The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  Her daddy was still sitting there when she went to bed; he did not rest well anymore, and there was a foreboding in the house in those days, as both her momma and daddy changed. Things would never be the same as in the hundred or so kitchens, it seemed, they had all gathered inside before.

  She went to sleep thinking how there were some people in the world who danced, and some who cooked, and how it was the first time in such a long time when she went a whole day without cooking something for someone. She had walked ten miles that day, from one kindness to another.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I do forget things,” she told me, a lifetime later, “but I still love to cook….” And I realized then that I had asked her a thousand questions over the past year about how she learned to cook, but rarely if ever asked her why, while others went out to learn a step or two.

  It was easy enough for her to answer:

  You do not forget the best days of your life.

  “I remember how Daddy and Momma used to cook together on a Sunday morning, and when they’d cook they’d sing….Daddy would sing honky-tonk songs, stuff from the pool hall and the radio and the records we played on the Victrola, and Momma would sing about the Lord, but sometimes she would sing about that other stuff, too, you know, stuff from the world…”

  Daughter oh dear daughter

  How can you treat me so

  Leave your dear old mother

  And with that gambler go

  With that gambler go

  “…and Momma would make the bread, the biscuit, and make the good coffee, and Daddy would cook the meat and the gravy, and fry the ham or the streaked meat or sometimes even some country-fried steak when he could get it, and he would cook the redeye gravy, or water gravy, or the white milk gravy. And they would slice ripe tomatoes to eat with it if they had ’em, or slice a fresh cantaloupe, and it was all just so good, hon, because they took such care with it. And, oh, hon, it was just the most happiest time….”

  Buttermilk and Cornbread Patties

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 cup self-rising cornmeal

  3 cups buttermilk or whole milk

  2 tablespoons lard or bacon grease

  1 dash black pepper

  1 dash salt

  2 blades green onion or small white onion, chopped

  HOW TO COOK IT

  In a bowl, mix your cornmeal and 1 cup buttermilk till you have a nice thick batter, like pancake batter.

  Heat your lard or bacon grease in a 9-inch iron skillet, and use a large spoon to ladle out a single dollop for each patty. Four will suffice for 2 servings. Fry until the cornmeal browns and gets a little crispy, then flip, and do the same to that side. Size and thickness do not really matter. You want a crisp outside and a creamy inside.

  Being careful not to burn your fingers, crumble the hot cornmeal into a glass, cup, or bowl, then pour on some buttermilk. Do not drown it. Eat immediately, topped with chopped green onion or white onion. Some people, like me, also like it with whole milk, but Momma disapproves.

  The trick in it is to be able to taste the hot cornmeal and cool buttermilk together, the bitter and the sweet.

  · 22 ·

  BLACKBERRY WINTER

  Wild Plum Pie, Blackberry Cobbler

  Aunt Sue, the baby sister

  1956

  WE HAVE a time here called blackberry winter, which is as pretty as it sounds. It comes in the late springtime, when the cold weather should be well and truly past, March and April have come and gone, and another endless summer is weighing down. The first thick, humid days are on us already, and the bleak landscape of the mountain South again covers itself in heat and green. The buzzing, whirring things, the wasps and mosquitoes and all the rest, descend.

  But then, for just a few days, it all seems to shift, change, into a last breath or two of cool. “They call it blackberry winter because it comes after the blackberries bloom. It’ll turn almost cold, like wintertime. It’ll just last a little, little while, and then it’s over, and it’s summertime.”

  This was Velma’s season. She would sit in her kitchen on A Street with my mother, drink her unusual coffee, and plan the desserts she would craft from blackberry islands and plum trees that grew in the mountains around Jacksonville, Alabama. “I used to sit with her at that big ol’ long table, and we’d talk about what we’d cook once it all come in. I loved that ol’ woman. Now, that was a cook.”

  One thing she could never figure out: one of the best cooks she had ever met did not brew her own coffee, or at least she did so strangely. She put instant coffee in a percolator, let it cook and cook, going from its weak beginnings to something darker, stronger, and drank cup after cup.

  She made immaculate pie crusts from scratch, and picked her filling from the trees, yet she got her coffee from a jar.

  “But it was good coffee. She could even make instant coffee taste good.”

  “How?” she asked her once.

  “Boil the hound out of it,” Velma said.

  * * *

  • • •

  My mother married a man who would rather have a cheese sandwich on white bread than a home-cooked meal. Now, what are the chances of that?

  “Some people just don’t have no luck,” she said, but that was not altogether true. With the husband came his momma, who shared her wisdom, and was perhaps as close to an angel as my mother knew. She made the best desserts in the foothills.

  She might even have saved her and my big brother, with a wild-plum pie.

  Velma was everybody’s angel, if they were hungry. She fed half the mill village, year after year. People still talk in amazement about luscious meat loaves, and pot roasts with potatoes and onions served in pans you could wash a baby in, and skillets of cream gravy she was not even able to lift, and pies, my God, the pies, baked not in puny tins but in great trays. Her husband, Bobby, a small man, could have had a nap in one of those trays.

