The Best Cook in the World Read online

  As it turned out, as sin goes, dancing was the least of it.

  The old man returned after midnight, his hands bloody. Ava’s usual belligerence evaporated in fear, and the boy stood, worried, waiting for an explanation. The old man just washed his hands and went to bed. The next morning, instead of discovering a dead body or a pack of bloodhounds on the doorstep, they spotted smoke rising from the smokehouse. Inside, they found small hams, shoulder, and sides of bacon. Slabs of fatback were packed in salt, to cure. At least it had not been murder.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked, drumming up her courage.

  “From people who won’t miss it,” he said, as she tried, and failed, to stare him down.

  The truth was, the old man believed he was entitled. He took it not from a pen, but from the land itself, roaming loose, as some people allowed their pigs to live. This one roamed the land he had once owned, before the law ran him to Georgia and the tax barons and lawyers took it from him in absentia. The old man knew only a little about the law, and what he did not know he could ignore, but there were some things a man was owed, and if you did not believe that, you should pen your hogs.

  Besides, it was just a shoat. It wasn’t like it was a prize hog.

  “Sin little, sin big,” Ava said.

  The old man told her to tell that to a judge and see what happened; by her reasoning, if you picked a penny off the street, you might as well knock off a bank on the way home, or rob a train.

  Besides, it didn’t make much difference to the pig.

  “If I coulda come across a fat ’un,” he confessed, “I’d of kilt a fat ’un.”

  In as few words as possible, to get the child to shut up, he tried to explain the law according to the common man. He had decided, the day before, to teach her how to cook a fine pot of beans, “and you natcherly can’t have beans without pork,” he said, as if this made it all right somehow. In his mind, maybe it did, since the old man had never known a world in which the people, his people, could live without good beans.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dried beans, just a few cents a pound, were life itself for the people of the hills, he told the girl after she had calmed down and it seemed they were not all going to prison after all. Butter beans, Great Northerns, baby limas, black-eyed peas, and others, simmered on the woodstoves of sharecroppers and landowners alike, because they were not only filling, cheap, and nutritious; if they were properly seasoned, usually with just salt, pepper, onion, pork, some sugar, and sometimes a little stray red pepper or garlic, they were delicious. But for the poor, in hard times and pretty much every time, they were the very foundation of the diet. Families lived almost completely on beans and cornbread in cold weather and early spring, with the largesse of a skillet of fried potatoes.

  The rest of the world could demean the bean, say that something “ain’t worth beans,” or say that someone “didn’t know beans.” In the foothills of the Appalachians, a man who knew beans was worth something, by God.

  And at the very top of this pyramid of a billion beans, shelled over a few hundred years, was the pinto, the bean you cooked for company, or in celebration of all important things. Pinto beans were less chalky and starchy and more flavorful than other beans, he claimed, with a nutty, rich flavor. Besides, the old man liked them best, so of course that was where he would begin. But, as fine as it was, the pinto was, on its own, incomplete. Pinto beans could not be prepared without pork, even if it was just a piece of skin, or a scrap, to enrich the natural flavor. But a ham bone—now, a ham bone was fine.

  “You can’t make brick without straw,” the old man said, and it made her so mad she almost levitated. Who was he, to quote to her the tribulations of the children of Israel?

  “I ain’t stealin’ no pigs,” she told him, and then, to cover all possibilities: “Nor no chicken, neither.”

  “No,” he said, “they’d ketch you, short and bowlegged as you are.”

  She stomped to the door, but wheeled around at what had seemed to be, of all things, a shard, a fragment, of a chuckle.

  “Hee,” went the old man, who had the rare ability to laugh without mirth or joy.

  It took a long time for her to wind down this time; self-righteousness is without a true bottom. But before he could teach the child actually to cook something truly fine, he had to teach her to build and maintain a fire. Electricity had not arced so far as the little rented house. He split wood for the stove, and tried to show her how to do it herself. The boy would lay wood by, of course, but she needed to know how. “I know how to chop wood. I ain’t helpless,” she said. She took a mighty swing and almost lost a toe, and the second time she brought the heavy ax head down, the block of wood flew into her shin, knocking her, bloody, onto her backside. She sat there alternately praying and cursing, with tears in her eyes, as the old man finished his smoke. He had the thing in his mouth, lit and unlit, from dawn till bedtime.

  He would admit, much later, that it was amusing to watch the girl try to split wood. She was a true Pentecostal, despite her hubris and dancing and occasional cussing, and however far she might have backslid from time to time, which seemed daily. But she was true to her doctrine. She wore her hair to below her waist then, and her skirts to her shoe tops. Around a cookfire, the girl was a human torch. At the woodpile, she was little more than a backstop.

  “It’s be easier on your shins if you was to put on some pants,” he said. “Be easier to get out the way, when that wood comes flyin’ at you. Hard to chop much wood, anyway, in a damn bedsheet.”

  She told him that, like thievery, drinking, fighting, and smarting off to ladies, to wear pants would be a sin.

  “Hell is a wide place for y’all, ain’t it?” the old man said.

  While she composed herself, he chopped the wood, gathered it, and showed her how to sort the beans.

