by Rick Bragg
Fried Chicken Gravy (Water Gravy)
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
2 to 3 tablespoons flour (may take more)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper (at least)
3 cups water
HOW TO COOK IT
My mother has no recipe to make a small skillet of gravy. The above amounts will yield a skillet-full of chicken gravy, which has a remarkable dual purpose. It is a true delicacy for humans, but also an excellent, economic method, with the leftovers, to feed a yard-full of dogs.
The chicken, thinly coated with dry flour, will not soak up as much of the lard as you think if you cook it right, and the chicken fat and skin will add a lovely taste. There may be 4 or 5 tablespoons of fat left. While the skillet is still medium-hot, sprinkle in the flour, salt, and pepper, and stir until the oil is thoroughly incorporated. “Just say ‘mixed up good,’ ” she said. Do not fish the crispy bits from the skillet before doing this; they are where the flavor resides.
Stir the browning flour until you have a nut-brown color. If the flour is still raw, the gravy will have a chalky taste. Be careful, though, not to burn it.
Stir in the water. Gravy is forgiving. The gravy will thicken, if you leave it on the heat.
You can use milk instead to thicken it. Milk gravy can overthicken and become chalky, gunky, so be careful of the heat. But I prefer milk gravy, and on this my mother and I will never agree.
No matter what gravy you choose, eat it over biscuits, maybe speckled with a little more black pepper, with sliced tomatoes or sliced cantaloupe on the side, and set some biscuits aside, buttered, to eat with jelly or preserves, as Jim advised so long ago.
Fresh Green Beans with Golden Potatoes
This was perhaps Ava’s finest dish, my mother believes, because of the distance she carried the simple ingredients. No one seems to understand why her recipe for this basic thing turned out so much better that others’. It just did.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
3 large golden potatoes, or 10 or so small red potatoes
1 small piece salt pork, fatback, or smoked pork, or 2 slices bacon, for seasoning
Small amount bacon grease
1 to 1½ cups water
2 to 3 pounds fresh green beans, any kind
1 teaspoon black pepper (that sounds like a lot, but green beans do well with black pepper)
Salt (to taste)
1 white or yellow onion, coarsely chopped
HOW TO COOK IT
Quarter the larger potatoes. New potatoes should at least be halved, so they will cook evenly. Red potatoes do not have to be peeled, but we do it.
In a medium-to-large pot, cook the seasoning meat in a little bacon grease until some of the fat renders into the bottom of the pot, but not until crisp. You are looking for just a little brown on the edges. It will taste better this way.
Add the water, green beans, and other seasonings. Cook over high heat until the water comes to a good boil, then lower the heat to medium. After about 10 minutes, add the potatoes, and cook for about 30 more minutes, allowing most of the water to cook out, and till the potatoes are tender. The beans will be done, no matter what. Green beans are forgiving.
* * *
• • •
Ava never forgave Dee Roper for killing Clem Ritter with his mercantile.
“She always called him that SB Dee Roper,” my mother said. “I thought it was part of his name.”
My mother turned twelve in April ’49. Her time as a spectator in her momma’s kitchen was done now. She was not the oldest daughter in the house—still learning, certainly—but more and more she did the cooking herself, if Ava was working in a cotton field, or visiting relatives, or just mad at Charlie. At such times, Ava refused to have anything to do with his sustenance, and the children suffered by association. “It was cornbread and buttermilk,” my mother said, “if Momma was mad at Daddy.”
Juanita’s early indifference to cooking and eating, so like her mother’s early attitude, had not changed, so there was no struggle for control of the kitchen.
On days when the kitchen was bequeathed to her, to her alone, my mother found a peace there, a kind of quiet. She had studied her mother, and her aunts, and the men, like her daddy, who were at home in the kitchen. It is not so much that they instructed her in any active or organized way; she was more like a dancer watching better dancers go through their steps, over and over again.
