The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  She did not stop with those three pies. Every week, without fail, she made three pies, chocolate, coconut, and buttermilk, and had them delivered to the old man. She did not expect a thank-you note, not in a world where half the inhabitants did not read, but the day after the third pie, without fail, she got her pie tins back from Rodney, scrubbed clean.

  It was an act of God that brought them all face-to-face. A storm had blown fiercely across the bluff and had sent Old Man Rearden’s wife, whose only name was apparently Old Lady Rearden, tumbling into a flooded slough, where she almost drowned in a foot of water.

  “She was real short and real fat,” my mother said in explanation.

  Ava, when she got word, rushed up the bluff to see about her, only to discover that Old Lady Rearden was not even close to drowned, only wet.

  The storm had not chased Old Man Rearden from the porch, and no one had apparently deemed it necessary to roll him inside. They were an odd bunch, the Reardens.

  “How do, Mr. Rearden,” Ava said.

  “How do,” he replied.

  “I hope you enjoyed your pies,” she said.

  “Ain’t had no pie,” he said.

  “But every week for a month, I sent you three pies….”

  “Ain’t had nary a pie,” he said, and turned back to watch the river.

  It did not take a great sleuth to track down the thieves. The boys had carried them down to the river, eaten them down to the last crumb, washed the tins in the river, dried them on their shirts, and hidden them in the bushes until it was time to return them to Ava, after a day or two.

  “I guess they ate ’em with their hands,” my mother said, “since we didn’t seem to be missing no forks.”

  If Old Lady Rearden had not been blown into the ditch by the storm, they would have gotten away with it forever, or until Charlie moved the family again, which would be soon.

  The saddest part was that Old Man Rearden did not believe that there ever had been any pies to start with, taking the word of his pie-stealing son, Rodney.

  This, of course, made Ava mad, so, instead of immediately going to work to repair what had become an even wider breach between the two families by crafting a few more pies and carrying them up the bluff herself, she and the old man just faced each other across the holler, jut-jawed and belligerent.

  She tried, unsuccessfully, to beat the pie stealers in her own household, but James and William were about eight feet tall by then and hammered together from what seemed to be saddle leather and two-by-fours, and they just laughed when their tiny mother tried to beat them.

  Their daddy would also have tried, but by the time he stopped laughing they had stolen the truck and had a good head start.

  “I think, before we moved, Momma might have sent him just one piece of pie,” to show the old man what he had missed, and what he might have enjoyed if he had been more gracious.

  * * *

  • • •

  In my mother’s time, the pies were prepared much the same way as these recipes, except for the shells. My mother does not like change, but the ready-to-bake pie shell is one she can live with.

  Chocolate Pie

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 stick unsalted butter

  2½ tablespoons cocoa powder

  3 tablespoons flour

  1 cup sugar

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  3 egg yolks

  2 cups whole milk

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  One 9-inch pie shell

  HOW TO COOK IT

  This is not a fancy chocolate pie, just a rich, good chocolate pie. There was no such thing in my grandma’s time as fancy pie. If you had asked someone for French silk, they would have thought you were talking dirty.

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  Let the butter soften as you prepare the ingredients. In a bowl, mix the cocoa, flour, sugar, and salt. Beat the egg yolks, and combine all the wet and dry ingredients in a pan or double boiler. “Be sure not to forget the vanilla flavoring—some people think ’cause it’s chocolate they won’t need that.”

  Cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly, then reduce heat to medium-low, and stir in the butter one big piece at a time—she likes it in fourths—as the mixture thickens. When I asked why she does it this way, my mother’s only answer was “ ’Cause it smells good.”

  When the mixture has thickened, pour it, still hot, into your pie shell.

  Bake at 350 degrees for at least 10 to 12 minutes, and maybe as long as 15 minutes, depending on your oven.

  The chocolate filling does not have to crack when it’s done, but it should not worry you if it does, and perhaps it could even make you a little happy. Though it won’t be the prettiest dessert you’ve ever made, it gets prettier as you cut into it.

  Do not top it with anything.

  The two boys, when they were little, seemed to have a hard time keeping chocolate pie on the inside of their mouths, even if they were just licking the spoon.

  Charlie would come home from work and see them besmirched with chocolate up to their cheeks, even their eyebrows; he’d shake his head at the wonders of procreation.

  Odd, he would say, how the two boys would one day be able to steal a half-dozen or more chocolate pies without a trace.

  Toasted Coconut Pie

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  3 tablespoons flour

  1 cup sugar

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  3 egg yolks

  2 cups whole milk

  1½ teaspoons vanilla extract

  1¼ cups scraped or flaked fresh coconut

  One 9-inch pie shell

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and salt, and stir in the beaten egg yolks, milk, and vanilla flavoring, but not the coconut. Pour into a medium pan and, over medium heat, cook until it just begins to thicken; then stir in the coconut, saving about a good tablespoon. Cook another minute or two to thicken it a bit more, then pour, while still hot, into your pie shell. Sprinkle the rest of the coconut across the top.

