he is old and grouchy.
“I was not adopted,” I said.
“One of us was,” he said.
“It’s a perfectly fine question I asked. Why don’t you just use fresh beef for the stock the day you cook the soup?”
My mother shook her head.
“Because then it would not be soup,” she said.
She waited for me to read her mind, gave up.
“Then,” she said, “it would be stew.”
She handed me a bowl.
“We don’t do stew.”
“What’s wrong with stew?” I asked.
“Nothin’. I just don’t do it like that.”
I started to tell her it seemed like semantics to me, but this was one of those discussions that just circled around and around itself, till, one day, you were sitting on a porch with a blanket on your legs, still mightily confused. The eventual conclusion was that there was just something about the way the flavors in the tallow intensified, condensed, between one day and the next, but the main reason, she said, “is ’cause we’ve always done it that way.”
I asked her if she could just use beef broth, or even chicken broth, as a base.
She did not deign that worthy of the breath it would take to reply.
Here is her recipe for vegetable soup, and if you put fresh beef in it the day of, that is your own damn business.
Vegetable Soup in a Short Rib Base
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
2 large potatoes, diced (not too finely)
2 medium onions, diced
2 large carrots, thin-sliced
1 head white cabbage, coarsely chopped
Beef tallow and detritus (“leavin’s”)
1 quart canned tomatoes (home-canned are best, because she believes you can taste the metal in commercially canned tomatoes)
1 quart tomato juice
One 11-ounce can white shoepeg corn
1 can limas
1 can young English peas
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ to 1 teaspoon sugar (to taste)
½ teaspoon chili powder (no more)
½ teaspoon Tabasco sauce
HOW TO COOK IT
In a medium pot, boil the chopped potatoes, onions, carrots, and cabbage—using just enough water to cover—until the potatoes are tender but still firm and not mealy. They will continue to cook in the soup pot, as will the cabbage, carrots, and onions. Set aside, and do not pour off the liquid.
Spoon the leftover tallow and detritus into a large soup pot, and add the potatoes and onions; heat until the tallow liquefies, being careful not to burn it. To the starter, add the tomatoes, tomato juice, and second round of cooked potatoes and onion, and the carrots and cabbage. Then add the canned vegetables and the dry seasonings and
Tabasco sauce.
Cook over medium-high heat until there is a good roiling boil, stirring, then reduce heat to medium, and simmer, still stirring, for about 10 to 15 minutes. “You got to cook the taste of the can out of it” if you were unable to procure home-canned tomatoes or juice, my mother believes.
The oil from the starter will collect on the surface. “Keep stirring it back into the soup,” she said. Do not spoon it out, no matter how much of a Philistine you may be.
Then simmer for at least 1 hour, continuing to stir occasionally. Do not be afraid to add salt or pepper to taste. It’s your damn soup.
Serve in thick ceramic bowls with cornbread or cornbread muffins (some people like sweeter muffins with this, for contrast).
“It’s better in winter for some reason, but in summer you can make it with fresh corn and green beans,” she said.
“Is that better?” I asked.
“It is in the summer,” she said.
Rather than try to plumb the depths of that logic, I just had a big bowl of her soup, and told her it was the best soup I had ever had, which was probably true. It needs to be eaten hot, so that the oil pools in circles on the surface of the rich tomato broth. I remember how my uncles used to blow on every spoonful. My brother Sam looks like them, looks like my grandfather, and my mother says that watching him there at the kitchen table, blowing on that soup, eating it with such relish, is better than a time machine.
As with most of our stories, there was a point or two that still puzzled me, like how he could be so angry at a preaching, freeloading brother-in-law one night, yet show such generosity to total strangers. I guess he just truly disliked that brother-in-law.
But one thing puzzled me even more. I wondered why my grandfather, who had not gone crazy that day, skewered the head of white cabbage with the reinforcing rod, and flew it from the bed of the truck.
Sam, who has a logical mind, helped reason that out.
“Well,” he said, “it was a flatbed truck.”
I still didn’t see.
“It was the best way,” he said, “to keep it from rolling off.”
I am not so logical, and from all that I have heard of the man, I am not certain that he was, either. I think my grandfather needed a flag of some kind, a banner, to declare his brief independence from a sharp-tongued woman. What better flag is there in hard times, for an honest man?
· 15 ·
THE PIE THAT NEVER WAS
Chocolate Pie, Toasted Coconut Pie, Buttermilk Pie
Aunt Jo
1943
HE HAD ONCE been a go-getter, Old Man Rearden. In a time when men slunk around and cooked their whiskey in the secrecy of the pines, he said to hell with all this sneakin’ around, and cooked his liquor right in his own house. He pretty much dared the rest of the world to come in his front door and take it, if they had the guts and the gunpowder. The Volstead Act wasn’t doodly to him, nor its repeal, ’cause he hadn’t never made no damn legal liquor anyway. G-men, gunfire, dynamite, bloodhounds—all of it—he survived.
There were a lot of good reasons to bake such a man a pie.
First, it was just the nice and neighborly thing to do. The Bundrums had moved back and forth across the state line a half-dozen times, and now they were back in Georgia, in a place near the bluffs that rose from the big river itself. Old Man Rearden and his clan were the only neighbors for miles. He was the patriarch of a large and troublesome mountain family, which included several dense and violent boys held barely in check by his quavering voice and trembling hand.