They still had no electricity, so there was no modern stove, and no refrigerator. The cooking was still done on a heavy iron wood-stove with a square baking box, the oven, attached to one side. Her daddy chopped most of the wood, but if he was chasing work, Ava and the girls chopped it themselves—about an hour of work, and a lot of bloodshed, to fuel the cooking of two or three meals. She was no better with an ax than her momma was. A scarred, ancient cupboard against one wall held the plates, spoons, spices, and a drawer-full of scarred, pitted knives. The kitchen table had a road map of nicks and scrapes and ancient, mysterious stains, and had been hammered back together after more than one sorry, drunken relative had crashed into it or onto it, or been thrown across it. But my mother looked at it and imagined the food she would place on it, one heavy iron pot at a time, and knew that, wherever they dragged it, through the foothills or along the dirt road, “hon, I was at home.”
· 18 ·
TOMATOES WITHOUT TASTE, TOMATOES WITHOUT END
Ham and Redeye Gravy over Fresh Diced Tomato
Aunt Edna and her oldest daughter, Betty
1950
HAM STEAKS with a disc of creamy marrow in the middle, served with fried eggs and hot biscuits, all done right, “don’t need no extras,” my mother says. But now and then she just likes to show off a little bit. She opens a piping-hot biscuit, covers it with a beautifully ripe diced tomato, salts it a little, peppers it a lot, and dresses it with an elixir made from the hot grease mixed with a few tablespoons of brewed black coffee, stirred together in the sizzling skillet. I cannot really explain why this is so delicious, exactly. I only know that it is.
But almost every time, she apologizes. It is brought down, brought low, by the poor quality of the tomato.
“Ru’nt it,” she says.
Every tomato, for fifty years or more, has had something wrong with it.
“Not fit to eat,” she says.
She was not always a snob as to tomatoes. As a child, she toddled down rows without end, the tomatoes as big as her head, green turning to orange turning to red. As a young woman, she pulled them by the bushel, one bushel as near perfect as the next, so that you could reach in with your eyes closed and get a pretty one. But that was a long time ago. I asked if maybe she was just a lot harder to please now, as an old woman, and she told me no, you don’t get so old you can’t tell magic from mush.
The last truly good tomato was probably in…Well, she cannot quite recall. “But I was still a girl….We had ’maters then, son,” she testifies. Since then, she has stared with contempt at untold baskets of tomatoes in country stores, corner groceries, supermarkets, curb markets, on the tailgates of rusted pickup trucks, and even at unharvested fruit hanging from the vines in other people’s gardens, and sniffed. She actually sniffs—in disdain, in frustration—as she looks them over one by inferior one.
I cannot count the times she has stood at my elbow as I paid some cashier or vendor or poor farmer what seemed a reasonable price, as she mumbled about what a shame it was that an old woman could be so lowly bamboozled, hoodwinked, and treated like a dog. I have learned never, never to let her pay with her own money; if she counted out her hard-won Social Security for inferior tomatoes, she would gripe till Kingdom Come. At least she has never discriminated. She has openly disdained beefsteaks, Big Boys, Heatmasters, Sunmasters, Sweet Millions, Mountain Masters, and Boxcar Willies. She does not give a damn.
It is understandable that she would feel that way about supermarket tomatoes, which are not actually food, and most likely ripen
ed somewhere on a truck between here and Homestead, or Mexico, or in the hold of a tramp steamer. A supermarket tomato is food the way a frozen burrito is food: of last resort.
But in the Deep South, in the hot summertime, you would think an old woman could at least ride past a good tomato every now and then, at the rustic curb markets, or on the backs of trucks parked at the side of the road, their springs sagging with watermelons, sweet corn, cantaloupes, and green and ripe tomatoes. You would think that on the back of some raggedy ’74 Dodge, on some forgotten crossroads somewhere south of Sylacauga, the perfect tomato would be waiting, or at least one that that did not make her queasy or mad.
No.
