The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  It was a different time then, a time before people ripened their vegetables with chemicals, so the well-traveled tomatoes might be edible, if somewhat jostled or bounced around. If they looked passable, Charlie would take two or three of the ripest ones. They had to be dead-ripe for the delicacy he had in mind.

  He would leave the store trailed by his girls, the meat, wrapped in clean white butcher’s paper, under one arm. At home, he would stoke up the fire on the woodstove and reach for an iron skillet that had rarely if ever been exposed to soap and water.

  “Daddy always cooked the meat and made the gravy,” my mother reminded me, as if this was something I should not get wrong, like Scripture. “And Momma always made the biscuits and the coffee. They cooked together, side by side.”

  The pork, either ham or thick bacon or crispy fatback, would be cooked to crisp perfection, but not petrified.

  “Daddy was an expert,” my mother said.

  The biscuits would be immaculate, each rising to a perfect dome, with just the slightest dusting of browned flour.

  Ava took over the skillet and fried perfect eggs—not too runny, not hard and tasteless. The white had to have the last speck of runniness cooked out, while leaving the rich yellow to run liquid.

  If you think that’s not an art, by God, try it some time.

  Then she relinquished the skillet to Charlie once more, for his famous redeye gravy, which he prepared with the care of a chemist. But the winter tomatoes, as he had expected, were at best so-so. It was not that he didn’t make a good redeye gravy, because the gravy itself was excellent. It is just that, on a humdrum tomato, it was not good enough to satisfy her daddy, my mother says. “We waited all week for that breakfast,” my mother said, “and Daddy wanted to be proud of it. He wanted it to be good, for us.”

  This was their luxury, but without luster.

  “Come summer,” Charlie said, “I hope, by God, we’re drowning in ’maters.”

  * * *

  • • •

  And it came to pass.

  “Daddy always planted a big garden, not really even what you’d call a garden, but a great big field,” my mother said. That spring, he broke ground for seven or eight long rows, “as long as a chicken house,” she recalls. He hitched their horse, Buck, to the plow, so every foot of it was hard-won. Charlie worked every evening after work and into the night, lining up his rows with white rags tied to stakes, so he could make them out in the moonlight. Charlie believed he had to plant more than seemed necessary, to ensure, in the end, that he and his family had enough to carry them through the summer and early fall, and enough to can for the winter. The drought would destroy some of them, or storms would obliterate them, or hard, soaking rains would bring them down under their own weight. The caterpillars would feast on them, or the birds, or any one of a dozen wild, furry things, and sometimes, because of things no man or woman could figure, they just wouldn’t make.

  “He planted so many he couldn’t stake them, planted so many he had to just let them grow on the ground,” she said. “Tomatoes will make fine on the ground, but you lose a lot more, to the caterpillars and such, and some will make but make ugly, and good for nothin’ but piecing up and canning.”

  Charlie was either ahead of his time or else behind it, but he refused to doctor his garden with the primitive pesticides of that time, and used no chemical fertilizer beyond some cow manure he had worked into the red clay in late winter or early spring. Red clay is not rich bottomland, but it will make tomatoes, squash, okra, green beans, watermelons, cantaloupes, and more, especially if you can awaken the soil with some kind of fertilizer. Charlie planted them all, but he put more rows in tomatoes than all the rest combined, just to be sure. Then he stood at the edge of his field and waited for nature to do its worst.

  But the droughts did not come. The dust did not blow, and the ground did not crack, and when the wind came it seemed to pass high over the plants, which snaked along the ground and survived, whereas staked tomatoes were knocked down. The rains, when they came, were gentle for this volatile corner of the earth. Every afternoon, it seemed, brought a thunderstorm and a soaking rain, not enough to wash the world away, just enough to sink deep into the ground before blowing itself out or moving off to the east.

