The Best Cook in the World Read online

  That said, she recognizes progress when she sees it, or tastes it. Self-rising flour and cornmeal were perhaps the finest inventions since the polio vaccine, and even canned biscuits and store-bought pie shells have their limited use. Electricity was, she concedes, also a fine idea. But she would like to meet the man who invented the telephone, she says, and smack him a good one.

  Progress is fine, in all. But with food, she says, you should not be able to taste it.

  You should taste the past.

  “What would you even call it?” she asked me, of a cookbook on her food.

  “The Best Cook in the World,” I said.

  “I wasn’t even the best cook that lived on our road,” she said. “Your aunt Edna was a fine cook. Our momma was a fine cook.”

  I told her we couldn’t call it The Third-Best Cook on the Roy Webb Road, because that just didn’t sing.

  She thought about that a bit, about its veracity, and her reputation. Her momma was an excellent Depression-era cook, but was widowed young and never had the variety of ingredients to flex her muscles in the kitchen the way her daughters would, in somewhat gentler, fatter times. Edna Sanders, my mother’s oldest sister, was a true master of Southern country food, in every way, who could grow it from the dirt, fish for it, run it down and kill it, skin it, and make gravy from it, on dry land or floating on a houseboat or bateau. “I guess me and Edna did run a pretty good race,” my mother said, her humility slipping a little bit.

  I told her I believed she was the best cook in the world, and I got to say.

  “Well,” she said, “I did wear out eighteen stoves.”

  I told her there were only thirteen stoves, off and on, there in the weeds.

  “I wore out some since then,” she said.

  I could tell, after a while, that I was beginning to wear her down. She is otherwise humble, a woman who buys her clothes at the City of Hope thrift store on Highway 431, and has been to the beauty shop twice in forty years. My cousin Jackie cuts her hair in the living room, the same style for sixty years. But she can be a hardheaded old grouch when it comes to cooking. Though her face has been on the cover of a great many books, her food is her identity closer to home. And it saddens her that her iron skillet might one day become a relic, a curiosity, like a butter churn or a flea-market lazy Susan, or that her home-canned vegetables, peppers, jellies, and jams would be something vaguely remembered, like the name of that third cousin who moved to Detroit in the fifties to work on the auto assembly lines, or like a long-gone dog.

  We already live in a culture where people line up at buffets of canned turnip greens cooked to green ooze, macaroni and cheese that glows like a hunter’s vest, and vacuum-sealed coleslaw that went bad on the back of a truck somewhere on Interstate 59. She has seen home-cooking recipes dwindle even from the kitchens of her kin, slowly fading, generation by generation. She has watched the cafés, truck stops, and barbecue joints of her youth—places that took pride in their simple, savory food—go out of business forever, to be replaced by themed restaurants, and kitchens that produce what could be called food only in the most generous sense. Southern is more a fashion, a marketing tool. She knows there are world-class restaurants out there that produce fine, fine Southern food, but she will never sit down in one, most likely, nor will most of the people she has ever known, most of the people she has cooked for in her lifetime.

  She wondered, aloud, if people outside the family even see value in food like hers anymore.

  “What if people don’t like it?” she asked.

  I told her some people don’t like Patsy Cline.

  The culture around her has changed, of course; country means something different now. The entire region walks around in camouflage, to belong, and the last of the Roosevelt Democrats have long vanished in the mist, with the last panther, and the last local dairy, and most of the good butchers. The fish in the Coosa River, fish that fed generations, are unfit to eat, and the wild things in the forest taste different now, she believes; the venison tasted better when our men walked in the woods without a GPS, and deer did not hurl themselves into every third Subaru on a six-lane thoroughfare. Wild turkey roam subdivisions now, and can be shot from the bathroom window by a data processor in his Scooby-Doo drawers. Thank God, she says, she can still see the fresh-turned red earth of gardens in the springtime, mostly in the yards of old people like her, who will cling to their traditions, and their hoe handles, till the bitter end.

  But mostly, outside the living museum of her kitchen, she has seen a great silliness envelop Southern cooking, something she sees when we drag her, griping, to eat catfish or barbecue, or to the last few meats-and-threes; she sees no reason to drive a half-hour to a strange place, to sit on a hard bench built from two-by-fours so as to appear rustic, just to be sad. She believes that most outsiders, including Southerners who have never stood in a field and salted a tomato, have forgotten what Southern country food used to be, or ought to be. “I mean, it ain’t s’posed to be easy.”