“Oh, you can get one that tastes like a tomater a little bit, one of them pink things that makes you think to yourself, ‘Well, it’s better than no tomater a-tall.’ That’s what I always say to myself: ‘It’s better’n no tomater a-tall.’ ”
As with many things, she blames the men who walked on the moon.
“They ought not have done that,” she said. “Our weather’s just not right anymore. It used to rain every day in the summer. You can’t tinker with nature and expect everything to just be all right.”
When she was a child, her people watched the moon, listened to the wind, smelled the rain. Then some fool goes and just walks all over it.
But whatever the reason, there are almost no real tomatoes in existence anymore, ones that are fit for human consumption (though they are still adequate, she allows, for hog feed). They are mealy, which is the worst sin a tomato can carry, or spotted yellow, or hard-fleshed, or artificially ripened with “chemicals and poisons,” apparently in tanning beds. They are too ripe or too green or scarred or blemished or wormy, or, she is almost certain, radiated by the government. The thing is, worminess is about the best you can hope for. “You can cut a worm out,” she said, “and go on.” When she does find what seems to be a good tomato, it is an impostor, a poseur, and when she cuts into it at home it is unspeakable.
The thing is, she is so disappointed in the quality of the tomatoes that the vendors, whether in a big produce section or standing beside their trucks, agree with her, and tell her they will try to do better.
“They just ain’t real good, are they?” she says, sniffing.
“No, ma’am, they surely ain’t.”
I usually just stand there, uncomfortable.
Sometimes these men grew the tomatoes in their own gardens, sweated over them, stooped over them, prayed over them.
“Well, give me that basket there,” she finally says, pointing at one that looks just like all the rest of them.
I have seen it happen all my life. The only decent tomatoes she gets are from our kin, from my brothers, who raised her a garden at various times, or her nephew Mac (who is not really her nephew but might as well be), or other kin who come by bearing bags and bags of tomatoes, mostly for her to can. But for slicing and eating, those, too, are less than ideal to a perfectionist.
I asked her, finally, if she could ever remember a passable tomato in the last, say, decade.
“Why, sure,” she said, and waited for me to read her mind.
“When was that?”
I watched her pick through them in her memory like it was a curb market she had happened by, gathering, sorting, discarding, and arriving, finally, in only disappointment. “I’ll need to study on it a little more,” she finally said. After a while, she just said no, there were none, after all. She loves tomatoes, and eats them every day in the summer, sliced on her plate or in sandwiches or with her cornbread and buttermilk, and enjoys them as much as she can, given such poor quality. But she knows there is a good one there, somewhere, in the weeds.
* * *
• • •
The song was perhaps the last one on earth I expected her to know. We were driving to the doctor’s office that morning; it seems like going to the doctor is what we do. We go to the heart doctor, the toe doctor, the eye doctor, the urologist, the general practitioner, the doctor who treats her for what she calls only “the bad word,” and the dermatologist she nicknamed “Dr. Butcher.” He, oddly, is one of her favorites. “He’s nice to me,” my mother said, “but quick to cut.” I do not listen to the radio as we drive, because it will rob us of time, and time is our hobgoblin. She tells me stories as we ride, and does not have to hurry, because she lives forty-five minutes and one drive-through sausage biscuit away from the closest specialist. I do not want her to have to shout over Creedence Clearwater Revival. But I had that song in my head as we rolled through the cotton fields and soybeans and brittle, rustling corn, and the corn made me think of my grandfather’s liquor, and that made me think of chain gangs, and…
When you wake up in the mornin’, when the work bell ring
You go marching to the table, to see the same old thing
Knife and fork upon the table, ain’t no pork up in the pan
And if you say a thing about it, you get in trouble with the man
Then, right on cue, the old woman next to me began to sing…
Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me
Oh, let the Midnight Special shine her ever-lovin’ light on me
It should not have surprised me. Everybody from Lead Belly to Burl Ives recorded that prison anthem, and her daddy, of course, knew every vagabond and chain-gang song ever recorded. But it just sounded strange coming from her. I gave her a few more minutes, a few more stanzas, to let the story take shape inside her head. There is always a story—or stories, swirling in and out of each other, leading nowhere, everywhere. This time, like so many times, it led into the field.
