The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  Top with the other bun, and serve with some good potato chips and maybe another little dollop of slaw, because you just can’t ever have enough slaw, and maybe a little bowl of the sauce to dip your chips in. We know how to live.

  * * *

  • • •

  As good bologna vanished from the diet of my people, so did this recipe. I went forty years or more without a decent barbecued bologna sandwich, till one was bestowed upon me in Memphis, where they understand such as this. You can even get one in the airport. It was pretty damn good.

  They charge about six dollars for a bologna sandwich there. I guess it was worth it, to remember my one and only brush with show business, to remember little people in the tall grass, and elephants in the broom sage, and monkeys on a string.

  · 30 ·

  EDNA’S ARK

  Fried Fresh Crappie, Hush Puppies, Tartar Sauce

  Getting ready for the majors

  1967

  I GUESS there were a lot of reasons why they built it.

  My aunt Edna and uncle Charlie fished the backwater, it seemed, every weekend when the weather was mild. Their daughters, Betty, Linda, Libby, Wanda, and Charlotte, were raised with fishing rods in their hands. It would take a big boat to float them all along the Coosa, and all the fish they could catch. It almost killed me, as a little boy, to ask a girl how to rig my minnow on the hook, or how deep to set my float, but I got over it in time. They were their momma’s girls, and did not go all squeamish when it came time to bait a hook; they sent a million minnows into the murky water without even a sigh, and, I swear, caught washtubs-full of speckled crappie, the tastiest fish in the Deep South. The family needed, and deserved, a fishing boat of considerable size.

  It may be that their reasons for building such a thing went all the way back to that stormy day, so long ago, when the rising water almost claimed their grandfather Mr. Hugh, when Sis Morrison came to his rescue. But you cannot always count on having a big woman around with a number-2 washtub. So it may be that they had never intended to build a boat at all. It may be that they built an ark.

  It may also be that my aunt and uncle remembered the island, the spit of gravel in the middle of the river, that my grandfather Charlie went to so often in the last year of his life, a place to cook, eat, and sleep, and listen to the river. What better island than one that floats, that you can sail all the way to Georgia and back, waving as you passed at the old men in lawn chairs on the bank who were pretending to fish?

  But I think it had everything to do with time.

  Blessed time.

  You could slow time on a houseboat.

  I believe it with all my heart.

  It took years to build the great big thing, or it may just be that it seemed that way, because of the anticipation. It grew from their yard, one weld, one rivet at a time, handmade, resting on two massive steel pontoons. The day they finally hooked a truck to it and dragged it, an hour or more, to the river, was an event like what I imagined it had been to launch the Queen Mary. But an Alabama man made these welds and put these rivets in, so it held. It had a central cabin, with a bathroom, a gas stove, and kitchen tables; enough bunks to sleep a navy; a sundeck covered in AstroTurf, for just lying around; and a wraparound deck, so you could fish in every direction.

  It was so tall its upper railings routinely snagged on the low bridges, and you had to wait for the river to lower, at the whim of the hydroelectric gods. But sooner or later it would scrape free, and we would glide on down the river, or up it, never any faster than an old man could backstroke through that current. It was prone to breaking down, but that was only a problem if you were downstream of the dock; upstream, you just rode the slow brown water southward, and tried to run her aground as close as possible to your cars. I cannot recall if she had a name.

  Sometimes I would sit beside my uncle and watch him pilot, and it was easy to pretend this was something more, some antebellum riverboat, a floating palace peopled with gamblers and dancing girls and even soldiers sailing off to fight the Yankees upriver, with a great paddlewheel pushing us along instead of a Johnson outboard. The river’s backwater straddled the state line, and I was still young enough to be amazed at that—how you could be in one state one second, then cross a ripple or two and be somewhere else.

  Now and then, he would see one of those old men on the riverbank, half dozing in their lawn chairs, and sing out to them: “Do you have the time?”

  And the old men would answer, every time: “Alabamer time? Or Georgie time?”

