The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  “I’d begged her to name that baby after me, and she did. She named her Wanda Marie. My middle name is Marie,” she told me, in case it had somehow slipped my mind. She would have gone anyway, to help, but now she was bound to.

  “Juanita planned to go home and I was going to stay, to help look after Edna and the baby and the other little girls. There was just the oldest, Betty, and Linda, and Libby then, and now another girl. Charlie Sanders never had no luck with boys.”

  My mother always enjoyed walking the tracks. “I used to could even walk them rails when I was young,” my mother said. “You should of seen me, just a-gettin’ it down them rails. I almost never did fall.”

  At the end of the trek, they would have to cross the infamous trestle. The revered Mr. Hugh Sanders, who had retired from the Coosa ferry and lived with Edna and his son Charlie, had already warned them twice not to dawdle on the trestle, and to listen close before crossing the span and run like blazes when they did, whether they heard a train or not. The very nature of the trains, he told the girls, had greatly changed.

  “She’s a diesel,” the old man had explained, not some lumbering steam train, and she moved so fast she could be on you like death itself if you were not watchful. There would be no clickety-clack of old-fashioned iron, or great plume of smoke, to warn of her approach. She would come in a great rush on slick steel rails, and the roar would be just a few cross ties ahead of the gleaming engine, “and God help you, children, if she catches you on the trestle.”

  The trestle has not changed, still a relic from the bygone South, a tall, creosote-soaked structure, and too long, end to end, to outrun a train if it caught you in the middle.

  The day after Edna’s child’s birth, the sisters were pushing their bicycles across the trestle when they heard the whistle—not a whistle at all but a blaring horn. And, just as Mr. Hugh warned, the train came in such a rush that they had not even heard its engine when they started across, and suddenly could feel it, in the rails.

  “It like to got me and Juanita, on that bridge,” she said. They guessed at the direction of the train, which was obscured by the trees, and, their bicycles bouncing along the cross ties, they sprinted for the near bank. It was too far to jump even if there had been deep water in the creek—it would have killed them—“and we seen it comin’ at us just as we got close to the bank, and jumped for that, and slid down them gravel.

  “Could you imagine me running a track now?” she asked me.

  I thought it was a trick question and just said, “Sure.”

  She remembers rising from the gravel, shaken but unhurt, and watching the train flash past, car after car. It was a passenger train, “and you could see the people in the seats inside, and I guess they could see us, but they didn’t wave. It didn’t matter. If they had waved, they’d of done been gone by the time they did.”

  The trains had not always passed Tredegar by. Once, in the years after the Civil War, there had been a thriving little settlement there, and even a train depot, loading dock, and hotel—grand for its time, two stories tall, with a wide staircase. It had mostly all rotted down and been reclaimed by the forest, all but the old hotel. It was here that Charlie and Edna made their home, in this place everyone else in the world had left behind.

  “The second floor had just about rotted apart, so my daddy and Charlie Sanders tore the second floor off the hotel, and they put a new tin roof on that first floor, and Charlie and Edna made that their house,” my mother said. “They did a pretty good job of it, too.”

  They left the grand staircase in place, “but it didn’t go to nowhere. It just went up. Edna put her canned stuff—her canned tomatoes, and her soup, and pickles, and pepper, and her jelly and jam and fruit—on the steps of that stairway, and, oh, hon, it was so pretty.” Two or three times a day, a train would blast past the old hotel, just a few feet away, and the jars, like the lights on a jostled Christmas tree, would tremble on the steps of the staircase.

  But the most magical thing in the old hotel that afternoon was in the kitchen, hardwired to the wall. She cannot recall the brand name—she thinks it was probably a General Electric—but it was white and chrome and brand-spanking-new. It was the first electric stove she had ever touched, and it seemed oddly out of place in that old structure reclaimed from the past. And right next to it was a real refrigerator, not an ice box, but a thing that hummed and growled, and when no one was looking she opened the door and just stood there, staring at the aluminum ice trays. It was not the first one she had ever seen, only the first one she had ever touched.

