The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  The steelworkers did not call themselves that; that was what they called themselves in Pittsburgh. They just “worked at the pipe shop,” pouring, crafting, welding, and when they sat down to order, you could see the outline of the black smut on the bottoms of their boots, and the pinprick scars that covered their forearms after years of living in a shower of sparks. They came in at five in the morning and got ham and eggs with grits for sixty-five cents, and it always puzzled her, how a man could wear that smut on his way to work. She guessed they took it home on their boots, and brought it back the next day. It was a two-fisted city then, and a two-fisted city needed a place where you and the smut you tracked in were welcome, where you wiped your feet twice and still left the print of a size-twelve Wolverine on the linoleum floor. The waitresses swept it clean when they cleared the tables, just in time for some cotton farmer from Munford to track in a powdering of red dust.

  The textile workers always seemed a little off at first, a little numb; she would learn that this was because the vibration, the nerve-racking clatter, and the killing heat took a while to wear off, and they tracked in not smut but lint, missed when they brushed each other off at the end of a long shift. It was always odd to see people come slowly back to life, to smile and laugh and feel. They ate their lunches from sacks, standing beside their machines—bologna and potted-meat sandwiches on white bread—and came here for supper, to celebrate the end of the day. The single ones, and the ones without children, came to decompress over a good cheeseburger or splurge on a hamburger steak. On the weekdays, and weeknights, the working people ate hamburgers. On the weekend nights, in celebration, they had the hamburger steak. They had hamburger steak on their anniversaries, and on their birthdays, and after church. It was the same kind of ground beef, but the patty was bigger, and it sounded fancy.

  The couples with children ordered pork, beef, and chicken barbecue at the takeout counter or curbside, for two dollars a pound, and took Red’s home with them to their frame houses in the country.

  The sweatshop women came in groups of six, eight, more, because there was a sisterhood there. They wore their scars on the ends of their fingers, which had grown back bumpy and even black, from being pierced more than once by the needles. But they painted them, anyway, in bright red. In solidarity, the waitresses gave them an extra pudding, or three, or five. The fortune-tellers came; they looked not like Gypsies, in beaded and bejeweled headdresses, but like grandmothers, in smocks and tennis shoes, and made the drive from Piedmont, which was lousy with fortune-tellers back then.

  The farmers came in their overalls. They sat down talking about the weather and got up worrying about the same, and complained about how much they had to pay the crop dusters, who sat three tables away; they always smelled like cotton poison, and even flirted with Granny Fair. The back-shop men came over from the newspaper, and the pressmen, and the sportswriters. The disc jockeys ate there, and the government employees who tended the stockpiles of nerve gas left over from wars long gone, but too dangerous to move.

  And, of course, there were the soldiers. So many soldiers.

  You could hear them from the parking lot, could hear them all along the Jacksonville Highway, what we now call Highway 21, marching to a cadence on the parade grounds and parking lots and green lawns of Fort McClellan. The fort was too far away to make it out from Red’s, but it was as much a part of the atmosphere, the feel of this place, as the thick air and red dirt. They dressed in civilian clothes, but their heads, as slick as onions, set them apart. They were sunburned pink by an Alabama summer, dreaming at night of a cool Wisconsin, or Wonder Woman, which they lingered over a little longer than necessary to divine the plot of such a quick read. They ate banana pudding by the bucketful, or chocolate—anything, as long as it was sweet. They tried to act big, but Granny Fair called them, every one, “Sonny Boy,” and called us the same.

  It made my mother sad sometimes, because most of those boys were leaving straight for Southeast Asia, and though we did not know a lot about the geopolitical situation, we watched the news, and they got blown up there. And it just seemed wrong that soldiers could go from reading a comic book your boys would read to fighting in a war.

  There were, especially on the late shift, whole tables of no-accounts, the gamblers and fighters and hard drinkers who had no discernible source of income and had all the time in the world. The whole world, in her culture, could be divided into two groups, the ones who were “no-’count” and the ones who were “some-’count.” In between were the guitar pickers, who played honky-tonk on Saturday nights and joined the hallelujah chorus on Sunday mornings.

  Jack Andrews, Charles Hardy, and the Couch boys always came in sooner or later, after picking some hot country on the radio station’s local talent show, or playing a dance. Guitar pickers always lived in the in-between, in neither one world nor the other, like cats. They wore pearl snap-button shirts and talked about Nashville, and sometimes had to run out, quick, to make their shift at the cotton mill.

  I guess, to hear her tell, everyone in the place was dreaming about something.

  In the meantime, this was about as good as it was going to get.

  People went two, three times a week, because they felt at home. Tracy and Deb Thomas would drive a half-hour or more to eat at Red’s. And if they did not eat at Red’s, they ate at Star’s, just a few blocks away. Same crowd. Same food, more or less.

  “In the daytime, they came in their overalls, but on Friday night, they all got dressed up, and still came to Red’s,” said Deb, who went there to get the food she had grown up on, pinto beans and cornbread, with a big slice of sweet onion. It was a barbecue, true, according to its sign, but the cooks knew their customers.