  And it didn’t matter.

  The day was as long as you wanted it to be, and some evenings, instead of heading in, we would just find a place to anchor, turn on the electric lights, and fish all night. I remember dozing off at the rail, and awakening to a tug on the line. I would reel in a crappie the size of a dinner plate, glad I had not tumbled overboard.

  The only time that mattered was the amount of time it took you to transfer that fish into some hot grease. Our people did not smoke fish, or salt them; they caught them and ate them, and every second in between lessened the pleasure in it.

  The freshest fish I have eaten in my life was on that boat, going from the river to the plate in minutes, fried up by one of the best cooks who ever lived, my aunt Edna, who taught my mother the finer points of frying fish.

  Of course, you had to catch ’em first.

  * * *

  • • •

  The polluters were well on their way to ruining the river, but the crappie were safe to eat. Some of the fishermen used man-made lures, but my people will always believe that a bucket of minnows, hooked so that they will wiggle a little, dangling at the appropriate depth on a bobber, is the tried-and-true strategy. Hook it behind the head, cast, and wait. If you catch one, then you may catch a hundred.

  They ran shallow in cold weather and deeper in the summer, but you could still find them in the shade. In the summer, and it seemed it was always summer, you could catch them in the brush, off the ledges, the points, or the creek mouths—a wide, flat, speckled fish with fins on the top and bottom, a pretty fish. There was maybe more sport, and of course more fight, in bass, but most people caught crappie for supper and for fun.

  Fried, they had none of the muddy flavor of the bottom-feeding catfish. The flesh fried up clean and mild and pure white, so tender it really did seem almost to melt in your mouth. I’ve read a hundred recipes or more for crappie, for thick batters and spicy batters and even batter fancied up with whipping cream. My aunt Edna did not believe in any of that.

  “And Edna was the best fish cook there was,” my mother believes. She filleted them with a knife so sharp we were not even allowed to look at it, as if it could cut you from across the room. Mr. Hugh sharpened it himself; no one born since 1919 should be allowed to sharpen a knife. After the fish were cleaned and the insides were relegated to the river to feed the catfish, she ran the razor-sharp blade once down the gills to the tail, then flipped the fish over and, the flexible blade bending almost level with the tabletop, ran it along the skin. You did not scale crappie.

  She sprinkled the fillets with salt, dusted them with unseasoned self-rising cornmeal, and laid them in grease so hot you could feel it on your skin from six feet away. If the grease was not scorching hot, the fish would go greasy and limp. They were done before you could even get anxious. I remember four skillets on the stove at one time, roiling, popping. Edna’s daughters, all taught to cook by their mother and each other, cut thick fries, and whipped up hush puppies from cornmeal, buttermilk, white onion, green onion, and cheese.

  I remember the hush puppies better than anything, how crisp they were on the outside but creamy on the inside, how the specks of onion and cheese melted together in the delicious cornmeal. They served it all with freshly made coleslaw, a delicious fresh, tart tartar sauce, and gallons of sweet tea with lemon.

  My aunt Edna did not ask me if I wanted seconds. She just put it on my plate. It is how I remember her now, with a big spoon i
n one hand, telling me, over and over, “You ain’t got enough. You ain’t even got enough to taste.” I have never known a person to take more pleasure in seeing another person enjoy food. On the rare, rare occasions when the fish were not biting, she conjured up a hundred or so chili dogs. Again, it is probably just nostalgia, but it seemed even the Igloo cooler was a treasure chest, and the Coca-Colas, the ones made with cane sugar, were so cold they burned your lips and throat.

  I wish, all the time, that I could somehow recapture the magic of that place, when time was an ally and not my hobgoblin. Only a boat on the water can do this. The closest I can come, as with the cracklin’s, with the pinto beans, with every recipe in this book, is to get a little taste of it, every great now and then.

  You can still eat crappie in the clean rivers, but this recipe, and its sides, go well with pond-raised catfish, which are milder- and cleaner-tasting than the muddy river cats, and other mild white fish. But the old people will swear that nothing in this world tastes like crappie.