Yonder come Miss Rosie, how in the world did you know?
Well I know her by her apron, and the dress she wore
Umbrella on her shoulder, piece of paper in her hand
Well I’m callin’ that captain, “Turn a-loose my man”
“I think it was ’49, or maybe ’50. I know ’cause James and William had done got home from the army.”
“What was?” I asked.
“The last time I had some really fine tomaters.”
* * *
• • •
It had started in wintertime, with a curse.
Sunday was a day of feasting for the Bundrums—not after church, because damned if Charlie Bundrum would swing a hammer six days a week to feed chicken to a preacher. No, they feasted in the early morning on Sunday, when every preacher in the world was occupied. “It was the one day we eat better than anybody.” My mother somehow always made me think of Dickens when she talked about this, about their early-morning journey to procure the elements of their meal. She made it sound like a feast of kings.
Funny how you can see a thing so long after it is over and done with, even if it happened a lifetime before you were born. But she has always had that skill, to make me picture people in my mind, painting me a picture not only of the physical world but of the feelings behind a thing. She made me see the little store and the glassed-in case with the coiled sausage and fresh hamburger and red steaks, made me see my grandfather there outside the glass, like he had coin in pocket to buy the whole damn store.
He was painfully thin, his health failing even then from a lifetime of hard living, but as hard as an old bone. His Sunday clothes were his everyday clothes, and they sagged and bagged over his body; his work boots were filmed in red mud. The known world was covered in red mud. To my mother, then, he looked like an old hammer handle, worn and cured, “but so thin. I guess it’s one of the reasons I loved cooking for him. I thought, if I could just make real good food, I could make him okay.”
It was always the same Sunday-morning conversation, there at the butcher shops in the working-class neighborhoods in Jacksonville. “What have you got that’s good?” Charlie asked.
He preferred to deal mostly with kinfolks, so he would get an honest answer. Fortunately, two of his cousins by marriage, Ed Young and Y. C. Bonds, ran neighborhood groceries.
“Y.C
. was married to Mary Emma, Uncle Babe’s daughter—you know, it was Uncle Babe who helped butcher that hog in the dead of night. Sometimes Daddy had to get Y.C. out of bed on a Sunday morning to open up his store. Ed Young was married to Lois Bundrum. They sure had some pretty children, but that’s account of Lois.”
He would ask them if they had any T-bones—they cost a dear thirty-nine cents apiece—and he would nod his head as if he had actually been considering T-bones but was not altogether set on them. Then he would ask about fresh ham, or streak o’ lean, not salted but fresh, the lean streak a bright pink.
The cousins, by marriage or not, treated the thin man in the ragged overalls with respect; Charlie Bundrum was the kind of man who would help you drag your ox out of the ditch, metaphorically and otherwise, and earned friends. Sometimes, if times were hard, he decided on the fatback, and sometimes it was the beautiful freshly sliced ham, which had a ring of fat an inch thick circling the lean, its center eye creamy with marrow. “I remember us having beefsteak for breakfast,” my mother said, “but not a lot. I remember Momma frying chicken. But usually, if Daddy cooked breakfast for us on a Sunday, it was pork.”
One winter morning, after selecting and procuring the meat, he went looking for a winter tomato. His hopes were not high; it would have to be a world traveler, that tomato, if he found one at all. The hills of northeastern Alabama and North Georgia had real winter, miserable ice storms, and sometimes even troublesome snow, so any fresh vegetable had to come from someplace the winter didn’t go. My daddy’s cousin Carlos was named for the logo on the side of a wooden crate of Mexican produce, I guess because his people were just so happy to have something, anything, that did not come from a can.