  “Some people don’t like their mother-in-law, but I loved mine.” They worked side by side in her kitchen and prepared a thousand chickens, baked, fried, whole lakes of buttery dumplings, and creamy pots of beans that seemed to have no bottom, and in summer they stirred skillet after skillet of fried green tomatoes and squash and okra and a dozen other things Bobby grew in a garden that seemed to have no boundaries. Only the seasons could mark its beginning and end. They lived in big, ramshackle houses in the country or little mill houses in town, for their wealth was hidden inside Velma’s oven.

  “She knew how to season, like they said Grandpa Bundrum could season, but I got to see Granny Bragg work in person in the kitchen, and I never really got to see him. It didn’t matter none if it was just supper for her people or a whole army,” my mother said. “She cooked hog liver and onions in white milk gravy and people lined up for it…and people don’t even really like hog liver. But they liked it if she cooked it, I’ll tell you that. You got to be a blame good cook to make people like something they don’t like.”

  At dinnertime or suppertime, depending on her shift at the cotton mill, first cousins, second cousins, kin twice-removed would come walking down the alphabet streets to the house where she cooked a massive meal every single day, somehow finding time between her shifts, where she kept a never-ending thread spinning for eight or twelve hours a shift, perched on an upside-down Coca-Cola box so she could reach her machine. Sometimes her man and boys did not show, because they’d rather drink than eat, but even so there was almost never an empty place at her long, long table.

  No one knocked. No one asked to sit down, because no one who behaved had ever been turned away, and if they were close kin she even fed the ones who acted a fool.

  “It was mostly cousins that come in, but not all the time.” Sometimes Velma would look up to see an expectant young man she did not even know, holding a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, as if he had been sitting there every day of his life.

  “Ari and Roland was first cousins, and they would com
e in that front door and be set down at that ol’ table even before the screen door had a chance to hit,” my mother said.

  Velma’s face was etched with worry and her eyes were set in dark circles, for she lived and cooked in the heart of a storm that could, in a second, sweep away all her efforts and best intentions. But the two things she knew best were food and the human heart. When my daddy was long, long gone from my mother and their sons, her heart, and kitchen, were still open to my mother, and to us.

  “I learned how to season from Momma first, but Velma knew things other people didn’t know,” my mother said.

  What my mother learned mostly was desserts, but not delicate, light, creamy desserts. No one made cobblers of such breadth, depth, and taste as Velma Bragg, “and the thing of it was, they were just so, so simple.” No one made a richer pecan pie, or finer layer cake. But the one dessert my mother would always remember was a labor-intensive delicacy from the distant past, one most of the world had forgotten or just given up on, because it was too much trouble.

  “But she made one for me,” my mother said.

  * * *

  • • •

  My big brother was due in the early fall of ’56.

  “I was just so terrible sick when I was first expectin’ your brother, and I thought I was goin’ to die. I couldn’t eat nothin’, not even bland stuff like bread or taters, and I was so weak.” All her mother’s home remedies had failed.

  “This ain’t good for the little ’un,” Velma said.

  “Well, what can I do?” my mother said. “I can’t even think about food.”

  “I’ll study on it,” Velma said.

  They were snapping beans, in the relative cool of the porch in an Alabama summer.

  “I’ll need some plums,” Velma said after a while.

  The very idea of a sour wild plum made my mother gag.

  “I’ll need a gallon or two, for a decent pie.”

  The next day, she worked her shift inside the bone-splitting shake and clatter of the mill, and in the late afternoon she and my mother walked into the pastures just outside town, to search for the wild-plum trees, which used to be easier to find. It was the season for plums—a small red-and-yellow fruit about the size of your thumb, and you had to race the birds for them sometimes. They grew in front yards and cow pastures, and even in the ditches at the side of the road. Velma put down an apron and had my mother sit in the shade on the grass while she picked the fruit deftly from between the thorns. Thorns were nothing much to Velma; she made a living sticking her fingers into the whirring teeth of a hungry machine.

  Then she walked home with my mother and did something that, as far as anyone knew, she had never done. She cooked a pie she did not share. It was a gift.

  First she sat on the porch, to catch the breeze, and squeezed the pits out of a million or so ripe plums. This took hours to do.

  “I saw her make some other’ns for people with the seeds still in ’em, like a cherry stone, you know, under the crust…for people she didn’t like.”

  She called it a wild-plum pie, but it was more a cobbler, a simple dish. She mixed the red-and-yellow plums, a gallon or two, with cups of sugar, and set them in her refrigerator overnight “to make the likker,” as she called it. The next day, she poured them into a baking dish, tossed in an ungodly amount of good butter, covered the lake of fruit with a latticework of rolled biscuit crust brushed with melted butter, and baked it until the fruit bubbled up between the strips of golden dough. Then she brushed the dough with butter again, because there really never is enough good butter in this world, and handed my mother a massive spoon.