  Fried Fresh Crappie

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  2 pounds fresh crappie

  1 tablespoon salt

  1 cup self-rising cornmeal

  2 cups lard, or vegetable or peanut oil

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Lightly salt each fillet, and dust with cornmeal.

  In a large cast-iron skillet, bring your lard or oil to 450 degrees. If your grease is not hot enough, the fish will be greasy and soggy. With crappie, the crisper the fish the better.

  Because you will use your grease more than once at a large fish-fry, even our people sometimes use the lighter oils for this. You’ll use this grease for the hush puppies.

  Cook the fillets till golden brown and crisp. Thicker fillets will take longer.

  “Don’t use no pepper,” my mother said. My people believe that pepper will scorch in the hot oil and leave a bitter taste.

  Hush Puppies

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 cup self-rising cornmeal

  ½ cup buttermilk

  ½ cup water

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 small onion, diced

  1 green onion, diced

  ¼ cup American or mild cheddar cheese

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl. With a tablespoon—not a measuring spoon, but a steel spoon—spoon dollops into the hot grease from the fish fry. They will not be round balls but more patty-shaped. Fry till golden brown, and turn. You want the outside to be crispy and the inside creamy, as Aunt Edna made them.

  Tartar Sauce

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 cup mayonnaise

  ¼ cup diced sweet onion

  ¼ cup sweet pickle relish

  ½ teaspoon black pepper

  ½ teaspoon lemon juice

  ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  HOW TO PREPARE IT

  Mix everything together thoroughly, and chill.

  “Don’t be stingy with it,” my mother said.

  Serve the fish, hush puppies, and tartar sauce with freshly made French fries, and a big dollop of freshly made slaw.

  Tiny bones will, even with someone good on the knife, sometimes materialize, so eat slowly, and savor. This is not much of a hardship, for real food.

  * * *

  • • •

  Fried fresh fish, however she can get it, is my mother’s favorite meal. She has had to make do with farm-raised catfish for a long time, which sometimes has a blandness to it, but we have this dream that, in our lifetimes, the rivers will run clean again. We may, someday, even catch a few crappie, but only from the banks. Edna’s ark is in rust and ruin now, and so many of the people who rode her back then are missing. But if people can live on in my mother’s kitchen, then surely they can live on here, in the slow current, slipping back and forth forever between Alabama and Georgia time.

  · 31 ·

  STAGGERING TO GLORY

  Barbecued Pork Chops and Ham Slices, Deviled Eggs, Baked Beans with Thick-Cut Bacon, Jalapeño Cornbread

  Uncle John

  1969

  MY AUNT JO had noticed the hogs were behaving oddly.

  As we have already established, hogs are enigmatic creatures. They will run over you, at a full pig gallop, to get to a trough. Put something, almost anything, in the trough, or on the ground remotely close, and they will devour it as quickly as possible, till every scrap, kernel, or crumb is gone. We have kinfolks like that.

  Beyond that, who knows why a hog does what a hog does? I have seen them stand still so that you could scratch them behind their ears, and I have run for my life from the same creatures, which apparently thought I was dinner. I have been treed by them, to sway at the top of a pine sapling, only to see my uncle John, my aunt Jo’s husband, walk into a pen and tell that same monster to do something—to git, or come here—and watch it obey like a lapdog. You just cannot figure a hog.

  But this was something new. These hogs seemed to be drunk off their behinds.

  My aunt Jo stood at the fence and watched them stagger across the ground of the pen behind their house in Calhoun County. They did not seem to have the dreaded blind staggers, or fever of any kind, or to be in any distress at all. They just seemed to have a little trouble trotting a straight line. They meandered, and sometimes just got to leaning a little bit, and fell over. But they got right back up every time, to meander off, list, and fall again.

  It is hard to tell if a hog is happy, but they did not seem to be unhappy.

  “Your hogs are actin’ funny,” she told my uncle John.