  “Charlie Sanders had a good job at Fort McClellan—hon, I think it had something to do with ’lectricity. Mr. Hugh took care of cows for Mr. Boozer, who owned a bunch of land there, and they had sweet milk, and buttermilk, and real butter.”

  “Edna was in the bed with the baby, and I got to do the cooking…” with all those wonderful tools.

  “You’ll have to watch Grandpa about the milk,” Edna told her from the bed. “I got to noticin’ that the milk was comin’ in short, less than it should have been, and I snuck out to the barn, where he was supposed to be doin’ the milkin’, and there he was, and him a grown old man, squirtin’ the milk from the cow’s udder straight into the little kittens’ mouths—I mean, a whole bunch of it. And he was just laughin’, and the kittens were just a-dancin’….”

  Charlie Sanders was still something of a puzzlement in the family. He was a tall slab of a man, dark, grinning, and blue-jawed, with tight, curly hair, a sportsman who took hundreds of deer and thousands of fish, who did not stop at one drink of liquor ever in his lifetime and loved to laugh out loud. “He had devilment in him, but Charlie Sanders’s heart was all right, and he would have give you anything that he had,” my mother said. He said what was on his mind, and if he had ever been embarrassed by it, or regretful of it, no one could recall.

  He had inherited his father’s ability to tell a story, and when he had heard about a contest to write a slogan for Carnation milk—the winner got five dollars—he rushed into the kitchen to tell Edna.

  “Edna, get a pen and paper. I’m gonna win us five dollars.”

  “Oh Lord,” Edna said.

  He recited:

  Carnation milk is the best in the land

  Because it comes in such convenient little cans

  No tits to squeeze, no hay to pitch

  Just punch a hole in the little son of a bitch

  It did not win.

  “But them was very convenient cans, you know, because they was little. So he had that part right,” my mother reasoned.

  Around dark, the little girls and Charlie announced that they were hungry.

  “Well, I can cook anything,” my mother said boldly.

  “I would like some biscuits,” her brother-in-law said.

  “Biscuits,” the little girls echoed.

  Her heart fell, but she did not confess.

  “I guess people would think it strange that a good cook—a good cook down here, I mean—hadn’t never made a biscuit.”

  Charlie Sanders said they had fresh sausage, and some ham, salt pork, potatoes, and eggs in the kitchen. They wanted breakfast for supper—a common thing then.

  “Which y’all want?” my mother asked.

  The two men and three little girls just looked at her.

  They were hungry.

  They wanted all of it.

  “You can let Daddy make the biscuits,” Charlie Sanders said, as if he somehow knew that my mother was untested as a baker. Mr. Hugh’s wife had died young, and he had raised his sons by himself, cooking every meal they ate. He, too, was one of the best cooks in the family, or in any family at that time.

  “No,” Mr. Hugh said. “Let the child make them.”

  He shrugged into his coat.

  “Besides,” he said, “I got to do the milkin’.”

  A line of cats and kittens followed him to the barn.

  My mother went to work. She shaped a half-dozen sausage patt
ies, less than a half-inch thick and as big around as a MoonPie. Then she took a hunk of ham from the refrigerator and sliced it into squares and triangles, also slightly less than a half-inch thick. Anybody could make a ham or sausage biscuit, but the salt pork presented a problem—it would be too salty unless it was thoroughly rinsed and soaked. Fortunately, Edna was not the kind of cook to leave anything to chance. She had already done this, and wrapped it in clean wax paper, and put it in her refrigerator. My mother sliced it, too, a little less than a half-inch thick, cut away the skin, and wound up with a slice about five inches long. “It was purty meat. Didn’t have hardly no lean on it.”

  Finally, she sliced three or four large white potatoes into half-inch-thick wheels. She would fry the fatback in one skillet, to render the good lard in which to fry the potatoes, and fry the sausage in another, while the biscuits were baking, so that they would all still be hot to the touch when served.

