The Best Cook in the World

by Rick Bragg

  I wanted a turkey more along the lines of an ostrich.

  She did not, ever, listen to me. She got a puny fifteen- or twenty-pound turkey, and instructed me to carry it to the checkout.

  I will be honest. None of them ever really looked like food.

  I believe that turkeys just freeze harder than other substances on earth. They seemed to have more in common with bowling balls and anvils than with something a person might, someday, be able to consume. This was perhaps the time when I began to see my mother as some kind of alchemist, able to turn lead to gold. There were fresh turkeys for sale in the world somewhere, just not in our A&P.

  She paid for it and pointed me to the car, but that did not mean she would be coming anytime soon. She knew the checkout girl, and the butcher, and three out of every four people in the aisles, and so she had to linger behind and visit as I transported the bitter-cold, rock-hard turkey to the car.

  I was eleven, and people did not blister through the parking lot of the A&P. But my being run over by a car was not at the top of her worries.

  “Do not run with it,” she said, like I was an idiot.

  I had tried to run with it when I was five years old, from excitement. I fell, and, between the rock-hard turkey and the asphalt, was damn near crushed to death.

  “Do not,” she warned, “set it down and wander off.”

  “What if I…”

  “Do not set it down.”

  She decided this was all too much for me, and was making apologies and heading for the door when an ancient, a great-aunt or distant cousin twice-removed, cut her off, and she just had to trust me.

  I guess I got distracted. As she instructed, I carried the brown paper bag with both arms wrapped around it, but I lingered at the coin-operated rocky horse in front of the building. It was a particularly rambunctious rocky horse, and one that an eleven-year-old would not be ashamed to be seen upon. I considered, for a moment, climbing up on the mechanical pony and taking our turkey for a ride, but I had trouble fishing out my nickel with both arms full of frozen turkey, which caused me to reconsider. I wish I could say things were fine after that.

  In that moment or two of indecision, the film of ice around the turkey’s plastic wrapping had gone from slick to wet. I felt it through my sleeves, and panicked a little, picturing the thing tearing through the wet bag and crashing to the pavement. I locked my arms around the bag and squeezed with all my might, but a frozen turkey is not proportioned in such a way as to help a boy who was just trying to do his best not to ruin Thanksgiving and, by association, Christmas.

  It went the other way, shooting as if propelled by a cannon from the top of the bag, crashing with a sickening, awful sound onto the asphalt, and rolling down the incline of the parking lot.

  My mother could not have purchased a turkey from a store with a nice flat parking lot. This lot did not have one downhill track; it had two. The turkey first headed south, then curved more east, or maybe it was east and south, I am not sure. But it traveled like it still had feet.

  I caught it, using every curse word I had in my vocabulary, just before it made it to the highway, where I am almost certain it would have rolled to Montgomery.

  I just have one thing to say. Whoever makes those plastic wrappers is not paid nearly enough. I’d have thought it would shred, and though I am not saying it was not perforated ever so slightly in a place or two, that wrapper held up and saved the turkey, and—or so I believed at the time—my life.

  I ran for the car, set the turkey on the hood to open the door, and heaved it into the backseat. I was sitting there beside it just a few moments later, when my mother got to the car.

  “Where’s the bag?” she asked.

  “What bag?” I asked.

  “The paper bag the turkey was in.”

  I could see it between me and the store.

  “Throwed it away,” I said.

  “Why on earth?”

  I shrugged.

  We went home. She had three boys. Chances were, in our gene pool, at least one would be peculiar.

  I confessed some time later, after Christmas.

  “Well,” she said, “it was a big turkey, and you wasn’t no size at all. We had to give you goat’s milk, you was so puny.”

  That did not make me feel much better. Not only had I failed at my one job, but nobody was surprised.

  Our menu on Thanksgiving was always the same. It was as if the ghosts of the great old recipes came together in that kitchen, and I guess in a way they did. There was nothing exotic, nothing new, and it was perfect that way.

  That year, there was runaway turkey, cornbread dressing that you could eat cold, standing inside the door of the refrigerator, pinto beans simmered with ham bone, mashed potatoes with little lakes of melted butter, creamed onions cooked in bacon fat, sweet potatoes, green beans, hot biscuits, cranberry sauce, fresh coleslaw, and more, and more. There was a dessert or two, if you were able. It all started with a long, long prayer, because a short prayer was not in our history. I always opened one eye, to see who was not doing it right, only to find that the only one not doing it right was me. Every other head bowed. Every other eye closed.

  The turkey was beautiful—golden, partly submerged in butter and juices, and there was no sign, none, that it had been a traveler. I went through the whole meal waiting to bite down on some gravel, but I forgot after a while, over the drumstick. My mother always saved me one, and she saves me one now.

  Roast Turkey

  WHAT YOU WILL NEED

  1 turkey, about 15 to 18 pounds

  ½ cup vegetable oil

  3 tablespoons salt

  1 pound butter

  1½ cups water

  HOW TO COOK IT

  Use a real roasting pan with a real, vented lid.

  The 911 operator is busy already.