  Remember, this is just part of the cooking process. If the mixture has cooked so much it will not pour out of the pan or boiler, congratulations, you have custard, not suitable for pies. Remember, too, to be careful handling the pie shell filled with the hot mixture.

  Bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, till it turns a golden color and the coconut on top is toasted. Golden brown may mean the pie is a little too done, and perhaps a little too dense, but, again, that depends on the oven.

  “Some people like a thicker pie,” she said. “I wouldn’t throw out one, if it got a little…”

  “Dense,” I said.

  “Gummy,” she said.

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “I like a gummy pie.”

  She nodded, pleased to be right again, for the fourteen billionth time.

  Buttermilk Pie

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 stick softened butter

  1½ cups sugar

  3 eggs

  3 tablespoons flour

  ½ cup whole buttermilk

  ½ cup whole milk

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

  One 9-inch pie shell

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  Making this pie is a little more tedious: you need to mix the butter and sugar thoroughly; cooks call this creaming, but my mother calls it “mixing it up good.” Then you stir in the eggs—you will not separate them for this—and flour, and mix them thoroughly. She does not use a mixer for this; she whips it with a fork.

  Stir in the buttermilk, milk, and vanilla, dust the top with the cinnamon, and bake at 350 degrees for about an hour; then lower the heat to medium-low, and bake another 15 to 30 minutes.

  You can try the old method of sticking a knife in its center, and if it comes out clean it’s done. But if it�
�s golden brown on top, it’s likely okay, she believes.

  * * *

  • • •

  None of which did Old Man Rearden a damn bit of good.

  In one last attempt as a peacemaker, she started sending him soup. After threatening her boys with severe beatings, which they mostly snickered about, and having her husband threaten them with severe beatings, after which they solemnly promised to do better, she started sending the old man home-canned quarts of her fine, short-rib-based vegetable soup. She sent him one a week, every week, because he had told her once that he certainly enjoyed a fine soup, and it was something he found much easier to enjoy—his own teeth had not survived life’s journey to its natural end.

  Even though her husband and the Reardens were still officially at feud, she risked a visit to see Old Man and Old Lady Rearden, and to apologize for an unfortunate incident involving her children and a fat hen they had nicknamed, unfortunately, Old Lady Rearden.

  Old Lady Rearden the hen had perished in the yard from unknown causes. She lay in the yard with her legs sticking straight up in the air, which reminded the children of the time Old Lady Rearden the human had been washed down the ditch and wound up, in much the same awkward position, in the river mud.

  This loss, of the chicken, had sent the children wailing through the yard, lamenting the death of Old Lady Rearden at such a volume that it carried across the ridge to the Rearden cabin; it momentarily disturbed Old Man Rearden, who had to wheel around and check, just to be sure, and even caused Old Lady Rearden a second or two of consternation, as she checked herself.

  “I am sorry the children was rude,” Ava said.

  Old Man Rearden nodded that it was forgiven.

  “Did you enjoy your soup?” Ava asked.

  The old man just blinked.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I guess James and William just threw the jars in the ditch,” said my mother. “Momma’s soup was so good you could drink it, just drink it cold. I guess it didn’t matter none. We were movin’, anyway.”

  · 16 ·

  RIBS IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

  Spareribs Stewed in Butter Beans

  Jo

  1945

  FIRST OFF, we might as well agree that three o’clock in the morning is a bad time to take a hog for a drive.

  “I remember the night it happened,” she said. “It was pitch-black, not a bit of a moon”—just right for sneaking off.

  “I remember it because it was the night I swallowed my marble.”

  I asked why she’d had a marble in her mouth to start with.

  “I kept it in my mouth for about three years,” she said, and she was serious. “I pretended it was a jawbreaker. When people would ask me what I had it my mouth, I would say, ‘Oh, it’s my jawbreaker.’ It didn’t taste good, but it never wore out.”

  Sometimes there is just not much to say.

  My people were movers. Some people are disdainful of that—usually landed people who hacked a piece of dirt out of the forest primeval in the time of Andy Jackson and then stuck with that land through war and flood and disappointing progeny, generation after generation. These are the same people who are prone to say, with understandable pride, that their great-grandfather died in the same bed in which he was born. It seems a dull way to end up, to me, unless you had a hell of a good time in between. But maybe that’s just my grandpa’s restless spirit whispering in my ear.

  He held his family together not with an ancestral home, with neat, straight rows of crops and barbed-wire fence and indisputable property lines, but with spinning rubber and steel, as if the very motion of that old truck was a kind of gravity that kept his people from just drifting off into space. My grandfather did not sit on the same porch in the same swing and use the same fan to swat at the same ancestral flies. But he did move his family eight times in one decade, in the same beat-up, rattling Ford. There were nine of them now, in the caravan. The last child, Sue, came in ’44.

  “Mostly, we lived a-comin’ and a-goin’,” my mother said. “I don’t know if we ever moved in the daylight.” They crossed state lines so much, they couldn’t recall which one they resided in.