  People would fluctuate from Red’s to Star’s to others here, sometimes boycotting a restaurant because of a slight or an imagined slight, but rarely because of the food.

  “I went to Star’s, and I asked the waitress for a piece of chocolate pie, and she told me, ‘No, we ain’t got but one piece, and you don’t need it,’ ” said Deb. So she went to Red’s, and had “good steaks, catfish, slaw, and good fried chicken, and mashed potatoes, and that redeye gravy, oh my God….”

  They had it cooked right, once, maybe when they were children. They would not tolerate less.

  To make them sit down to a stale bun or a questionable slaw was picking their pocket.

  “I don’t know when people stopped caring about their food,” my mother said. “I don’t mean the cooks. I mean, people will just eat what you throw at ’em. It’s like they give up on having anything good.”

  When I was a boy, staying at my lovely aunt Sue’s, she cooked hamburger for me, the exact same way. She learned it from my mother, who learned it at Red’s. Sue, the baby of my mother’s family, died when she was still a young woman, and my memories of her grow dimmer every year, as my own faculties erode. But I know she was the kind of person who made Red’s the institution it was, who could run a sewing machine twelve hours for time-and-a-half, take the balls of cotton from her ears, and go celebrate life one good plate at a time. I can still see her sitting there in that restaurant—sometimes by herself, but surrounded by people with whom she felt at home, who asked her how her momma was, and asked her, always, to come and see them, even if she had not the vaguest idea where they lived.

  * * *

  • • •

  “People remember the simple stuff, mostly,” my mother said, “but mostly I remember the hamburgers. They’d let me take it home to y’all. Do you remember the hamburgers?”

  I think I can still taste them.

  It is hard to describe the beautiful simplicity of a good blue-collar Southern cheeseburger of that era. Or, more accurately, it is hard to explain its appeal in a world of massive half-pound bacon cheeseburgers made from elk meat and buffalo butts and covered in Asiago and pork belly and served with a side of truffle and rosemary-scented pumpkin fries and a habañero-infused pickle spear, and a Diet Coke.

 
; The problem is, much of the time, that the aioli went afoul that morning, and the bright-red meat in the middle of the rare patty is just worrisome in the aftermath of a thing called Mad Cow. The thirty-two-grain bun, studded with seeds of an unknown origin (but they appear to be mostly pine nuts), is crumbly, tough, and toasted hard to hide the fact that it is stale; no amount of Bavarian mustard on this planet can make up for the fact that the pink, mealy tomato was pulled green and rode a thousand miles in three tractor-trailers before it finally met the knife, which was likely wielded by a young man with a lip piercing and a hair bun and a full-body tattoo of a carp.

  A hamburger patty here was not wafer-thin, not fast-food-thin, but thin compared with the excess of today. It was simply cooked right. It was salted, generously peppered, and cooked till it crisped around the edges. Then it was covered with a thick slice of mild American cheese, which melted into the browned crispiness of the meat on the grill. The bun they laid it upon was fresh, and soft, and they dressed it quickly with a daub of sauce that was mostly ketchup, mustard, black pepper, and a little hot-pepper sauce, and then layers of fresh red ripe tomato, shredded lettuce, dill pickles, and sweet onion. The top bun had a spread, not a gob, of mayonnaise. It was served hot where it was supposed to be and cool where it was supposed to be, not some mushed, tepid mess in between. It crunched when you ate it, and did not run down your chin for effect.

  They served it with fries that would burn your fingers, and a little bowl of the best coleslaw in Calhoun County and maybe the whole earth, stirred together that morning by an old woman who had to take off only her wedding band, which was most likely the only jewelry she had ever cared about.

  “We mixed it up in big pickle jars, just cabbage, carrot, good mayonnaise, some dill-pickle juice, and a seasonin’ or two, and we mixed it up with our hands,” my mother said.

  Its shelf life—or cooler life—was quitting time. They served no bad, old, questionable slaw here.

  The soft buns were always soft, because someone paid attention and threw out the ones that were not, or saved them for the hog farmers. The fries were hot, because a cold potato is insulting to a woman who spent an hour’s pay for a burger and fries.

  “It was good food,” my momma said.

  It was the first takeout food we ever tasted. They were just her hamburgers, really, the way she cooked them at home, but because they were wrapped in paper they were exotic, and I still remember the smell as she carried them into the house after she got off work.

  I have had a few thousand hamburgers in my life, all over the world, and I am still searching for something even close to this.

  The other mainstays were given the same attention to detail, the hamburger steaks, and good chili dogs, and barbecued pork. She was not trusted with the pit—you had to be a hundred, at least, to be trusted with the pork barbecue—but she learned how to build the perfect sandwich from the old men who worked there. She watched another cook chop the perfect blend by combining the tender lean, the inside meat, with the fat and the crispy skin. A fresh bun, one small splash of tomato-based barbecue sauce, and amen. The old men would measure the meat each sandwich got by holding it in one big hand. A scale would have insulted them.