  Some people like a few sprigs of rosemary, or garlic, or a dusting of paprika. Some people like a brine. Some people like smoke.

  “I like to keep it simple,” she said, and she prefers a smaller turkey now, though I believe they would be just as hard to catch once they got rolling.

  Once the turkey is thawed, pat it dry. “Then I rub it all over, inside and out, with cooking oil.” That seems to cling better than butter. Then she rubs it all over again, inside and out, with salt.

  The pound of butter goes on the inside, and the water goes in the bottom of the pan.

  “Just lay the butter in there?” I said.

  “Just lay it in there.”

  It will melt, mix with the water, and steam through the body cavity.

  She also rinses the neck, gizzard, and liver, and returns them to the body cavity.

  “There is a lot of flavor in them.”

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  “No black pepper?” I asked. I remembered the black pepper speckling the bird as she took off the lid.

  “I quit,” she said.

  “Why,” I asked.

  “I wanted to.”

  She seemed disinclined to tell me any more.

  “Well, how long do you cook it?” I asked.

  “Till it’s done,” she said.

  About halfway through the time she refuses to tell us, carefully remove the lid and ladle some of the liquid in the bottom of the pan onto the bird, then cover it and finish cooking.

  She finally relented and told me she cooks an 18- to 20-pounder between three and four hours, till it almost falls apart.

  “It won’t be pretty, but it’ll be good.”

  Do not bind the legs, do not stuff the bird with lemons, and do not, ever, stuff the bird with breadcrumbs or cornbread stuffing or anything like that. Stuffing the bird prevents the heat, and she believes the flavor, from reaching the inside.

  I asked her about using a meat thermometer. She went momentarily blank.

  When it is done, there will be a pool of browned butter and drippings in the bottom of the pan.

  “Some people use that for gravy, but we don’t ne
ed no gravy.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It is the simplest recipe I have ever seen, or even heard of. It may be, of course, that it is no better than other turkeys I’ve had in my lifetime. It may also be that simple, even simple excess, is just better. I guess, if I was going to be honest, this notion is at the heart of most of our food. I see it now.

  I guess I figured that out when I went back through these pages and counted the number of times that “1 stick butter” was the measurement we used, except in this one, where it was “1 pound.”

  I guess some cooks might even see that method as clumsy or the like.

  As a man who has failed even at carrying food, let alone at cooking it, I believe now and always will that what my mother and my people do in a kitchen is nothing short of beautiful, and I get to say.

  Because she was still recovering from her ordeals this last holiday season, I had to be turkey boy on my own. All the turkeys were still frozen hard, but they are lighter now. They put them in big, stretchy, plastic nets now—I guess to prevent runaways, but I don’t know. She got it into and out of the oven without calling the rescue squad, and everything in those pots and pans was the same, just the same, as if time had stood still. Only we were different, older, and, though I would like to say “smarter,” I am not altogether sure. But I made it across the parking lot this time, all the way. My big brother did not say anything, but I think I know what he was thinking: How far away did you park?

  “We’ll have ham for Christmas,” my mother said.

  I like ham.

  You can get a good grip on a ham.

  · 33 ·

  “UNTIMELY FIGS”

  Ray Brock’s Fig Preserves

  He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away….

  —JOEL 1:7

  Momma

  1986

  HER HOUSE may be in order, but she harbors a secret. Her thieving did not stop with that onion, or that cheese. I discovered it, in an empty place on her shelves.

  I had come home to visit at suppertime, and asked for breakfast, please. She laid thick slices of sugar-cured bacon onto a battered and blackened cookie sheet, and baked them until they crumbled. She fried a platter of eggs, melted cubes of mild cheese into creamy, buttery grits, just enough to taste, then woke them up a little with some coarse black pepper. She moved from stove eye to stove eye to oven rack and round again, all with that truck-stop shuffle, that café slide, so it would all be done at the same time and come hot to the table. She learned this not from the matriarchs, from the family recipes and traditions, but at Red’s café. I came back just a few minutes later to find her lifting a pan of biscuits from the oven. Only one thing was missing: a little taste of something sweet. I perused a row of jellies, jams, and preserves on her kitchen shelves. There was red cherry, grape, blackberry, blueberry, golden apple, rusty red crabapple, others…and not one jar of fig preserves. I was hoping for preserves.

  I asked her if she had any somewhere, put aside, and she just looked sick. She told me no, said she might not put up any fig preserves for the rest of her life. “I done somethin’ terrible, hon” was all she said, and for a long while she was too ashamed to tell me what that was. She said only that she had sinned, and not a piddlin’, rinky-dink sin, either. As it turned out, it was a whole tree of it.

  * * *

  • • •

  It began with a simple gesture of generosity, from an upright man.

  Ray Brock has since gone on to his reward, but he left a multitude of people here in the red dirt who speak well of his name; even sinners respected Ray. He was a preacher of the old order who lived in the little mill town of Piedmont, in northern Calhoun County, and had been a friend to my family for most of the twentieth century. He baptized more than a few—some more than once, because the first time sometimes did not take. He prayed for them to be healed at their bedsides in Holy Name of Jesus Hospital, and when it was time, prayed them right on out of this world and, it was to be hoped, into the next. He was a lean, stern-faced, warmhearted Congregational Holiness, who believed in the Holy Ghost and human charity, and would not foul his pulpit with politics. He preached of the wages of sin and of the Streets of Gold, and no wiggle room in between. It was up or down with Ray, and not an inch of sideways.

