The Best Cook in the World Page 4

  This, I told her, was her food, just working-class food with a different accent, often cooked with the cheapest ingredients to hand, by old women and men in their own ancient pots, stirred with their own steel spoons, with their own drunken uncles and freeloading kinfolks to feed. If I could write about all that, with respect, then maybe I had sense enough to write about hers, too. I wanted to do this book, I told her, not just because her food will live on forever in some kind of dusty archive. The truth is, I like the notion that my mother’s recipes might one day be attempted by cooks who live far, far away from here.

  I like the idea that her delicacies might be crafted on designer countertops with ergonomic knives and simmered on ten-thousand-dollar stoves. I like that her daddy’s fine redeye gravy might one day be prepared with coffee from a French press and organic tomatoes from a market on the Upper East Side. I like that cooks accustomed to extra-virgin olive oil might go slumming with lard, and maybe even stare down a pig’s foot, not to be picturesque, but because it just tastes good. I like the idea that an amateur chef who has never been anywhere close to the Coosa backwater, who has never swung a hammer or slung a wrench, might one day call up the words to my grandpa’s train songs on a touch screen embedded in his or her refrigerator door, while discussing how to craft the perfect hush puppy without access to any government cheese.

  But mostly I like the idea that her food might one day be prepared in a mobile home or a little wood-frame house right down the road from her, by young people who vaguely remember that their great-grandmother used to make it just this way. And, after a while, my mother came to like that notion, too.

  The stories and recipes in this book are of long memory. Many come, skillet by skillet, from my mother’s teachers and the teachers before, and others come from the foot of my grandma’s bed, where I slept as a little boy, listening night after night to endless stories of her life and her kitchen when she was a child bride, in the early twentieth century. Later, when my grandma’s mind began to slide a little sideways, she carried on long conversations with her mentor, my great-grandfather, as if he were sitting with us in the dark, and so many others I had never known. It would be years and years before those conversations made sense to me, as I listened to my own mother talk about cooking and what it meant to us, and what it used to be. Though, in my defense, I had covered up my head with a quilt during some of my grandmother’s one-way conversations. The stories and recipes in this book come from great cooks who have passed on, and from aunts, uncles, and other living kin who did not write down their favorite recipes, either, but had the great good sense to pay attention, as my mother did, when the old people had something to say.

  These recipes and stories come, one by one, from the beautiful, haunted landscape itself, from inside the lunchboxes of men who worked deep in the earth and out in the searing sun, from homemade houseboats in the middle channels of slow rivers, or in the dark, high places as we chased the beautiful sound of our dogs through the hills and pines. They come from feasts and damn near famine, from funerals and other celebrations, and a thousand tales that meandered to no place in particular, and some I will never forget for as long as I live. I tried to write them as they were lived, tried to write them richly, because we believe that a dull people will rarely cook rich food, and sure will not appreciate it when it is laid before them.

  As my mother said, it is not for everyone; it is heavy, probably a little too greasy, and perhaps deadly. You would not cook and eat it every day, even if she does.

  I guess you would call it a food memoir, but it is really just a cookbook, told the way we tell everything, with a certain amount of meandering. Even the recipes themselves will meander, a little bit, because a recipe is a story like anything else.

  We have learned that you can never tell what people would remember about food, or the people they cooked it for, like those young soldiers she fed in Red’s café back in ’65, across the four-lane from Fort McClellan. We remember it was banana pudding they had before they left for war, and know it for sure. We remember because she would bring their discarded comic books home to me—Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Tales to Astonish, Amazing Adventures, Wonder Woman, Mandrake the Magician, and more—and as I flipped through the pages crumbs of vanilla wafer would fall into my bed.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had to be away for a while not long after she got home. I came in from the airport to find the house quiet but the stove hot to the touch. Dusk is feeding time here, for her mule, donkeys, goat, two dogs, untold cats, the wild things she has tamed, even the crows in the trees, and any kin who might wander in, hungry or just pretending to be. I have learned not to fret when I do not find her right away; she cannot move that fast and won’t be far off. She has forty acres, but the mule is eight feet tall and not right in the head, so she does not go into the pasture anymore, for fear of being stomped to death. I asked her, many times, if she wanted me to give it away, or shoot it, and she told me she loved the mule and had paid a hundred dollars for it besides, so her eventual decision was to surrender the entire property to it, every fenced acre, till it died of ripe old age. It is in excellent health and will outlive all of us. If that makes no kind of sense to you, then you do not understand the terrifying logic of the Southern woman.

  I circled the house and found her in the side yard, listening to the clouds. The weather prophets on Channels 6, 13, and 42 said we would have storms that evening, and thunder growled in the distance from clouds we could not yet see. The heavens can be seen only in slashes and slivers here, blacked out by the ridges and the trees; the horizon ends before you get to the mailbox. I can hit the horizon with a rock.

  Sometimes, dissatisfied with their prophecy, she flipped from one weather prophet to another, looking for a forecast that suited her; today they all agreed she should go sit in the basement with a good flashlight and a weather radio, and maybe a fistful of Fig Newtons.

  “The Lord’s crying,” she said.