  Then she turned to the flour barrel.

  “I knew what to do. I’d watched it a hundred, maybe a thousand times, but biscuits are just tricky. There’s women, good cooks, famous cooks, that’s afraid of biscuit. There’s old women ain’t never learned to make no really decent bread.” She had come to think she might be one of them.

  By sight and feel, she carefully portioned her ingredients, sifted her flour, then combined the baking soda and salt, and kneaded in lard and butter, working smoothly and gently, not slow but steady.

  She took about a handful of lard and worked it into the flour first, till the mixture was crumbly in texture. “I made them the way the old people do. Careful. It’s pretty much like surgery. The dough has to be just right.”

  Then she slowly added the liquid, a little at a time. “I would have rather used buttermilk and water, a mix of it, but they wanted me to use sweet milk. That works good, too.”

  “I patted ’em out with my hands; I don’t cut ’em, the way a lot of people do. It should be just thick enough to form a dome, and I feel the flour as I do it. If the flour’s old, I can feel it, and if the flour’s old, the biscuits won’t rise.”

  She laid them out in a blackened pan from before the Civil War, a pan Mr. Hugh’s mother had made biscuits in, and her mother before. She greased it with a little lard, and wondered how many times that had been done, how many thousands of biscuits had been baked there.

  It was about then she noticed she had an audience. Charlie Sanders and the three little girls stood watching her, the little girls big-eyed and solemn.

  They knew their momma was the best cook in the world, and their grandpa, and their daddy was no slouch. They had doubts about this interloper.

  “I guess they was hungry,” my mother said.

  “Quit bein’ so easy,” Charlie said. “Get rough with it.”

  He moved in beside her and reached for the dough.

  “Scrub your hands,” she ordered him, and surprised herself at how grown-up she sounded. “I don’t like nobody in my food but me, and for certain not without clean hands.”

  “I done done it,” he said.

  But she was amazed at how fast, and sure, the man worked. He had learned from his daddy, and from cooks who made biscuits in the mess halls and the galleys of ships in the navy, for hungry sailors; he had made them for whole shiploads. There was no time to dawdle in an arena like that; they’d throw a slothful cook overboard, he believed, feed him right to the sharks.

  “He did not make the prettiest biscuits, but he made ’em fast,” she said.

  What she learned, making them at his elbow, was that every biscuit did not have to be perfect or uniform on the outside. It was the chemistry, not the aesthetics, that mattered. If you had good flour and fresh ingredients, and took the biscuits from the oven at just the perfect time, well, “it didn’t make no difference if you had a ragged biscuit or two in the batch.”

  As they baked, she fried the sausage till it was crisp around the edges, the ham just enough to give it some brown, and the fatback till it was crispy, then fried the potatoes in thick chips, till crisp on the outside, almost creamy inside. As they finished, she split biscuits and slipped sausage in some, ham in others, and stuffed some with a strip of fatback and a single round of potato.

  With the eggs, she tried something a little different. She diced a smidgen of hot pickled pepper, sprinkled it all into the hot fat, and soft-scrambled the eggs on top of it, folding in some government cheese. But she could have sautéed a crocodile and no one would have noticed, not with a platter of sausage, ham, and fatback biscuits on the table.

  “I didn’t want no real hot, just a little taste in them cheese and eggs,” she said.

  It all disappeared, and this made her happy: “Edna’s kids was used to eatin’ good.” The dessert biscuits, buttered and jellied, were delicious. They disappeared, and the house went to sleep around her. Mr. Hugh told her the biscuits were better than he could make, and if it was a lie it was a kind one; the old man, of the same generation as Jimmy Jim, could cook anything, on a stove or over a campfire.

  It all seems a small thing now, a thing of little drama, but she would never forget it, “because it was my first biscuit.” A million biscuits later, she still remembers everything about that night. You can never tell what people will care about.

  “And I went home and told Momma I could make the biscuits, too, from then on. But she kept makin’ ’em in the mornin’, for years and years and years, but she would let me make ’em in the evenin’ time. I guess them biscuits was less important.”