  What made Jim remarkable, like all good Southern blue-collar cooks, was the distance he could bring the simple ingredients, the transformation he could achieve in a simple bean, or a bitterweed, or the pieces of meat that would be discarded, in a more affluent culture and easier time, as scrap. This does not, however, make him unique. It was true in the slave quarters of the Old South, and in the mill villages of the early twentieth century, and the coal fields. The villain of taste was expediency, impatience, and before a cook got near a fire, he had to make sure that the food he was preparing was fit.

  He told her to find a quiet place with good light and pick through the dry beans, swirling them round and round in a pan, like she was panning for gold. He told her to discard any black ones or shriveled ones, and to feel for grit, or tiny pieces of trash.

  “Can’t I just rinse the trash off of ’em? Won’t the trash and the grit come off in the wash?” she asked.

  “No. Hit might just stick to the wet beans. They’ll get tacky after you wash ’em.”

  It seems such a little thing, till you think about what a speck of grit tastes like, feels like, in your teeth. It is hard to enjoy your meal once you taste grit in your teeth, he said, and she allowed that was probably true, her being a fastidious housekeeper herself. But, again, such a notion did not fit the man, who brushed his teeth with a sweet-gum twig, and ate slices of his apples off the wicked blackened blade of the same pocketknife he used to whittle stick and shave off his tobacco.

  He rinsed the beans with clear, cool water, once, twice, then put them in a pan to soak for an hour or so. “They’ll cook better, and cook a little bit quicker, if you soak ’em,” he said. “You don’t have to, but hit’s better to.”

  He tested the edge on the butcher knife and found it to be useless, and spent ten minutes putting an edge on it. She would learn this was what the old man did to relax. Then he went to work on a small fresh ham, one from the mysterious pig. He sliced off some meat to set aside for breakfast, till he had the ham bone he was looking for—not a bone at all but just a skinnier ham, with some nice meat still on it.

  A pound of pinto be
ans cooked with a ham bone would feed a family of six, maybe more, he said. He stoked up the fire, aiming for a slow boil, and put the beans on. He tossed in a tiny peeled whole yellow onion, with a tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar. “If we had some garlic,” he said, “we’d add a little somethin’ extry.” He had learned garlic from a man on the Gulf Coast; they put garlic in everything there.

  He laid the ham bone in the boiling water with the beans and seasonings, then gathered up the trimmings of fat and skin from the chop block and dropped them into the pot. He told his daughter-in-law that even a small piece or two of pork—salted, smoked, or fresh—would help the flavor, but a ham bone was the foundation of a feast, and the trimmings of fat were an extra blessing. “Cook it all slow, so it all gits together,” he said. The fat would literally melt into the beans and the cooking liquid, and become that fine elixir.

  Bland beans, he lectured, would keep a man from starving, but there was no goodness in them whatsoever.

  It occurred to Ava that, for someone who did not particularly like to talk, whose answer to most questions outside the kitchen was a baleful stare, the old man grew more and more talkative as long as he was talking about food. He was never exactly gabby, but at least he did not speak in hisses, curses, and nods. He seemed almost fascinated with the nature of beans.

  When the girl lost interest, the old man did not rant or yell.

  He just stabbed his temple again with one scarred, bony fnger.

  “Cook thinkin’,” he hissed. He pronounced it “thankin’.”

  And remember.

  Then he showed her how to make the dish that complemented it all. He showed her how to thin-slice the white onions and a few green onions and put them on to cook in just a daub of bacon grease and a little butter, bring them to a quick sizzle to get the flavors working, but cook slowly from then over low heat. “You don’t want fried onions,” he said. He showed her how to make them go soft in their own sugars by slowly adding spoonfuls of water and covering them with a lid, so that they did not fry or steam so much as just kind of melt in the butter and pork fat.

  “This little thing,” the old man said, “is what folks will remember.”

  “Onions?” she said, aghast.

  “You’ll l’arn,” he said.

  She was prone to wandering off in the middle of a thing, even a sizzling skillet, causing him great distress that she might actually burn the house down, but this dish, he lectured, could not be prepared at all unless the cook was willing to stare into the skillet and monitor its cooking at least every few minutes. You had to cook it covered but routinely stir—gently, so the onions did not break into mush. Now and then, you had to be sure to add a spoon or so of water when the liquid was about to cook away. If the onions turned brown, they were cooking too fast; you wanted a gold color, he told her.

  She did not concede it then, but she was amazed at how careful, how almost delicate, the rough old man was in the kitchen. Over the months ahead, she would see him take a discreet swallow of liquor now and then as he cooked, but, as much as she disapproved of such as that, she learned that cooking, much like banjo picking and sometimes preaching, was one of those things a body could do when about half drunk, as long as he did not get his testaments mixed up or fall into the fire.

  As the beans and then the onions cooked, the old man put a few potatoes on to boil whole. There were only two kinds of potatoes, in the vernacular of his people: there were sweet potatoes, and white, or Irish, potatoes, which, in his accent, was pronounced “Ar’sh.” These were “Ar’sh,” peeled and boiled whole.