  “At what?” I asked.

  “At the wickedness in the world,” she said.

  I started to ask her if it might just be weather and not the End of Days, but I so badly wanted to eat.

  “My house is in order,” she said. “I am not afraid.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s easy for you to say.”

  I walked beside her to the house, but not too close. Someone is with her almost all the time now, but she does not like us to hover, as if we are waiting on her to fall. Inside, I stood in the room just off the kitchen, and we talked as she finished cooking supper, and I noticed how she has to work harder now to do what used to seem so easy. She cannot see well anymore, and sometimes she salts things two and three times. She forgets. “I ain’t the cook no more that I used to be,” she said, but that is not necessarily true.

  At Thanksgiving last year, she roasted a juicy turkey, golden brown and swimming in a lake of melted butter, maybe not as pretty as a Southern Living holiday photo shoot, but tender and delicious, and perfect in its way. She had surrounded the great turkey with cornbread dressing, green beans cooked with pork, buttery mashed potatoes, hot biscuits, sweet potatoes, creamed onions, a pan of hot cathead biscuits, and more. It might have been the greatest meal of her life, or at least the greatest in recent memory.

  Then, just a month later, she petrified a Christmas ham. She cooked it like she was mad at it, cooked it and cooked it till it looked like an old, scorched baseball glove laid atop a desiccated bone; cutting into it was more archaeology than anything else. “I guess I just lost track of the time, hon,” she said, genuinely stricken. I told her it was good ham anyway, if a little chewy and, well, smoky, because it is my prerogative to lie to my mother in times like these. Everyone else lied to her, too, right along beside me; we lined up to lie to her. We should all be loved like that old woman is.

  We came in so she could finish supper, and I left her in the kitchen; she prefers to be alone when she cooks, or at least as alone a
s she can be. But even from the next room I could tell there was something remarkable there on the stovetop of number 22, or 23; we have lost count. I could hear her for a long time, still talking.

  “You know, I always wisht I could whistle,” I heard her say to no one in particular, as she put the finishing touches on supper. I wonder whom I will talk to, when the day comes, and if they will answer? The institutions here could not hold all the people with our blood who walk around talking earnestly to Bear Bryant, Teddy Roosevelt, or the air. “Momma could whistle, whistle like a bird singin’….

  “It’s done,” she said after a while, softly, but, like dogs listening for thunder, we seem to be able to hear those words for miles. She handed me a heavy ceramic plate minted two generations before I was born, the same one I ate from before I left to catch the yellow school bus across from my grandma’s house. The plate has a faded cluster of red roses at its center and a thumbnail-sized chip in the rim. I cannot recall how the chip got there, so it must have happened before I was born, and maybe even before she was.

  I raised the lid of the old pot bubbling on the stove and gazed into a molten, aromatic pool: pinto beans and ham bone, with hunks of lean ham, disintegrating fat, and luscious skin floating in the liquid that melted from the ingredients to form a lovely, translucent elixir on the surface. A pot of deep-green collards, the liquor steamed away, waited on the back of the stove, next to a skillet of pale-gold creamed onions, and a tray of crisp cornbread muffins baked with melted butter and bacon grease.

  “Well, now you’re just showing off,” I said.

  The recipes, like so many of her recipes, precede the Civil War, though some are relatively modern and stretch back only about a century or so, to a time when the Doughboys rode home on trains festooned with American flags after the First Great War. She was not yet born when the best of those recipes traveled to Alabama from the mountains of North Georgia on muleback, inside the mind of a mean ol’ man. I suppose, in the long history of my mother’s food, it is as good a place as any to begin. It is not, of course, the beginning, only as far back as we can reach. The true beginnings of some of these recipes are so old there is no beginning anymore—only, if we are not careful, an end.

  She handed me a steel fork.

  “I hope it’s good,” she said.

  • 1 •

  “THEM SHADOWS GET TO DANCIN’ ”

  Butter Rolls

  Jimmy Jim Bundrum, his first wife, Mattie, and their boy, Charlie, my grandfather

  IT BEGINS not with a recipe at all, but with a ghost story.

  The Buick was a ’50, maybe a ’51, long and slick and gleaming black, and sparkled with more chrome accessories than a Shriner’s hat. It rolled up to their porch on the Littlejohn Road, and my mother thought for a minute it must be the governor, drunk again, or a judge, or some other rich man lost on the dirt roads. But it was only her second cousin Buck Bundrum, who had stolen his daddy’s car, again.

  His daddy, Richard, ran a bulldozer for the county, and there was good money in it—maybe not Cadillac money, but Buick money. “Let’s go for a ride,” Buck shouted, but when my mother and her older sister Juanita looked in the car, they saw his daddy snoring softly in the backseat, well and truly drunk, passed out cold. “Buck’s daddy never would let him drive that car. I think Buck saw the keys in it and just took off, and he didn’t see his daddy back there till it was too late, till he’d gone on down the road a ways. Buck wasn’t old enough to drive that car no-how….I was just fifteen then, and I know he wasn’t no older’n me….” But his daddy seemed deep in dreams, even smiling the faintest little bit, so Buck just kept motoring, and with any luck he could take his favorite cousins for a spin before his daddy even came to. It was in the late summer of 1952, and, “Well,” my mother said, “we didn’t have nothin’ better to do.”