  The pestilence descended, as it always does, but Charlie and the girls moved through the fields flicking the green caterpillars off to the ground and stomping them. The birds descended, too, but they fashioned a scarecrow out of old pie tins and a raggedy shirt. It was not scary at all, but apparently the crows were too busy laughing themselves silly to eat the family’s crop, and the plants bore fruit.

  My mother was twelve years old that summer. She remembers walking through the field with her daddy and Juanita as the first tomatoes changed from orange to deep, delicious red. Her daddy pulled one each for her, Juanita, and himself, and they ate them there, passing the saltshaker back and forth. The tomatoes tasted clean, with that tart bite of acid, and were juicy but not watery, the way some store-bought tomatoes can be.

  “We’ll have ’maters this summer, by God,” he said.

  The tomatoes made early and in a great bounty. On Sunday, as the first crop ripened to perfection, he drove his girls to town and they made a great ceremony of selecting slabs of ham a half-inch thick, though it is unclear which cousin by marriage he bought the meat from. He prepared a perfect redeye gravy, and Ava baked a pan of perfect biscuits. And as he drizzled the gravy over a perfect tomato, he sang.

  If you’re ever in Houston, well, you better walk right

  You better not squabble, and you better not fight

  Or the sheriff will grab ya and the boys will bring you down

  You can bet your last dollar, Oh! you’re prison bound

  “I still think it’s the best thing, about, I’ve ever eat. He’d take the grease from that fried ham—that clear, hot grease—and spoon in fresh-brewed black coffee. He’d spoon it in till it was about two-thirds coffee, one-third of the fat. Then, he’d take a tomato or two—they had to be dead ripe—and dice ’em up, and use a little salt on ’em and a lot of black pepper. He’d take two of Momma’s biscuits and open them up, and pile that diced tomato on top. Then he’d spoon that mixture, that redeyed gravy—nothin’ but coffee and grease and the leavings of the fried meat from the bottom of the skillet—onto that tomato. And that hot grease, it causes that tomato to kind of wilt. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but it does, and…Well, the trick to it is, you have to eat it right then, or it’s not fit to eat. But if you eat it right then…Lord.

  “Fresh ham will make good grease for it. Salt ham is too strong sometimes, or too salty, but fresh ham is fine. But that white, streaked meat is fine, too, for this. Even good bacon will make good redeye gravy, but mostly for this you need fresh pork, not smoked, because you don’t want sugar or maple or other stuff in it. It messes it up.”

  Her daddy diced every tomato himself, and, working quickly, prepared every serving of the gravy, because if it was not scalding hot it would not work, would not wilt the tomato or properly ferry the juice down into the biscuit.

  He would make a double portion for himself. They ate it together at the small table with those fried eggs—not cooked hard, not too runny, just right—and the fresh ham or whatever fresh pork they’d chosen. If it was ham, he would take a Case knife and remove the marrow from the circle of bone, spread it on a piece of fresh biscuit, pop it into his mouth, and close his eyes.

  “The thing you got to have to make it taste right, besides the perfect tomato, is that perfect biscuit,” my mother said, because a gummy biscuit or a mealy biscuit, or one constructed from old flour, would ruin it. But that, as they say, is another story. She knew how to make biscuit by then, but not the perfect one, not quite yet; her momma had still not trusted her with such an important mission.

  I asked my mother where her father learned his redeye gravy. It sounds like the kind of thing Jimmy Jim would have relished, but she belie
ves her father learned it from his mother, the former Mattie Mixon, the gentle, long-suffering woman with the broken spine who perished in Jim’s exile. Mattie’s only real joy in her life came from the stories she told her children and the good food she cooked for them, and her journey was hard and mean every day she opened her eyes. When people say, at a death, that someone found peace, this is what they mean. Some people would say that was not much of a life, but not my mother. Even if a person’s only legacy is one lingering taste, “Well, that’s somethin’, ain’t it?”

