The Best Cook in the World Read online

  ALSO BY RICK BRAGG

  My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

  Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story

  The Most They Ever Had

  The Prince of Frogtown

  I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story

  Ava’s Man

  Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg

  All Over but the Shoutin’

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Rick Bragg

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Peer International Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Waiting For A Train” by Jimmie Rodgers, copyright © 1929 by Peer International Corporation, copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Peer International Corporation. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bragg, Rick, author.

  Title: The best cook in the world / by Rick Bragg.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2018] | “A Borzoi Book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024979 (print) | LCCN 2017028840 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780525520283 (ebook) | ISBN 9781400040414 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bragg, Rick,—family. | Cooking, American—Southern style. |

  LCGFT: Cookbooks.

  Classification: LCC TX715.2.S68 (ebook) | LCC TX715.2.S68 B725 2018 (print) |

  DDC 641.5975—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017024979

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520283

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  v5.2

  ep

  To the cook

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rick Bragg

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  It Takes a Lot of Rust to Wipe Away a General Electric

  1 “Them Shadows Get to Dancin’ ”

  Butter Rolls

  2 “Salt Is Good”

  Cream Sausage Gravy, Buttered Grits with a Touch of Cheese, Sliced Tomato, the Perfect Fried Egg

  3 A Man Who Knew Beans

  Pinto Beans and Ham Bone, Creamed Onions, Buttered Boiled Potatoes, Carrot and Red Cabbage Slaw, Cornbread

  4 Sweeter, After the Frost

  Collard Greens, Baked Hog Jowl, Baked Sweet Potatoes

  5 “A Chicken…Ain’t Likely to Ketch On”

  Chicken Roasted in Cider with Carrots, Turnips, and Onion, Chicken Gravy, Mashed Potatoes

  6 The Fourth Bear

  Cornmeal Porridge with Chicken and Watercress, Stewed Cabbage, Fried Apples

  7 The Falling Cow

  Beef Short Ribs, Potatoes, and Onions

  8 “Hard Times, Come Around No More”

  Sweet Potato Pie, Sweet Potato Cobbler

  9 “A Ham Hock Don’t Call for Help”

  Pan-Roasted Pig's Feet (with Homemade Barbecue Sauce), Chunky Potato Salad

  10 Cakes of Gold

  Meat Loaf, Scalloped Potatoes, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

  11 Sis

  Sis's Chicken and Dressing

  12 The Second Ghost

  Cracklin' Cornbread

  13 Bitter Weeds

  Poke Salad

  14 Still Hard Times for an Honest Man

  Vegetable Soup in a Short Rib Base

  15 The Pie That Never Was

  Chocolate Pie, Toasted Coconut Pie, Buttermilk Pie

  16 Ribs in the Dead of Night

  Spareribs Stewed in Butter Beans

  17 Clementine

  Fried Chicken, Fried Chicken Gravy (Water Gravy), Fresh Green Beans with Golden Potatoes

  18 Tomatoes Without Taste, Tomatoes Without End

  Ham and Redeye Gravy over Fresh Diced Tomato

  19 Didelphis Virginiana

  Baked Possum and Sweet Potatoes

  20 Stairway to Nowhere

  Real Biscuits, with Sausage, Ham, Fatback, Fried Potatoes, Spanish Scrambled Eggs

  21 People Who Cook

  Buttermilk and Cornbread Patties

  22 Blackberry Winter

  Wild Plum Pie, Blackberry Cobbler

  23 Till It Thunders

  Turtle Soup

  24 Offerings

  Smothered Cubed Steak

  25 Government Cheese

  Cheese-and-Sausage Pie, Macaroni and Cheese, Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Pear Preserves or Muscadine Jelly

  26 Sometimes the Pies Just Call Your Name

  Pecan Pie

  27 Red’s

  The Hamburger Steak with Brown Gravy, The Immaculate Cheeseburger

  28 “When Momma Was All Right”

  Tea Cakes

  29 Monkey on a String

  Barbecued Rag Bologna Sandwich Dressed with Shredded Purple Cabbage Slaw

  30 Edna’s Ark

  Fried Fresh Crappie, Hush Puppies, Tartar Sauce

  31 Staggering to Glory

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

  32 The Runaway

  Roast Turkey

  33 “Untimely Figs”

  Ray Brock's Fig Preserves

  34 Spring

  Fresh Field Peas with Pork, Stewed Squash and Sweet Onions, Fried Okra, Sweet Corn, Fried Green Tomatoes

  EPILOGUE: THE RECIPE THAT NEVER WAS

  Quick Fried Apple Pies

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.