  Then he showed the girl how to bake a decent skillet of cornbread, how to measure out the salt, soda, and meal, stir in just enough cool water. “Now I’ll show you the secret,” he said. They had no ice box, but had a quart jar of mayonnaise—even then, there was mayonnaise—cooling in a springhouse. He showed her how to mix a double spoonful into the cornmeal, for richness, and how to line an iron skillet with lard so the cornbread would come out crispy on the edges but soft and crumbly inside. He melted some butter and drizzled it across the top of the meal before putting it on to bake, for a little something extra.

  Last, he coarse-chopped a simple cabbage slaw, or at least she thought it would be simple. But the old man had a lecture for everything. Save as many of the dark-colored leaves as you can when you begin to strip it down, he said. “Hit’ll taste better if you do.” He mixed in only enough mayonnaise to give it taste. He stirred in a liberal dose of black pepper, but no salt at all: “Hit’ll wilt that cabbage down,” and defeat the very purpose of a good slaw, which is to cool, or somehow level, a heavier, saltier meal.

  And, again, the girl wondered how such an idea ever even took root in the smutty old man. But slaw was not an invention of the twentieth century. It was a staple in the mountain South, and the old man, like a lot of people here, had eaten it all his life. He made his own mayonnaise sometimes, by the half-gallon, and cabbage was about the cheapest thing in the dirt. Carrots, which he considered another essential ingredient, did not grow well in the clay, and often had to be store-bought, or bought from peddlers who brought them in from sandier soil. But they were worth it, because of that sweet taste they gave a slaw.

  That said, he would not allow sugar to be added for taste.

  “You don’t want sugar-sweet, but carrot-sweet,” he explained. “Good fer yer eyes, too, carrots,” he told her.

  She already had to wear glasses to read, and was sensitive about it.

  “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with my eyes,” she said.

  “Wadn’t speakin’ of yourn. Talkin’ ’bout ever’body’s eyes in the natural world,” he clarified.

  It was a small kindness by the old man to say that, she would later decide.

  At the time, she told him to kiss her foot, anyway.

  * * *

  • • •

  The boy had been away, doing pick-and-shovel work. He came back on a Friday evening, about done in. He was digging wells that day, ten hours at the bottom of a deep hole, praying for mud. Some men would not pay till you struck the damp, till you felt the red clay begin to slide a little under your boots. He was smeared with it from his boots to the crown of his head as he walked in, and it had dried in patches; he looked like a golem. He washed it off on the back porch, or at least he washed off some of it, and sat down at a tiny homemade pine table, almost too tired to sit upright.

  The plate the old man placed before him was a thing of beauty, another memory of his simpler past, with its puddle of beans rich in ham fat, with tender hunks of the reddish lean in the broth; to the side, mingling with the broth from the beans, the old man had spooned a big dollop of the creamed onions, so tender they slipped through the tines of the fork. Ava watched, a little mystified, as the old man took his own fork and pressed down on a single red potato till it broke apart, steaming, spooned a little melted butter on it from the pot, then peppered it liberally, as if his teenage boy were still a child, helpless. It was almost too much, the addition of that single potato, but the old man said a workingwoman or -man needed a little tater in almost every meal, if they were going to swing a hammer or a pick, or drag a hundred pound of cotton, or herd a passel of young’uns all day, and not misplace any.

  The slaw he placed at the edge of the plate, so it would stay cool; it was such a tiny notion, but it stuck in her mind. Finally, the old man unscrewed the lid on a home-canned jar of hot chowchow—he had swapped a few pounds of mysterious swine for some pickles and hot relish—and dished it out onto the heavy ceramic plates with a dainty teaspoon, like a fancy waiter spooning caviar in a New Orleans hotel.

  The boy leaned over his plate, breathing it in, and sighed.

  “Good Lord,” he said.

  Ava told him to wait a damn minute, and said a long and torturous grace, which would also become a tradition in our family on days when we could least stand the wait. The boy set upon the food like he had been living on maypops, boiled okra, and artichokes, as th
e girl sat across the table from the old man and glared. But even she had to admit that she had never seen the boy so happy, even hunched over the butter rolls and the fine breakfast, and it did taste very good, though she usually did not give a flying flip about such hearty food. The boy scraped the serving bowls clean, all of them, and then, bone-tired, went to sleep in his hard, straight-back chair. He often would, when he was exhausted, or a little bit drunk, or if his mind was easy. He was down so deep it was as if body and soul had already quietly departed, like a cat leaving a room.

  Ava looked at the ham bone on the boy’s plate. It was so pristine, so clean, it looked like it had been polished. She had seen bones in the dog pen that had been worried less than that. The boy dozed on, listing; he fell out of his chair altogether some nights. The old man smoked his pipe, and drank his black coffee. The only light in the pitch dark was from a single kerosene lantern in the middle of the table. The cool days seemed even shorter here in the foothills, when the sun slipped behind the mountain like it had dropped down a shaft, and you had a feeling it was still daylight somewhere, just a hill or two away.

  “I will pray for you,” she told him, “for your thievery.”

  The old man rose and headed for the door, to drink his coffee in the night in peace.

  “The one who cooks,” he said, “don’t do no dishes.”