  Night was falling when they rumbled out of the driveway, three abreast on the front seat, with Richard, oblivious but breathing regularly, still curled up in the back. Buck spun the radio to WHMA.

  I’m walkin’ the floor over you

  I can’t sleep a wink, that is true

  “We had us a nice car for a little while, by gosh,” said my mother, the rebel. They drove to the Mill Branch, a clear, lovely stream in northern Calhoun County, where my people went in the daylight to picnic, or sneak a warm sip of Pabst Blue Ribbon, or wade in water so cold it burned their feet red. The branch was only a few inches deep here, rippling over clean, smooth pebbles, the streambed bordered by thick carpets of watercress. With Ernest Tubb warbling from the speaker, they slid out of the car to look at the moon and count the lightning bugs. Unsure how long Richard’s slumber might last, they were walking back to the car to head for home when the calm around them was rent by a terrible scream from the backseat.

  Richard was awake.

  “Oh God!” he screamed. “Not here!”

  He had awakened befuddled, unsure where he was or how he got there, and looked out the car window to see the moon reflecting on the rippling surface of the Mill Branch. And in that moonlight he saw…something. He thrashed, and wailed, not in foolishness but in genuine terror.

  “The Haint! The Haint!” he sobbed, and begged his boy to drive them away from this damned and haunted place. Then he curled up into a ball on the backseat, arms wrapped around his knees, and began to rock and moan. His fear spread to the young people, who jumped back inside the car and locked all the doors. If Richard, a big, solid block of man, was so frightened, it had to be real. “Please, please,” he begged, “he’s comin’ for us. Get us away from here.”

  Buck left rubber on the blacktop. My mother turned to peer through the back glass, to see what was coming after them. All they could get from Richard was that he had seen “the Haint,” an indistinct, manlike shape astride what seemed to be a great red-eyed mule, coming at them through the glimmering stream.

  This was the night she learned that the Bundrums saw things at the Mill Branch other people did not see. If there was wrong done here, it was our wrong, and if there are ghosts, well, we put them here.

  And it was the night she first heard the story of where so much of the good food she had eaten as a child, and had already learned to cook herself, truly came from.

  The story behind it varies, depending on whom you ask, but this much we know: In 1919, James J. Bundrum, her grandfather, fought a bloody battle with another man on the banks of the Mill Branch. They were both dog-drunk at the time, and fought with knives. The other man, a drifter, was maimed and believed killed—was likely killed, for James J., who was called Jimmy Jim, was a furious man, and rarely fought to wound (he was also known to be a biter). While the blood was still bright on the leaves, he leapt on a tall black mule and fled across the state line and deep into the North Georgia mountains, leaving his family behind. His failing wife, Mattie, and a sickly boy, Shulie, would die as he hid deep in the trees. He would later say, “I couldn’t have helped them none in prison no-how.” And when people spoke of him, even years after, they said good riddance, because all the mean old man had wrought in the world was bloodshed, violence, and pain. His saving grace—and it was no small thing, this—was his skill in a kitchen, where he was known to make fine cornbread, delicious ham and beans, and lovely greens.

  Since that awful fight at the Mill Branch, my people have seen moonlight and shadow differently here. Some believe it is the restless soul of the unnamed drifter who rides forever here after dark. Others say it is old Jimmy Jim Bundrum himself, or perhaps both of them, who linger here under a bright moon.

  My uncle James, who is ninety-three and has created more mythology with his own stories than can be easily recalled, will not even joke about this tale. His customary foolishness sloughs away when he tells how the shadows of two ghostly figures come together when the moon hits the water just the right way, and how “them shadows get to dancin’, but t’ain’t dancin’, a-tall….It’s fighin’, turrible fightin’, and they fight till you get clos’t up on ’em
, and then…and then they ain’t there no more, son….”

  And still others say that is foolishness, of course, just country people scaring themselves bug-eyed in the dark, usually after sipping on some liquid imagination. My big brother has seen it, and some cousins, serious people and chuckleheads alike. “It’s just the moon in that water, trickin’ you,” says Sam, my levelheaded brother, but my mother warns that it is not wise to discount such things out of hand.

  “I just know I never went back there after dark,” she said. “ ’Cause if you believe in the Lord, if you believe in His goodness and His mercy and His miracles, then you got to believe in them ol’ demons, too, don’t you?”

  Still, she doubts if it is the old man himself, my great-grandfather, who haunts the branch. Old Jimmy Jim’s spirit rests in her kitchen with all the rest of them, most likely inside the saltshaker.

  I guess we should not be surprised that a ghost story and the story of our food are entwined. One of the first lessons my mother learned, which was one of the first her mother learned, was that the greatest sin a cook can commit is to serve bland food carelessly prepared, devoid of salt, seasoning, and crisping fat. Our people, our cooks, learned that long ago, from the mean ol’ man himself. It was old Jim who taught them the difference between savory and nothing special. They just had to go fetch him first, from exile.