  He stood for a minute and watched.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well” has more uses than any word in the vernacular of my people. It can denote surprise, or disappointment, or resignation, or agreement, or defeat, or realization. Or, in this case, all of that.

  My uncle John did not raise puny hogs. He raised hogs the size of a Coca-Cola cooler—long, tall, immensely fat hogs, who waddled more than walked across the pens. He was finicky about his livestock, and worked to keep his pastures and pens clean. He did not crowd his hogs tightly together in a pen with a wood floor, but gave them some breathing room, in a hog-wire pasture, which seemed to make them healthier, less prone to disease. Some farmers said a hog would run all its weight off if you gave it room, but not these. He fed them massive amounts of clean corn, then supplemented that basic diet with scraps and especially, if he could find it, breads.

  Someday, somewhere, people would clamor for lean pork. Here, then, the more fat on a hog, the “purtier it was,” my momma said. “And your uncle John had some purty hogs.”

  He was generous with that bounty. He gave my mother pounds and pounds of it—of ham, sausage, pork chops, and more—and sometimes he would barbecue all night for family reunions or just birthdays. As news of the enigma of the staggering hogs spread through the family, it caused great alarm.

  “What if we don’t get no pork?” I asked my mother.

  “Well, I don’t know, hon,” she said.

  It was not like we were living out Old Yeller. We would not have starved. But we would have damn sure missed a barbecue.

  It became the single most-talked-about thing in our lives, more than football, more than work, more than fistfights and pocketknives and even pie. Politics, which was tearing up the outside world then, was not much in our thoughts, at least not compared with pork.

  But quickly, thank goodness, my uncle John figured it out.

  He did not mean to do it, but he was getting them drunk on sour mash.

  It was not the by-product of whiskey making, though some bootleggers did feed their hogs the dregs of their mash. The problem, as it turned out, was doughnuts.

  James Green, who married my aunt Sue, owned the Dixie Cream Donut Shop, and prepared the finest glazed doughnuts, brownies, and cinnamon rolls I have ever tasted. His shop, not far from Red’s Barbecue and straight across the highway from one of the main gates at Fort McClellan, was an institution
here, too, and we used to stand in the back and watch the hot glazed doughnuts roll out by the thousands, amazed.

  There was, of course, some wastage. My uncle John had decided to try an experiment, and feed the leftover doughnuts to his hogs. He knew what eating a lot of doughnuts would do to people, and reasoned, correctly, that it would have the same effect on the hogs.

  He combined the doughnuts with the corn, in fifty-five-gallon drums.

  “I didn’t think about the yeast,” he said.

  Quickly, the doughnuts, corn, and moisture created what was essentially a fermenting mash, and as he fed that to the hogs, they did get fat, good and fat—and good and drunk. He had the only hogs in Calhoun County who were too drunk to oink and too drunk to care.

  But, my God, the meat…

  * * *

  • • •

  It bothers me that I cannot remember the occasion.

  It may be my uncle John just wanted to see if drunk pork was good pork.

  Southerners love to put on airs as to their barbecue, and speak in utter disdain of anyone’s method that differs even slightly from their own. I have always found it amazing that such snobbery could exist inside a big ol’ boy in a Dale Earnhardt hat, a T-shirt from Panama City Beach, and an apron that trumpets NO ONE CAN BEAT OUR BUTTS. They will tell you that beef is not real barbecue, and will threaten to beat you like you stole somethin’ if you even mention a chicken.

  I love it all. Pulled pork will always be the ultimate for some Southerners. In the Carolinas, whole hogs turned on a spit, and split hogs cooked all night in great brick pits, till the sweet meat all but fell off the bone, seasoned only with salt, pepper, red pepper, and a vinegary sauce—and sometimes seasoned with nothing at all. In Memphis and Birmingham, great slabs of ribs were smoked to perfection, spiced with dry rubs, and served swimming in sweet sauces. I have been overjoyed to sit down to all of it. There is a lot of bad barbecue out there, of course, but a lot of good survives.