  She believes this food cannot be purchased, only bestowed, or cooked with your own hands. Do not order it in a restaurant, at least in most of them, and assume you will be getting anything akin to genuine Southern mountain food. Think of restaurant grits, which are likely to be an inedible, watery, unseasoned abomination. Restaurant beans, of all kinds, are likely to be mass-prepared, chalky, bland, and bad, almost without exception. Try to find a piece of ham in them and you will go blind; none will have the concentration of lean ham, fat, skin, and that little something extra the ham bone brings as it disintegrates into the dish over hours of slow cooking. By the same standard, if you have ever had good sausage gravy over hot biscuits, or good greens, stewed squash and onions, fried green tomatoes, or slow-cooked cabbage, then order them in most restaurants; you will put down your fork in dismay.

  “I can eat it, if I’m starvin’,” she said, after searching for something nice to say. “I’d just hate for people to think that’s what country food is….I don’t want the people to think it’s what real food is….”

  It is soul food without soul, but mostly without a story.

  “Good stuff always has a story,” she said.

  The great chefs might snort at her, but she believes good Southern cooking is not all about excess or overindulgence; pork is more often served as a seasoning than a whole hog on a spinning spit, as a way to add a richness to fresh vegetables, dried beans, collards, and more. Her fried foods, like chicken, fish, or pork, or fried vegetables, like green tomatoes, squash, and okra, are dusted lightly with dry flour or cornmeal, salt, black pepper, and sometimes cayenne, not drowned in a thick dredge of gunky egg batter and deep-fried, obscuring or even erasing the flavors underneath, like a fried mushroom in a sports bar. My mother believes you can tell if a thing was cooked right by listening as people eat it. Any sound a fried food makes should be crisp, maybe even delicate. A group of people eating fried chicken should not sound like someone smashing a glass-topped coffee table with a ball-peen hammer.

  She has watched the signature dishes of Southern food become parody. Hot, spicy food has become sideshow. She loves heat, and her pickled pepper would be dangerous in the hands of children, but it is not hot for the sake of heat alone. The point is to taste the food, not to take a bite, squeal, blister hideously, and flee to the closest emergency room. Her soups, relish, sauces, and chili are spicy, rich in tomato, onions, peppers, and sometimes garlic, which you savor even as it bites you a little bit. I told her about a trip to Nashville where I had hot chicken seasoned with what appeared to be some kind of nuclear runoff. It almost sent me to a hospital, to have my eyes flushed, lips salved, and stomach pumped. I literally blinded myself, temporarily, just by wiping my face with a red-peppered napkin. “Seems like you’d want to taste the chicken,” my mother reasoned. “You ain’t supposed to burn your own fool self up. You ain’t supposed to eat nothin’ and sit and suffer. That’s just ignorant, ain’t it?” I told her ignorance is in.

  It i
s the same with sweets. She loves sugar, as most Southern cooks do, but there was once an art to it, a layering of flavors such as cinnamon, vanilla, and fruit or nuts. Now it all seems designed by a thirteen-year-old boy high on Little Debbie, as if a treacly, gritty icing will hide the fact that the cake layers are as dry as a Lutheran prayer meetin’. Her muscadine jelly is faintly sweet, a flavor that makes you think of flowers. Her cobblers taste of butter, plums, apples, and cherries. Crabapples, she said, do take a lot of sugar to cook with, and are also good for throwing at itinerant tomcats.

  Not long ago, I went searching in a Piggly Wiggly for a Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico, because they still use cane sugar instead of inferior beet sugar, a thing I only recently learned. She had known it all along. They haven’t tasted right on this side of the border since Lawrence Welk was wishing her champagne dreams.

  She knew that affordable, simple Southern food had turned the corner to banality when she saw that a chain restaurant had introduced a barbecue sauce purportedly flavored with moonshine. Moonshine, as any Southerner not born at a cotillion knows, tastes like kerosene. Men did not drink moonshine for its bouquet, but because they wanted to dance in the dirt, howl at the moon, and marry their relations. When they took a slash and said, hoarsely, “Man, that’s smooooooth,” they meant smooth for paint thinner. Her daddy made smooth liquor and peddled it in old kerosene cans; sometimes it ate through.