  There was something about it that broke through my mother’s illness, and she ate about a quart of it.

  “I ate it for days, and days, till it was gone…and then she made me some more. I don’t know how she knew. I guess, if you cook as much as she did, you knew everything.”

  She regained her appetite overnight, and her health, and the last few weeks of her term were nearly without incident. It was almost like there was some kind of magic in it. “But I had my strength back. I don’t know how she knew I could eat that when I couldn’t eat nothin’ else. But Velma knew everything. Let me tell you, that old woman was smart.”

  She made blackberry pie, pretty much the same way, and a cherry one, and peach, and apple, but these she called cobblers instead. She made them in the summer and early fall from fresh fruit, and from home-canned fruit in the winter and spring, altering only the sugar content in the recipe. We do not know why she called some things cobblers and some things pies, but if Velma had wanted to call them flying saucers, that would have been fine with my mother and fine with me.

  She would make it for us one day, but not often, because of the tedious nature of removing the seeds, but she made up for it with blackberry cobbler with a buttered biscuit crust, every time we begged.

  Wild Plum Pie

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  2 to 2½ cups wild plums

  1¼ cups sugar

  1 stick butter

  1 recipe biscuit dough (this page)

  HOW TO COOK IT

  First pick some wild plums. Big store-bought purple plums will not do, but some markets carry something close to the wild plums we picked when I was a boy. If you pick them wild, be careful of the thorns.

  Remove the seeds, or pits, or stones, whatever you call them. This can be done by breaking them and squeezing the seeds out over a bowl, so you can catch the juice. There won’t be that much, but that’s where the flavor is.

  Throw the seeds into your yard. With any luck, you’ll have wild-plum trees someday.

  The day before baking, combine plums, skin, pulp, and juice with the sugar in a sealed container. Overnight, it will make what Velma called the “likker.”

  Pour this into a medium baking dish, and dot it with chunks of cold butter. Use about ¾ stick of your butter, and save the rest to melt and brush on your crust.

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  If you have a favorite pie crust, you may want to use it here, but Velma’s latticework of biscuit dough, rolled out no thicker than ¼ inch, is hard to beat for taste and the beauty of the dish. Velma would slice strips about an inch wide and weave them across the top of the pan. But the secret, she always said, was the butter.

  Be sure to butter it twice, once before putting it into the oven, and again when you take it out. Use your remaining butter for this.

  Bake at 350 degrees till the crust is golden brown and the juices from the plums and sugar have bubbled up and at least partially glazed the crust.

  There are other options for the crust, both of which taste very good. A solid crust, slashed diagonally a half-dozen times to create vents, will cook up softer, less crispy; some people like that. Be sure to butter this crust, too.

  The other, a drop crust, is the one my mother likes for blackberry cobbler.

  “There ain’t no bottom crust on this,” my mother explained. “The cooking fruit and butter will be under direct heat,” and this creates a filling that a traditional pie, she feels, cannot compare to.

  “I’ve had bad cobbler,” she said, “and every one had a soggy bottom or a tough bottom. Better to have no bottom a-tall.”

  You’ll notice that there are no spices involved in this dish. None react well with the wild plums, which have a tart, clean taste. Velma knew not to mess it up, but Velma knew everything.

  Blackberry Cobbler (with Traditional or Drop Crust)

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  2½ cups freshly picked blackberries

  1 to 1½ cups sugar

  1 stick butter, melted

  1 cup self-rising flour

  1 cup whole milk

  1 dash salt

  HOW TO COOK IT

  As with the plum pie, combine the sugar and blackberries, and store in the refrigerator overnight in a covered dish, to make the “likker.”

  If you want a traditional crust, follow the biscuit crust recipe, as in
the preceding recipe, either in lattice form or vented crust. Or create a simple wet drop-crust by mixing the flour, milk, and a dash of salt, and pour over the fruit.

  My mother likes to create islands of the batter, leaving little rivers of the blackberry filling. This will allow the edges of the drop crust to crisp a little, and allow the fruit to bubble through as it cooks. But before placing it in the oven, drizzle about half the melted butter over the top. When it’s done, repeat this.

  The same recipes work well to make apple, peach, cherry, and other traditional fruit cobblers.

  Some people like to top their cobbler with vanilla ice cream. “But if you got good cobbler, you really don’t need to try to make it no better.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She lived more than a hundred years. She did not teach my mother all she knew, of course, because we shared only a sliver of her century of life, and there just wasn’t time. “But I got a lot from her,” my mother said. The last meal Velma cooked for us was when I was almost grown. That last time, she cooked a Southern breakfast of sausage, eggs, biscuits, and one of those massive skillets of gravy she could no longer lift. At the end, her fat cat, whose name I cannot recall, leapt on the table, and I wondered why she did not shoo it away. I realized that she could not see it. She had cooked mostly by feel as her vision failed. She was one of the best cooks in the world, too, even in the dark.

  · 23 ·

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