  COLOSSIANS 4:6

  Good stuff always has a story.

  MARGARET BRAGG

  • PROLOGUE •

  IT TAKES A LOT OF RUST TO WIPE AWAY A GENERAL ELECTRIC

  Three generations of great cooks, from left to right: Great-Aunt Plumer, Aunt Juanita, Cousin Mary, Cousin Betty, Aunt Edna, my mother at 13, Cousin Louise, Aunt Jo, Cousin Norma Jean, Grandmother Ava, Aunt Sue, Aunt Fene, and Cousin Jeanette in diapers

  SINCE SHE WAS eleven years old, even if all she had to work with was neck bones, peppergrass, or poke salad, she put good food on a plate. She cooked for dead-broke uncles, hungover brothers, shade-tree mechanics, faith healers, dice shooters, hairdressers, pipe fitters, crop dusters, high-steel walkers, and well diggers. She cooked for ironworkers, Avon ladies, highway patrolmen, sweatshop seamstresses, fortune-tellers, coal haulers, dirt-track daredevils, and dime-store girls. She cooked for lost souls stumbling home from Aunt Hattie’s beer joint, and for singing cowboys on the AM radio. She cooked, in her first eighty years, more than seventy thousand meals, as basic as hot buttered biscuits with pear preserves or muscadine jelly, as exotic as tender braised beef tripe in white milk gravy, in kitchens where the only ventilation was the banging of the screen door. She cooked for people she’d just as soon have poisoned, and for the loves of her life.

  She cooked for the rich ladies in town, melting beef short ribs into potatoes and Spanish onions, another woman’s baby on her hip, and sleepwalked home to feed her own boys home-canned blackberries dusted with sugar as a late-night snack. She pan-fried chicken in Red’s Barbecue with a crust so crisp and thin it was mostly in the imagination, and deep-fried fresh bream and crappie and hush puppies redolent
with green onion and government cheese. She seasoned pinto beans with ham bone and baked cracklin’ cornbread for old women who had tugged a pick sack, and stewed fat spareribs in creamy butter beans that truck drivers would brag on three thousand miles from home. She spiked collard greens with cane sugar and hot pepper for old men who had fought the Hun on the Hindenburg Line, and simmered chicken and dumplings for mill workers with cotton lint still stuck in their hair. She fried thin apple pies in white butter and cinnamon for pretty young women with bus tickets out of this one-horse town, and baked sweet-potato cobbler for the grimy pipe fitters and dusty bricklayers they left behind. She cooked for big-haired waitresses at the Fuzzy Duck Lounge, shiny-eyed pilgrims at the Congregational Holiness summer campground, and crew-cut teenage boys who read comic books beside her banana pudding, then embarked for Vietnam.

  She cooked, most of all, to make it taste good, to make every chipped melamine plate a poor man’s banquet, because how do you serve dull food to people such as this? She became famous for it, became the best cook in the world, if the world ends just this side of Cedartown. But she never used a cookbook, not in her whole life. She never cooked from a written recipe of any kind, and never wrote down one of her own. She cooked with ghosts at her sure right hand, and you can believe that or not. The people who taught her the secrets of Southern, blue-collar cooking are all gone now, and they did not cook from a book, either; most of them did not even know how to read and write. Every time the old woman stepped from her workshop of steel spoons, iron skillets, and blackened pots, all she knew about the food left with her, in the way, when a bird flies off a wire, it leaves only a black line on the sky.