  On TV, Southern cooks are often portrayed mixing a julep, or staggering under a Kentucky Derby hat the size of a Fiat, or planning a wedding with antebellum gowns and at least one cannon. That, or they are trust-fund bohemians in actual berets, and more pierced nostrils than a rooting hog. She has seen very hip chefs prepare things that were, in her mind, not something serious people would do, like pork-belly ice cream, or sweet meats in caramel sauce, or collard purée squeezed onto a tofu hoecake. She has nothing against fusion cooking, whatever that is, or something called, honest to God, “shrimp foam,” or “bright rice,” or recipes involving algae, or three-year-old duck eggs, or yellow catfish pounded into a fermented paste. “People is used to different things now,” she says, “but don’t you bring it into my kitchen.”

  She did not expect to find good, affordable food among the effete, but neither does she have much in common with modern-day blue-collar cooks who are regularly portrayed in popular culture as camouflaged, shirtless, excessively hirsute, and hollering sooooo-ieeee. They are often filmed cleaning a poor groundhog, or boiling a raccoon skull, or studiously sautéing squirrel brains. And the sad thing is, it all looks so put on, like the beards would come off if you pulled on them, like a bad strip-mall Santa.

  She does not cook raccoon, which is rich but strong and a little rank-tasting, like the small member of the bear family it is, and she sees no reason to sacrifice an animal as intelligent as a raccoon as long as there is a sparerib or chicken thigh laying around. Even possum has all but faded from the family diet, although my aunt Juanita, a possum-eating fiend, is the bon vivant of roasted marsupial. Tradition requires that we include a recipe for it, though my mother does not believe she is preserving her heritage by skinning and eating something that, when confronted with its mortality, keels over and plays dead, “and a whole lot of trouble for some oily meat.” Squirrel brains taste like you have licked the inside of an old, smutty beer can. Still, she knew how to cook it all, when it was all there was. “You mix your squirrel brains with scrambled eggs, to cut down on that metal taste….Anything you got to hide real good, ain’t good.”

  She does not cook chitlin’s, because she knows what God made them to do. That said, she has eaten many of them, when it was all there was. We have eaten many succulent pig’s feet, split, roasted, and pickled. We have eaten poke salad and more than a few varieties of bitterweed, but we have never in our lives deep-fried a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, or a Snickers bar, or served a cheeseburger on a Krispy Kreme doughnut; there is a reason why such food is found in carnivals, next to a goat that reads minds. We demur on frog legs; they may sound rustic, but they taste like an unholy union of a chicken and a Gila monster. But we ate a bunch of them, too, when it was all there was.

  The closest she will come to such exotica in her own repertoire is quail, which is delicious, and dove, which she can clean and dress using only her thumbs; she does not like to cook doves anymore, because they sound so lovely in the morning. Nor will she cook any rabbit, because she thinks they are adorable. She used to roast a little venison, which is lean, mildly gamy, and prone to toughness and stringiness, and has to be soaked in buttermilk and expertly prepared (grind a little pork into venison for a tasty burger or meat loaf) to be all that good. But fawns run across her driveway now, so she will not do it again.

  Snapping turtle remains in the diet, but that, too, is complicated. She will, if you bring her one already cleaned and quartered, dust it lightly with flour, salt, pepper, and a little hot sauce, and fry it up like pork chops or chicken, but she says it is best prepared in a strong, spicy tomato broth, to mask the strong essence of lizard. “Turtle makes a good soup,” she said, “long as you don’t think too much about it.”

  She would rather cook you something for the simple pleasure of eating than in some attempt to be picturesque. If you have time, she will show you how to make a catfish stew with okra, tomatoes, onions, and garlic, the way old drunks cooked it on a riverbank in ’47, between long swallows of white liquor, marathon lies, and the occasional fistfight; the French called it catfish court bouillon, but that language faded from her people a long time ago. Could the flavors, the memory, be that far behind?

  She will show you how to make delicious pickled onions, and jelly from hot pepper, honeysuckle blossoms, or kudzu blooms. She can show you how to bake a juicy meat loaf from ground beef, day-old bread, bell pepper, and sweet onion, all worked together by hand, because it is the bread, absorbing the liquid from the meat, spices, and vegetables, that gives the dish such rich flavor and smooth, almost creamy texture…if it’s cooked right. Drown it in tomato sauce and it’s prison food. Cook it too long and it resembles a tar-paper shingle; cook it too little and it looks like something the French would do and call a terrine. “Use a iron skillet, ’stead of a bakin’ dish or pan,” she said. “It’ll make the outside more crispy. You want the onion and green pepper inside to be so tender it almost ain’t there.”