  * * *

  • • •

  But in the field, the tomatoes continued to make, and make, and make….They made big, and round, and now, looking back on it, it seems like they all made perfectly, without blemishes. The family could not pull them fast enough to keep them from growing to maturity, going ripe, and rotting in the field. Maybe if the tomatoes had been coarse-skinned or blemished, they could have let them lie, or fed them to the hogs, but they were too pretty, too luscious for that.

  Charlie went to work in the field as soon as he came in from work, just to slave over the bounty he had wished for, and Ava and their daughters worked all day, some days, and still failed to keep up with the curse of rich soil, and the right amount of rain, and the perfect sun. They needed help.

  “James had come home from the army, and Charlie Sanders was back from the navy, and I can still see ’em walking through the fields on either side of these big washtubs, totin’ out just tub after tub after tub,” my mother said. “Edna and Momma went to work canning them, and they canned quart after quart, worked themselves to death. We borrowed jars, and bought jars. We traded ’maters for jars, or a full jar for three empty jars.” To leave them to rot was unthinkable; it would be like burning money on the ground.

  They ate tomato sandwiches on white bread, with mayonnaise, salt, and pepper (this, with a cold glass of milk and a few potato chips, remains my favorite simple summer lunch). They sliced platters of them to eat with everything. They ate them with white milk gravy and biscuits, and fried them, ripe as well as green. “You do it just like fried green tomatoes, but you choose one that’s turning, not soft yet, and it’s good,” my mother said. They tried, literally, to eat away the surplus.

  They gave tomatoes to kin, and friends, and to passersby they did not know from Adam, and still they made. They put up a sign that just said:

  MATERS

  FREE!

  Ava, who was literate and then some, added the exclamation point as a call for help. It was a point of pride to Charlie that almost none of those tomatoes rotted in the field. The walls in the house were lined with bright-red quarts of canned tomatoes, and green tomato pickles, and even these they had to give away. Finally, the season passed, but as the summer faded into fall, now and then a rare, red tomato, like a mockery, still showed itself in the withering vines. People who had worked a lifetime in the red dirt said they had never seen anything like it, and it became another of those very small legends in this part of the world. I guess maybe it was because there was not much else to talk about, this far out.

  Finally, fall turned the plants to brittle sticks, and winter dusted them with frost, and it was almost a relief. Charlie again herded his girls into the butcher shop to select their breakfast meat from behind the counter of the little groceries. There was Juanita, Margaret, Jo, and the baby, Sue. For a second, just a second, his eyes rested on the sad little bin of winter tomatoes. He told the girls they would have ham and eggs, and milk gravy on their biscuits, and maybe some hot buttered grits, but not a tomato, not again.

  “I can still taste them,” my mother says now, and there has never been a single solitary one to compare to that time—not to any one tomato, or any basket or bushel, but to the thousands of dead-ripe, perfect ones in that long-ago field. All she can do is keep trying, one biscuit, and one gravy, at a time.

  Ham and Redeye Gravy over Fresh Diced Tomato

  Smoked ham steaks can be substituted as a shortcut, if you are a Philistine, or just very busy, my mother concedes. Salt ham can also be substituted, but the flavor will be strong. You won’t get enough grease from the ham alone to make the gravy.

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  4 medium to large tomatoes

  1 tablespoon lard or bacon grease

  4 slices fresh ham, about ½ inch thick (do not trim fat)

  About ½ cup brewed black coffee

  Salt and black pepper (to taste)

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Dice the tomatoes, about 1 tomato per serving, and set aside.

  In a 9-inch skillet, or larger, heat the lard or other fat until it liquefies, being careful not to burn it, then fry the ham until the fat is crispy.

  Set the ham aside, but keep it warm.

  Carefully stir the coffee into the still-hot skillet, trying as best you can to keep it to that ratio of two-thirds coffee to one-third ham fat.

  Heap one of the diced tomatoes over an opened fresh hot biscuit. Sprinkle with salt, and more liberally with black pepper.