Second, he was a true ancient, thin and frail, and not believed to be long for the world. He mostly just sat on his porch in a wheelchair—the first one my mother ever saw—and watched the river ease by from the high bluff, the breeze lifting his thin hair. The very sight of him was so forlorn, so melancholy, it lingered in Ava’s mind long after they went to his house to say hello, and it made her want to do something to ease the old man’s receding days. “Momma’s tongue was sharp,” my mother said, “but her heart was soft. There wadn’t nothin’ wrong with my momma’s heart when she was all right.”
And, third, things had not gotten off to a good start with their volatile neighbors. They were trying, at the time, to rebuild relations, after Charlie purposefully shot one of the Rearden boys’ women through both bosoms with a .410 shotgun. It may, though, be worth readdressing that she was, at the time, trying to cut him with a big butcher knife, and that she was a large woman, and the wound not fatal.
“Momma was tryin’ to mend fences,” my mother said.
There is no sounder way to do this than by toting someone a homemade chocolate, coconut, or buttermilk pie, even if that fence was knocked down occasionally with a shotgun blast.
One pie would suffice for badly hurt feelings.
This seemed more a two- or even three-pie conciliation.
My mother stood in a chair, well back from the stove and its bubbling, molten, sugary delightfulness, and watched her momma cook not just for the usual reasons but for détente. More and more this was becoming her routine, to watch and learn, unless, of course, there was a new kitten, or a grumpy groundhog under the floor, or an apple tree to climb with Juanita, or a daydream that needed daydreaming. But pie was not beans, or biscuit, or frying bacon, or anything so everyday. Pie was glorious. Pie was, well, pie. And sometimes there was even a spoon to lick.
To bake them, Ava not only drew on the skills she had learned from Jimmy Jim, who might have been the finest logging-camp baker who ever lived, but went back even further in her memory, to her own, gentler people, who were masters of cakes and pies baked for blue ribbons, dinner on the ground, and other niceties she had all but abandoned when she married the rough boy and his rough ways. She did her best to remember her own grandmothers, who were pure pie-making fools, and their recipes, but with Jimmy Jim’s voice in her head, she cut in a little more butter, or shook in an extra dose of cocoa or vanilla, every time.
The ingredients were simple for the chocolate pie. She made not a traditional pie dough but something more like a biscuit dough for the shell, cut in cold butter and vanilla flavoring, and used rich, whole milk instead of buttermilk, then rolled it out to about an eighth of an inch. In blatant defiance of Jim’s spirit, she had Charlie craft her an excellent rolling pin—really just a smooth club, but a rolling pin just the same.
“My momma never saw a bought pie shell, not till she was old,” my mother said.
The filling was simple, too, just sugar, a little flour, egg yolks, good dark cocoa, some vanilla flavoring, and, of course, more butter, baked until the filling set, till the molten chocolate formed a little skin and then cracked. Those little fissures did not mean she had failed; they meant it was ready.
She never even considered a meringue, though she knew how to make one. She was too vain, anyway, for a meringue.
The way she saw it, the lovely dark brown of the cocoa and the golden brown of the toasted coconut and the glistening custard of the buttermilk pie were things of beauty; meringue, to her, tasted exactly like what it was, egg whites and sugar, and when cooked tasted a little like you had fluffed up some ground-up Blue Horse notebook paper and smeared it across a perfectly good pie. She would just as soon throw a rag over it as spread that tasteless mess across a good pie.
“Meringue,” she would say, much, much later, “had to have been invented by rich folks, to hide somethin’. Or they had them egg whites left over from the fillin’, and they hated to see ’em go to waste. It’s how they got to be rich folks,” she always said, “squeezin’ a penny.”
She sent the first chocolate pie to the old man, still warm, by her own boys, James and William, accompanied by the Reardens’ youngest boy, Rodney, who was about their age. They had become good friends and co-conspirators.
“We didn’t have no trouble with Rodney. It was Jerry whose woman it was that Daddy shot,” my mother said, for the record.
The next day, Ava went to work on the coconut p
ie. She and Charlie still had little money for luxuries, but they splurged for a real coconut, and Charlie used a hammer and nail to poke a hole in it. Ava offered some to the children, who made a face, and she drank it with great relish at her kitchen table—not from the shell itself, like a heathen, but from a teacup.
Charlie split the drained coconut into two neat halves, which is a trick in itself, and Ava worked the biggest part of an afternoon to reduce the snow-white inside into what she needed for a pie. She took a thick, sturdy steel spoon that had been worn down to something close to an edge from time and use, and scraped and scraped and scraped at the concave inside, drawing a flake, a sliver, from it every time. And when she got tired she would pass the spoon and coconut to my mother, who kept it up till they had not a pile of finely diced coconut, but a fluffy mound of those tiny slivers.
When she had a good double handful set aside, she mixed up what amounted to a simple but butter-rich vanilla custard, and as soon as it had thickened a bit, she stirred in the coconut, taking care not to put in too much. A person wanted a pie to be smooth and creamy, not chewy, unless it was a thick chess pie or some such. Before she put it in to bake, she sprinkled on some more of the coconut, so it could toast.
She did not prepare a meringue for that one, either. Again, she sent the still-warm pie up the bluff with the boys, to present to Old Man Rearden, and rested, content that she had used all her skill to bridge the violent rift between the two families.
On the third day, she began the more complicated buttermilk pie, creaming her sugar and butter, then spiking the ingredients with just a half-cup of thick, chunky, whole buttermilk. It baked to golden perfection, and after it set for a while in its own perfection, she sent it up the hill.
Sometimes she cooked a pie for her children, but sometimes there was not money enough for pie for everyone, and it seemed more important to keep her husband from being killed in retribution than it was to have a houseful of happy children with pie on their faces.