  “He even went in the jails, to save people,” said Aunt Juanita, who was Ray’s friend. “Don’t know if it did no good, but he went. I remember one night he got up without a word and walked out of a gospel singing at Community Church—and I mean they were singin’—and got in his car and left, ’cause the Lord told him Mr. Hudgins was ’bout to die, and Ray went to his bedside and they prayed and he got Mr. Hudgins saved. Ray told me, ‘Juanita, sometimes the Lord just puts it on me so strong, I can’t stand it.’ ”

  In 1986, the year the great sin was committed, he came by Aunt Juanita and Uncle Ed’s house for a cup of coffee.

  “Do you like figs?” he asked her.

  “Well, not so much,” she said, “but Margaret sure does.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a big fig tree in my yard in Piedmont that’s just hangin’ heavy with ripe figs, and I hate for ’em to go to waste, or for the birds to eat ever’ one of ’em. Tell Margaret she’s welcome to ’em if she’ll come and pick ’em.”

  My mother loves figs more than just about any food in the world. She will eat them raw, dried, and home-canned, whole, in a light syrup, or in gooey dark preserves. I’ve watched her eat a quart of freshly picked figs, and seen her gaze through the car window at a stranger’s fig tree with pure avarice. She planted a dozen trees on her own land over the years, with no luck. She made sure they had sun and water, but they just didn’t make. So, she admits, she coveted the figs of others.

  “Tell her it’s a big ol’ tree plumb full of ripe figs, and tell her to get ’em all if she can,” Ray told my aunt Juanita. “Tell her not to worry if we ain’t there when they come.” His sister had been sick over in Georgia, and some mornings he and his wife drove over there to sit with her and were gone much of the day. “Just tell her to help herself, and welcome.”

  My mother had never been to Ray’s house, but my aunt Juanita told her not to fret, she knew how to get there. “But I couldn’t go,” Juanita said. “I don’t know what happened. It may be I had to sit with Momma.” My aunt Edna, the oldest sister, who was still driving long after the laws of man should have forbidden it, volunteered to drive my mother to Piedmont purely for the distraction it would provide. Aunt Edna was a constant traveler; she loaded her pistol, checked her blood sugar, got somebody to feed her bulldog, and just went, as far and as often as she pleased. She was not overly concerned with the directions Juanita had, having once heard someone say it was the journey that was important, not the destination.

  Besides, she knew Piedmont back, forth, and sideways; it was only about eleven miles north on Highway 21. Ray’s house, my aunt Juanita had instructed, was on a quiet street in a quiet corner of a quiet town, and easy to find. She described it in detail; it was a big white house, built when they built ’em right, and had recently undergone some renovations. It would be the white house with the big fig tree in back.

  “I told her exactly where to go,” Aunt Juanita said.

  Aunt Edna had sewn uniforms at Fort McClellan till she worked her way up to where she was telling other people how to sew them, and it was not in her nature to dawdle or meander or lollygag, which, my people believe, is unusual for a government employee. She was still very much the older sister in charge in those days, and drove with confidence and conviction to an old white house, recently refurbished. The paint buckets and ladders were still there. In the back, a fig tree—well, more like a big fat bush—sagged with fruit.

  “And I was so happy,” my mother said, “ ’cause there ain’t nothin’ better in this world than a ripe fig. I mean, it’s in the Bible.”

  And the trees said to the fig tree, Come, thou, a
nd reign over us. But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees?

  —JUDGES 9: 10–11

  She plucked one, and tasted it. It was firm, sweet, and perfect. Ray, my mother thought to herself, sure knew how to prune a fig tree. The idea was to keep the trunk short and the tree fat and bushy, so that a picker could reach everywhere. You wanted a fat tree, not a tall one, not really a tree at all. Only the mockingbirds and jaybirds could feast on the high figs in a tall tree. Her momma had told her that.

  The figs were dead-ripe but firm, and if the birds had discovered them, they had not made much of a dent. She also noticed Edna was nowhere around.

  After a few minutes, she saw her walking back from somewhere, carrying a lawn chair.

  “She wouldn’t think nothin’ about just takin’ it off somebody’s porch,” my mother said.

  Edna made herself comfortable, adjusted her big straw sun hat, and prepared to nap.

  “Ain’t you gonna help me?” my mother asked.

  “No,” Edna said.

  “Well, why not?”

  “ ’Cause I don’t like figs,” Edna said.

  “Well, then, why did you come?”

  “So you wouldn’t have to walk,” Edna said.

  With Edna dozing, my mother methodically stripped the tree all but clean.

  “I took my time, and I enjoyed myself. I think I even got me some Bruton. It was one of the best days I’d had in a long time….Edna wadn’t near as bossy, asleep.”