  The chili dog was just a simple, boiled dog dressed on a soft bun with homemade chili, a little mustard, and a lot of finely chopped onion. They did not drown it in mustard, which would make your mouth twitch into a knot, like you had eaten a bad persimmon. They did not drown it in chili, which would mean you tasted nothing else, even if it was good chili. People did not want to eat their hot dogs with a knife and fork. They wanted to hold a hot dog like a civilized person, and enjoy it, without wearing it. They did not question its pedigree or its raising or its state of mind, and did not care if it was all prime beef or sawdust and kangaroo, as long as it tasted good and did not make them ill. It was a damn hot dog; you paid your money and you took your chances, and hoped that the butchers used enough spice in the seasoning to give it a little taste. They were made of pork and beef; chicken had yet to make its unfortunate entrée into the equation of the hot dog.

  The thing is, unless you opted for the slow-smoked barbecue, you were not buying just the meat. You were savoring the preparation. With the burger, it was the crust on the meat, mingling with the cheese, with the contrast of the fresh, cool vegetables. With the hot dog, the simplest of things, it was its construction. To this day, there are institutions that survive because they held to these simple ideas, of consistency and quality over excess and pretension and silliness, places that have become great, great successes. And then there are the smaller places, like Red’s, which just, one day, quietly closed its door, leaving a whole city of people who worked with their hands to sit over their disappointing food and say, “Hey, you remember that food over at ol’ Red’s? You remember how it…”

  • • •

  The Hamburger Steak with Brown Gravy

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 small onion

  1 pound ground beef

  ¼ teaspoon garlic powder

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon black pepper

  About 1 teaspoon bacon grease

  ¼ stick butter

  2 teaspoons flour

  1½ cups whole milk or water

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Dice your onion fine, and work it into the hamburger meat with the garlic powder, ½ teaspoon salt, and ½ teaspoon of black pepper. Form three oblong patties, about ¾ inch thick—no more than about 1 inch thick. Make sure your onion is finely diced, since this will cook quickly.

  Melt your bacon grease in a 9-inch skillet and get the skillet hot, then lower the heat to about medium. Lay in your meat. You should get a nice sizzle. Cook it till the pink side up begins to brown through on the edges, and flip. There is no need to season; the seasoning is on the inside.

  Cook to taste. The bane of any hamburger steak is a rubbery texture, which will happen if you cook too long, even if you cook it slow. You want a quick sizzle, to get some flavor; then watch it closely as it finishes. As soon as they begin to crisp good on the second side, remove them and set aside.

  Now, again, you have to work quickly. Stir in the butter and melt it quickly, then the flour and the remaining ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon black pepper, and let the flour brown, a little darker than sausage gravy. Slowly pour in the liquid, give it a good, hard stir, and put the hamburger steaks back into the skillet as the gravy thickens. Do not get huffy. Stir around them, and if you break off a piece or two, that is fine, as with the cubed steak. Thicken to taste. Something nice happens to the hamburger steaks as they finish in the gravy, though it is only for a few minutes.

  Be sure, when you put them on plates, to spoon a little extra gravy on the steaks. Serve them with mashed potatoes and green beans, and, of course, good slaw. They go well with any soft dinner rolls, or cornmeal muffins, or even biscuits.

  As a child, I believed only rich people ate hamburger steaks. As a grown man, I have found nothing but disappointment, for the most part, in restaurants that believe a hamburger steak is just a hamburger without a bun, and a bottle of Heinz 57.

  The Immaculate Cheeseburger

  It’s just a hamburger, but we would almost dance around the house as children when she told us we were having them.

  I would not know for years that she made them that way to stretch the ground beef, to feed everyone in the house, that she sometimes even worked bread into the meat to make it go further.

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  ½ head iceberg or romaine lettuce

  1 large ripe tomato

  1 Vidalia onion

  ¾ cup ketchup

  ¼ cup yellow mustard

  ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  ½ teaspoon garlic salt

  ½ teaspoon chili powder

  ½ teaspoon soy or Worcestershire sauce

  1 pound ground beef (this will make 4 or 5 patties)

  1 tablespoon bacon grease

  Salt, to tas
te

  Black pepper, to taste

  4 to 8 slices American cheese

  4 soft hamburger buns

  Handful dill pickle chips

  ½ cup good mayonnaise

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Obviously, a grilled burger, cooked outside, is best. But for the sake of history, we’ll cook this one inside.

  First prepare your sauce and toppings. Shred the lettuce, slice the tomato about ¼ to ½ inch thick, and the sweet onion the same.

  In a small pan, combine the ketchup, mustard, cayenne, garlic salt, chili powder, and Worcestershire, and heat till it bubbles a bit. Set aside.

  It’s time to cook the hamburgers.

  The patty is everything. You want a thin patty, no thicker—not a sliver—than ½ inch, and even thinner is better, and a good inch bigger, around, than the buns.

  It does not matter if the patties are ragged. It does not even matter if you can see through them in places. The more ragged, the better they will taste. I don’t know why.

  In an iron skillet, melt a little bacon grease. This will help, especially if the ground beef is too lean. Salt and pepper each side.

  Let the fat sizzle a bit, lower the heat to medium, and lay in the patties. It is the crisping that carries the taste here, which is why thin patties can have more taste than a big bloody burger. Cook to taste, but adjust your heat to make sure both sides get some crunch. They will, of course, cook very quickly.