  When people ask me now what makes my mother’s biscuits so special, I try to explain the best I can. The bottoms are crispy, not soft, and golden brown and domed on top, not discs, like cut-out biscuits. They have to be eaten hot or the bottoms will go from crispy to hard; if you are traveling, like to a family reunion or on a road trip to the Gulf, you can wrap them in foil, or in a towel inside Tupperware, which will make the bottoms go soft. This is not as good as hot biscuits, but passable.

  But, piping hot, there is not a better biscuit in the whole biscuit-eating world, not in the fanciest bed-and-breakfast in Charleston, or on the greatest battleship among all the ships at sea.

  The crispier bottom is a platform, it seems, for all the good things to come, all the things you can pile on top, like bacon or little triangles of country-fried steak, or a resting place for redeye gravy or sausage or gravy or chicken gravy.

  In a lifetime of uncertainty and woe, you smell them wafting through the house in the morning, and you just kind of know that everything is going to be all right.

  * * *

  • • •

  “The recipe is the same, more or less, as with the little biscuits we used in the butter rolls. Now, like before, I won’t try to tell the people to make ’em how I make ’em, but I’ll tell ’em how they ought to make ’em, you know, for them, so they won’t make no mess….

  “The first thing you got to have is a big bowl, to make ’em up in. A glass or ceramic bowl is good. I admit I did mix ’em up in a big ol’ plastic bowl, but I forgot one time and set it on a hot stove eye, and it didn’t burn all the way through but it was fixin’ to burn all the way through. I threw it out, because it had the imprint of the stove eye on it, and it reminded me what I’d done, and I didn’t like that.

  “Anyway, you need a big bowl, one that’ll hold about three pounds of flour. You won’t use three pounds, ever, but it’s good to have room to work.”

  The recipe has changed, as ingredients have changed. She has relented, and uses Crisco sometimes when she cannot find or make good lard, and always self-rising flour. She still makes them the old way sometimes, mixing her flour and soda, working in some good lard, but she makes biscuits every day she is alive, if she is able, and she admits, shamefully, that she has bowed to expediency.

  Here, in her words as much as was possible, is my mother’s recipe.

  Real Biscuits

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  4 tablespoons lard or Crisco

&nbs
p; 3 to 4 cups self-rising flour (you will only use as much as needed)

  ¾ cup buttermilk

  ¼ cup water

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Lightly grease a biscuit pan with lard, big enough to hold anywhere from nine to twelve biscuits. Cover with a cloth or paper towel, and set aside. “Remember, the biscuits will have lard (or Crisco) in them,” my mother said.

  Sift the flour, all of it, to screen out any trash.

  In a large bowl, repeat the process from Chapter One, creating your flour bowl to hold the wet ingredients, being sure to leave at least 2 inches or so of flour in the bottom.

  First, with your hands, squeeze the lard into pieces into the bottom of the flour bowl.

  Carefully pour in most of the buttermilk and water.

  “I put mine in all at once, instead of trying to pour in a little at a time, and work it, and pour in more, and work it, and pour in….”

  Gradually work the flour into the liquid and fat, as before.

  Remember: “You don’t want sticky, and you don’t want dry. And you have to really work it in or you’ll have one greasy biscuit and one hard, dry biscuit. You may waste a pan or two of biscuits till you learn. You want to be able to roll them into a ball, firm enough so they will hold their shape.”

  Again, do not worry about waste. You can sift the leftover flour back into your bin.

  You should end up with a nice semi-firm wad of dough.

  Pinch off a piece of dough, she said, “one that will fit easily in one hand—but I’ve got small hands.”

  Roll it into a ball, then flatten only slightly, carefully, in your hands. The biscuit will be more a patty shape, but will rise into a dome as it bakes.

  Place the biscuits on the greased pan. Do not crowd them or the edges will not brown right. As with the butter rolls, spacing is important here.