  “It’s all I’ve ever been real good at, and people always bragged on my cooking…you know, ’cept the ones who don’t know what’s good,” she told me when I asked her about her craft. “When I was little, the old women used to sit in their kitchens at them old Formica tables and drink coffee and tell their fortunes and talk and talk and talk, about their sorry old men and their good food and the good Lord, and they would cook, my God, they could cook….And I just paid attention, and I done what they done….”

  Most chefs, when asked for a blueprint of their food, would only have to reach for a dog-eared notebook or a faded handwritten index card for ingredients, measures, cooking times, and the rest.

  “I am not a chef,” she said.

  Yet she can tell if her flour is getting stale by rubbing it in her fingers.

  “I am a cook.”

  I remember one night, when she was yearning for something sweet, she patted out tiny biscuits and plopped them down in a pool of milk flavored with sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and cubes of cold butter. She baked this until the liquid, half whole milk, half thick, sweetened condensed milk, steamed into the biscuits, infusing them with the flavors underneath. It created not a dense slab, like a traditional, New Orleans–style bread pudding, but little islands of perfect sweet, buttery dumplings; the spacing, not the ingredients or cooking time, was the secret here. “Momma taught it to me, and Grandpa Bundrum taught it to her, and his momma taught it to him, and…well, I guess I don’t really know no further than that.”

  In the roadside cafés, cooks in hairnets with Semper Fi on their forearms taught her to build the perfect burger from layers of charred, thin patties, melting cheese, rings of sweet Vidalia onion, and wheels of fresh tomato. They taught her crisp, fork-tender chicken-fried steak, and how to dress steamed foot-long hot dogs with homemade hot chili, just the right trickle of yellow mustard, and lots of finely diced onion, to make the pulpwooders weep. She learned to slow-cook pork barbecue from old men who lived in the smoke itself. “The workin’ people wouldn’t pay good money for food that wasn’t fit to eat. I didn’t make no money in a café…fourteen or fifteen dollars a week was the most I made. But at Red’s café we got all the puddin’ we could eat. Your uncle Ed’s momma, Granny Fair, waitressed at Red’s when I was there. You remember her? She was kind of a big woman? Well, she’d bust through the double doors to that kitchen, snatch up one of them little chocolate puddin’s, and eat it in three bites on a dead run—and not miss a step.”

  Her big sister, Edna, taught her to fillet catfish, crappie, and tiny bream with a knife as thin as aluminum foil. A brother-in-law, a navy man, taught her how to pat out a fine cathead biscuit, but could only bake them a battleship at a time. Her mother-in-law showed her how to craft wild-plum pies, peach, apple, and cherry cobblers, and cool banana puddings, all in pans as big as she was. Her daddy shared the secrets of fresh ham and perfect redeye gravy, and tender country-fried steak. And her momma taught her to do it all, even with a worried mind. Then, finally, it was her time, and it has been for a long, long time.

  “I have to talk to myself now to cook,” she said. “I have to tell myself what to do, have to tell myself to handle the knife by the right end. I have to call myself a name, so I’ll know to listen to myself.”

  “By what name,” I asked, beginning to be concerned, “do you call yourself?”

  “Why, I use my name, hon. I ain’t so far gone I don’t know my name. I’ll say, ‘Margaret, don’t burn yourself,’ and ‘Margaret, close the cabinet so you won’t bump your head.’ It’s when I do call myself by somebody else’s name that y’all got to worry about me. Till then, hon, I’m alllll right.”

  She had hoped for a daughter to pass her skills and stories to—that or a thoughtful son, someone worthy of the history, secrets, and lore; instead, she got three nitwit boys who would eat a bug on a bet and still cannot do much more than burn a weenie on a sharp stick, and could not bake a passable biscuit even if you handed us one of those whop-’em cans from the Piggly Wiggly and prayed for bread. We ate her delicious food without much insight into how it came to be, which was not all our fault. She banned us from her kitchen outright, much of our lives, because we tracked in red mud, coal dust, or some more terrible contaminant, or tried to show her a new species of tadpole as she made biscuit. We are still barely tolerated there, though I have not stomped in a mud hole or hidden a toad in my overalls for a long time. So she would be the end of it, then, the end of the story of her table, unless we could find another way.