  Then spoon on the redeye gravy, at least 3 or 4 tablespoons, allowing the hot grease and coffee to wilt the tomato slightly. The redeye gravy should trickle through the tomato, carrying its taste down into the biscuit.

  Eat immediately, with ham and eggs.

  NOTE Some people like to pour the mixed coffee and grease into a bowl first, before serving. But this may be a mistake, since the redeye gravy will grow cold quickly, and leave you with an abomination. Timing, again, is everything.

  * * *

  • • •

  “What I learned from it,” she said, almost seven decades later, “was how things can go together that ought not go together, like how that meat-grease-and-coffee mixture could wilt that tomato just the right amount, but how you salt it first, to begin the process of wilting it, to get it all goin’. Daddy showed me. Daddy showed me it was all right to be particular.” She will not apologize for her standards, on good tomatoes or anything else. She has not had a really good slice of ripe cantaloupe since that monkey came back to earth.

  • 19 •

  DIDELPHIS VIRGINIANA

  Baked Possum and Sweet Potatoes

  My aunt Juanita and uncle Ed, after the possum scare and before their marriage

  1953

  SHE DOES NOT KNOW what woke her. She only remembers opening her eyes and seeing, down the hall, the silhouette of her father in a straight-back chair, staring into the dying coals in the fireplace.

  It was the middle of the night, and he was usually fast asleep. He went to bed early and was not a restless man.

  “It scared me a little bit,” my mother said, thinking back.

  She wrapped a quilt around herself and walked softly into the front room.

  Her sister Juanita snored softly in her bed near the fire.

  “Daddy?” my mother whispered. “How come you’re up? Is something wrong?”

  “It’s Juanita, hon,” he said softly.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I’m just scared to go to sleep,” he said.

  “Lord, why?”

  “Well, she eat that whole possum for supper,” her daddy said, deadly serious, “and I ain’t never knowed nobody eat a whole possum and live.”

  The truth is, he had never known anybody to eat a whole possum at all, and certainly not anyone who was roughly the same size and weight as a lemur. In her bed, Juanita snored peacefully on.

  “I guess it don’t seem to have hurt her none,” he said after a while, but they sat up anyway.

  “She had been terribly ill for a long time,” said my mother, thinking back. “It was ulcers, and, oh, hon, she suffered. She hadn’t eat nothin’ solid for so long.

  “Till that possum.”

  I asked her if the possum saved her sister’s life, but she said she didn’t believe so.

  “But it didn’t do her no harm.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The possum was an important element in th
e diet of my people; there is no denying this. But it is included in this book only because I love my aunt Juanita. That may have to be enough.

  My mother does not believe many modern-day chefs will attempt a recipe for baked possum and sweet potatoes, and the truth is, she never particularly enjoyed the process of preparing one, but it was subsistence cooking when she was a child. Its oil, rendered in cooking, was considered to be serious medicine, used to ease arthritis in the old, and was even rubbed on the chests of coughing children. Why would it not be medicinal from the inside out? But to my mother, it is no kind of delicacy.

  “I’ll talk about it,” she said, “but I don’t like it.”

  I asked her what a possum ever did to her.

  “If I can’t enjoy what I cook,” she said, “if I can’t enjoy eating it, I’d rather not cook it.”

  “If I had me one right now I’d cook it,” said my aunt Juanita, slightly insulted. “I might not could eat a whole one, but I believe I could eat a whole lot of one.”

  The Virginia opossum, Didelphis virginiana, walked with the dinosaurs. It is a semi-arboreal marsupial, which means it lives mostly on the ground but can climb trees if it so chooses, and carries its young in a pouch, like a kangaroo. It is not lovely, at least in its adult form. It has beady eyes that glow red, a white face, pointy snout, prehensile tail, silvery hair, and fifty teeth. People have been bad-mouthing the possum for as long as Europeans have walked this land.