  He had no love in his heart for a landlord, no gratitude, and no sympathy. So it made sense to him to quit on a place not on the day the rent was due, but on a day it was a month past due, more or less; if you could somehow stretch that to a full two months past due, well, why not? But, to get away with it, you could not drive away from a place under the harsh glare of a debtor’s sun. You had to slip away in the deep dark, between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when the landlord was in his bed, breathing easy, dreaming about ledgers and lockboxes and tinkling coins.

  They had left their place outside Rome under the Big Dipper, to move to a place in northern Calhoun County, Alabama, with no discernible name. “They call it Pleasant Valley now, but there wasn’t no Pleasant Valley then—it was just a place on the way to Webster’s Chapel. I guess it don’t matter. We wadn’t there too long, no-how.” A year or so later, he moved them from there to a place outside the town of Jacksonville, Alabama, called Carpenter’s Lane, where they stayed another year or so before Charlie began to fret. It was always just a matter of time before he moved them again. Part of it was that the work would, sooner or later, dry up, but the man was just born under a wandering star.

  In the early fall, before the first frost, he announced that they would be moving to a house not far away, near Boozer’s Lake. He was a full month behind on the rent on the Carpenter’s Lane house, and they needed to be long gone before the landlord came by at dawn, jingling his damn pockets. The two houses were, in truth, only a few miles apart, but the hope was that, by the time the jilted landlord figured out where the Bundrums had relocated to, it would be too much trouble to seek recompense.

  “We didn’t have much warning,” my mother said. “Sometimes he would just tell us the day of, and we’d be gone.”

  There was a finesse to it, disappearing a family, a houseful of furniture, and the livestock. Start packing too early in the evening and the landlord might happen by to collect or say hello, and catch them with a half-loaded truck in the yard. Start packing too late and they might not be done and gone by first light; landlords were notoriously early risers, as most well-off men tended to be. The idea was to leave the place bare, clean, and swept—because they were not hooligans—but with no forwarding address.

  The secret to a successful clandestine move was rounding up enough serious muscle to pull it off quietly and smoothly. They did not own much furniture, but what they had was hardwood and heavy, and there was the giant wash pot to load, and the chop block, and the anvil, and…James and William usually did the heavy lifting, but they were in the army for this move, drafted at the end of World War II. This was a problem if you had to move a milk cow, a massive hog, and a four-hundred-pound chifforobe.

  Charlie called on a brother, Joseph. Joseph could lift a Studebaker’s rear end clear off the ground.

  “But nobody called him Joseph,” my mother said. “They called him Babe. He was a big ol’ rough-looking man, not a good-lookin’ man like my daddy, but not a bad-lookin’ man, either. He was strong, real strong, and had a lot of reddish-blond curly hair.”

  I asked her if they called him Babe because he was the baby brother, or had a baby face.

  “No, hon,” she said. “They called him Babe because…Well, a lot of people said he was a ladies’ man. Women would holler at him, ‘Heeeeeeyyyyyyy, Babe.’ ”

  She thinks now it might have been the curly hair that did it.

  “I remember he always had one of them little-bitty Coca-Colas in his hand. Daddy would say to him, ‘Them things are gonna kill you.’ ” He was often making liquor at the time.

  But he was a good man to have on a moving night, and by 2:00 a.m. he and Charlie had emptied the house on Carpenter’s Lane, transported its contents to the new house, and gone to work on the livestock. They pushed, shoved, and threatened the milk
cow onto the back of the truck. Ava and the girls caught and penned the chickens—one or two always headed for the high country and could not be gathered up, so sometimes they had to sneak back to the house in the dead of another night and steal their own fowl—and rounded up the dogs and the spitting, scratching tomcat.

  Charlie told the children, as they clambered onto the back of the truck to ride beside the cow, to be careful not to hurt themselves on a sharp, broken piece of bumper that jutted straight out from the rear of the Model A. He had torn part of the bumper away in a wreck, and meant to hammer it into a less lethal protrusion when he had some time, some help, and a heavy sledge.

  All that was left, after dropping off the cow and one or two of the children, was a massive four-hundred-pound hog, snuffling ominously in the dark. “Daddy was fattenin’ it to kill, and it was big, but it wasn’t yet hog-killin’ time, so we had to move it, too,” my mother said. “You didn’t kill no young hogs back then. People couldn’t afford to kill a hog before you fattened it out. The meat from one of them fattened-out hogs was…Well, son, it was just wonderful.”

  She rode back from the house near Boozer’s Lake with her daddy, Juanita, and Babe. They could see the ghostly white of the hog as it circled the hog pen, agitated, as if it knew something was amiss. Charlie backed the truck as close as he could to the gate, which was just hammered-together scrap lumber, and put down a sturdy homemade ramp. But trees and underbrush made it impossible to back tight up against the pen, and the men feared the hog might take a hard left or right turn, escape, and maybe even hurt one of them. It was impossible to put hands on the hog to guide it, for it was a biter; they thought about putting a rope on it, but it seemed to have no neck. The best plan, the men decided, was just to shoo the hog straight from the gate to the ramp, using long poles to keep its tusks from their legs.