The Best Cook in the World: Tales from my Momma's Southern Table
Rick Bragg (Vintage, 2018)
Cookbooks, I'm told, vary along a spectrum from the dry, scientific, just-the-facts style to the ridiculously discursive, which lay an elaborate scene for each dish, including its provenance and what the weather was like when the writer first ate it. In The Best Cook in the World, Rick Bragg is surely setting the farthest boundary of the discursive style. Since I'm not really looking for a cookbook to cook out of, that suits me just fine.
In the first place, Bragg is not at all a cook, himself. He took a mind to interview his mother when she was in her late seventies about how she did what she did in the kitchen, in hopes of preserving some knowledge that might be going the way of the old growth forest. "She does not own a mixer or a blender. There is a forty-year-old lopsided sifter for her flour, and a hand-cranked can opener. She mixes with a bent fork and a big spoon, smelted, I believe during the Spanish-American War." The recipes in the books come in teaspoons and cups and such, for our convenience, but "[s]he cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as 'you know, hon, just some.'" And how long does it need to cook? Well, I'm sorry, but Margaret Bundrum Bragg doesn't know you, and she doesn't know how hot your oven runs. You'll know when it's done, if you're paying attention like you should.
In the second place, this is real country food. In the northeastern corner of Alabama, where Bragg's people come from, nobody needed to be told to eat locally, or 'farm-to-table'–that's just what food was. "The country people, the working people, subsisted mostly on beans, greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pork, and sometimes chicken, when one could be spared or perhaps stolen." And all this with plenty of butter; if not butter, bacon grease; and if not bacon grease, lard. You can only eat food this rich in fat if you have also chopped the wood for the stove to cook it on, or been out hauling logs or digging wells all day.
The family stories Bragg tells go back a hundred years, to when his great-grandfather James J. Bundrum went off to Georgia after (probably) killing another man in a drunken fight. He was a mean, violent old cuss, but he could cook like an angel, so in 1924 his son, Charlie, went and found him in the Georgia hills, and brought him back to teach Charlie's new wife how to cook. The sixteen-year-old bride, Ava, was just as hard-headed as the old man, and "it would be a fat lie to claim that her tutelage began with anything remotely akin to enthusiasm on her part." As iron sharpens iron, though, these two stubborn people eventually came to an understanding. He taught her biscuits and cornbread, and planting and foraging, and how to select the chicken whose day it is to die. "Spare the young when you can, and let them grow into fat hens or good roosters. It might be as tough as a two-by-twelve, but would be good for broth, or dumplings, or stew. And if you have to eat a chicken your kids have named, wait till they are visiting relatives, and blame the foxes."
That last is a level of sneakiness, not to say larceny, that runs in the family, because people have to eat. Where did that stoat come from, or those two pigs feet? (They come in fours.) And why was that cow trying to cross a railway trestle when it came to grief? These are mysterious matters, but in time they became the stuff of stories as delicious as the food they describe. Even the worst year, 1934, when Charlie was serving time for bootlegging, led to wonderful suppers consisting entirely of sweet potato pie or cobbler - cobbled together, indeed, by the best cook in the world. Bragg's own mother wasn't yet born in those days, but she would later work her magic keeping three sons alive on government commodities, and on what Bragg called in another book, "the table scraps of nothing."
Should you ever wish to wax elegiac about hillbillies, I'd suggest this or Bragg's earlier memoirs as a good place to begin. He treats these prideful, stubborn people both honestly and lovingly. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they cuss, sometimes they sing Hank Williams tunes over the stove, and you'll wish you were there to hear them, and to sit down over simple food, cooked well.
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January 1, 2021
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