  I made up my mind to do this book not on a day when my mother was in her kitchen, making miracles, but on a day she was not. Most days, unless she is deep in Ecclesiastes, or Randolph Scott is riding a tall horse across the TV screen, she will be at her stove, singing about a church in the wildwood, or faded love, or trains. In the mornings, the clean scent of just-sliced cantaloupe will drift through the house, mingling with eggs scrambled with crumbled sausage, and coffee so strong and dark that black is its true color, not just the way you take it. At noon, the air will be thick with the aroma of stewed cabbage, sweet corn, cornbread muffins, and creamed onions going tender in an iron skillet forged before the First Great War. Some nights, you can smell fried chicken livers as far as the pasture fence, or barbecued pork chops, pan-roasted pig’s feet, potatoes and pole beans, or blackberry cobbler in a buttered biscuit crust. But as I walked into the house in the winter of 2016, to find some clothes to take to her hospital room, the kitchen smelled only of lemon-scented dishwashing detergent, and a faint aroma of old, cold, burnt iron.

  * * *

  • • •

  In her life, she saw weeds creep over the Model T, and church steeples vanish beneath the man-made lakes of the TVA. She saw great blast furnaces go up, and go dark, and ancestral mountains clear-cut down to bald nobs. She saw circus trains, and funeral trains, and the first gleaming diesel engine roar through these hills. She saw a Russian monkey in a spaceman suit, and figured, well, now she had seen it all. “It made me sad, when they shot him into outer space. They showed him on the TV again when he come back down, but I ain’t sure it was the right monkey, you know, the same one.” The point is, I had convinced myself she was somehow immune to passing time, that she lived outside and above the events of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first. She could no more wear out
than the whetstone she used to sharpen her ancient butcher knives, even if she had seasoned most of the vegetables she ever ate with pork fat.

  “Gettin’ old ain’t easy,” she told me, as she passed seventy-nine, “but it’s best not to try and fight it too much. You know how I live with bein’ old? I just don’t look in the mirror, ’cept when I part my hair.”

  She passed eighty in April of 2017 with a baseball bat beside her bed, for assassins. In the past five years, she survived heart failure, serious cancer, dangerous surgeries, and harsh follow-up treatments that left her thinner and weaker over time. Still, I rarely saw her stumble, or waver in her resolve to live as she always has, to walk her garden, gripe about the weather, and rattle her pots and pans. She survived everything, but in the late winter of 2016, the hospital entrance had become a revolving door, and she was admitted and readmitted for regimens of strong medicine and rest. Again, the young doctors said she would recover, if she would eat the dull, bland food and drink the foul-tasting medicine that was made, she believed, from the manure in her donkey pasture. She could go home again, the doctors told us, if she would behave herself, and if, after so many hard, hot, long days, she still had the will. She was not an ideal patient.

  “That stent they put in my heart a year or two ago, well, they didn’t really have to do that,” she grumbled from her bed. “That was just the style then. Ever’body was gettin’ one. I didn’t need it. I was fine.”

  She spent most of the spring on an IV. While she slept, my big brother and I talked quietly beside her bed about being boys, running buck wild through her kitchen, about big fish, and ugly dogs, and a pearl-white ’67 Camaro he never let me drive. The past is where we go when we are helpless; the past, no matter what the psychiatrists say, can’t really hurt you much more than it already has, not like the future, which comes at you like a train around a blind curve. But our conversation always circled back to the thing that mattered most. I am not a particularly optimistic man, and feared for her. Sam told me I was being foolish. She would get better this time, too; it was just a matter of time before she got tired of this place and walked out, grumbling. He said he knew her better than I did; he was living his life within three miles of her, while I went gallivanting God knows where. He said the same thing over and over, like a prayer. “That old woman picked cotton…did stuff the regular people can’t do. They don’t know who she is.”