  She will show you the secret to perfect mashed potatoes, whipped together with only butter, milk, and one special ingredient, with no lumps or skins; lumps are for Philistines, and came into vogue only as an underhanded way for insecure cooks to prove they actually started with a real potato in the first place. You don’t whip ’em, “you just mash ’em till they’re just right,” and she grew a little testy that such a thing needed to be explained. She will not even discuss skins, though they are good for you. “They can be good for the hogs, then,” she said, which puzzled me a little, because we have not had a hog for seven years.

  She can show you how to prepare sweet peas or green beans so that they will not taste as if you got them on a tray in junior high school, and how to put up a jar of creamed corn so naturally sweet in its own sugar you will want to save it for dessert. She will show you how to make a coleslaw that will be the antidote to every miserable, gone-bad, chemically masked slaw you ever endured, how to spice pickled pepper and pickled onions and concoct a vegetable soup with a short-rib base that takes two full days to get right. She will show you how to make creamy porridge with rich broth, and twice-cooked watercress, a dish that was here long before the Spaniards came clanking in their rusty iron armor through these hills.

  She could show you all of it, if she only had someone she trusted to pass it on. In the end, the greatest obstacle to this book was finding a qualified person to write it, because this, apparently, was not me. She has eaten my cooking with regret and pity and not some small amount of genuine fear that I might actually poison her with undercooked pork or poultry, poorly washed vegetables, or alien spice. She d
id allow I once made some savory baked beans topped with thick-cut bacon in the summer of ’84, and served up a barely scorched ham in Atlanta in the spring of ’96; that she remembered it all, and the dates, insulted me more. She also recalls I once set a small kitchen fire with a grilled cheese sandwich, beat a smoke alarm to death with a broom handle, and—cooking on high heat, against her advice—caused a permanent molecular bond between her favorite biscuit pan and a box of freezer-burnt Pizza Rolls.

  I told her I am no more a gourmet than my uncle Jimbo, but I know what tastes good. I have eaten good roasted lamb on a rooftop in Peshawar, and excellent curry just outside London’s Kensington Gate. I celebrated high tea in a mountain outpost in Kashmir, had antelope steak in the Masai Mara, shepherd’s pie in Addis Ababa, and chateaubriand in bone-marrow sauce in Port-au-Prince, in the shadow of a coup d’ état. I had succulent Korean barbecue in Los Angeles, fine tres leches in South Florida, and spicy grilled shrimp, slivered onions, and garlic aioli on hot, sweet cornbread in New Orleans. I had buttery clam chowder in Boston and Portland, tasty dim sum on a slow Sunday in San Francisco, and a sizzling, world-class steak in Oklahoma City. The best salad I ever had was diced heart of palm, avocado, and fresh tomato in a mildly sweet, garlicky oil and vinegar, in Santo Domingo. I cannot cook; I love to eat.

  None of that made her feel any better about me; it just made her more suspicious, as if I had been caught spearing snails with little-bitty forks in the perfect bistro, or gone shopping for a three-hundred-dollar pair of pointy shoes. It all sounded like fancy, worldly, exotic food to her, to this woman who has been out of Alabama only three or four times in her adult life, if you don’t count Chattanooga, Pensacola, and Ringgold.

  The truth is, no matter where I went or how hungry I was, it has always been working-class food that made me happiest, made me feel close to home, like the black beans and rice, fried sweet plantains, and ham croquettes on Calle Ocho in Little Havana, deep-fried fish and chips in a thick white fog in Edinburgh, red beans and rice and boudin on the Bayou Teche, glorious fried chicken in Memphis, murky seafood gumbo on the Mississippi Gulf, ham shank and white beans on Canal Street, roast pork in San Juan, stewed turkey wings and cornbread dressing in Harlem, raw oysters on saltines with cocktail sauce and an extra daub of horseradish on a causeway on Mobile Bay, corn pudding on a buffet line in Fairhope, Alabama, and fine tortillas cooked atop a blazing oil drum in Everglades City.