The Best Cook in the World

 

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.

 

Any Good Books, by email

January 1, 2021

 

Whose Story Is This?

 Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

Rebecca Solnit (2019, Haymarket Books)

     In these essays, once again, Rebecca Solnit has things to say that will be obvious only after she has said them. She's making a historical record of the changes we're living through now, because we won't remember. "Forgetting is a problem; words matter, partly as a means to help us remember. When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, made, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions." Indeed, people are still arguing and shifting our assumptions: we're nowhere near the end of history. Nor are we near the beginning of history: the Me Too movement would not have happened without other events and movements going back decades.

     One of the sea changes we are now experiencing is a dramatic widening of whose story we are telling, or hearing. The history of America has so often, for so long, included only white people, nearly all of them men. Even outside the corridors of power, there's often an elision of non-white Americans in the eyes of the media. "In the aftermath of the 2016 election, we were told that we needed to be nicer to the white working class, which reaffirmed the message that whiteness and the working class were the same thing and made the vast nonwhite working class invisible or inconsequential. We were told that Trump voters were the salt of the earth and the authentic sufferers, even though poorer people tended to vote for the other candidate." We know we're not going to change people by yelling at them that they are racists, but that doesn't necessarily make it healthy to pretend that they aren't.

    One way to stay safe when you're powerless is to pretend not to know what you know. House-cleaners and secretaries keep all kinds of secrets, as a condition of their jobs. This skill may amount to a gift for invisibility: how much did Pullman porters overhear when the white passengers assumed nobody was listening? Meanwhile, "the powerful swathe themselves in obliviousness in order to avoid the pain of others and their own relationship to that pain. It is they from whom much is hidden, and they who are removed from the arenas of the poor and powerless." If they don't know that their students or employees are being sexually harassed, they don't have to do anything about it.

      Other people tell lies on purpose, abusing their power to be believed. "What's clear now is that...a minority of us think they can enforce a version of reality divorced from factuality, and that they always have. It corrupts everything around them, and the corruption begins with them." The current presidency is one example, of course. Black Lives Matter exists to shine a light on other examples, cases when the police believe that their version of events is the only one that will be heard, even when there is videotape that contradicts it.

     Another way that lies affect our public lives is the promulgation of anti-abortion laws that contain willful misrepresentations of pregnancy and childbirth. "Sometimes the mostly white, mostly male legislators pushing these lies seem like amoral strategists. Sometimes they just seem like idiots." Ohio Republicans introduced a law instructing doctors to treat life-threatening ectopic pregnancies by re-implanting the embryo in the womb, a purely imaginary procedure. "So this is a bill to force a procedure that doesn't exist to save an embryo or fetus who's doomed while risking the life of the mother, who can be saved. It isn't pro-life, it is pro-lie."

In the long arc that bends toward justice, lies and secrets don't get the last word. Anita Hill spoke up, and so did Christine Blasey Ford, even in the face of threats of violence, and the near-certainty that the Senate would write their stories off. A study from 2003 showed that three out of four women who reported workplace harassment faced professional or personal repercussions. Solnit wonders, "What would women's lives be like, what would our roles and accomplishments be, what would our world be, without this terrible punishment that looms over our daily lives? It would surely rearrange who holds power, and how we think of power, which is to say that everyone's life might be different. We would be a different society." 

 

If we keep fighting, it could still happen.

 

 

Any Good Books, December 2020

 

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

 This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2013)

      This is my perfect Ann Patchett book. Though I like her writing, I found Bel Canto, the novel she is best known for, so stressful that I've never read another one. In her essay about fiction writing, she makes the reason clear: she read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in high school. "That novel's basic plot–a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement–became the story line for just about everything I've ever written."

     Lucky for me, this collection of essays represents writing Patchett did to pay the bills, on the way to making a living from her novels. (She had the credentials to teach literature and writing, but that didn't leave nearly enough mental energy for creativity; and when she waited tables, she was simply too tired.) She cut her teeth in Seventeen, and graduated to Vogue, Elle, and GQ as her teenage days receded farther into the past. She cultivated a reputation as a reliable free-lancer, able to deliver copy on time and at the required length. In addition to the discipline of writing professionally, she developed a thick skin about the editorial process. "Somewhere along the line I learned to experience only the smallest, most private stabbing sensation when I watched my best sentences cut from an article because they did not advance the story. Ultimately this skill came to benefit my fiction as well." Not that editors cut her fiction, but she could see for herself what kept the story moving and what didn't.

     Essays from the latter part of that career, when she had more say over her topics, amount to a catalog of her life and loves: her grandmother, her dog, an elderly nun who was her first-grade teacher. To all of these she brings a quality of love, care, and attention that turn out to be what life is made of. When the Washington Post Magazine sends her to write about trying to join the Los Angeles Police Department, she brings an ear for story, and a delightful brio about climbing over six-foot walls. She's a lover of books, going so far as to invest in an independent bookstore in Nashville, which is still going strong.

      Even though novels aren't ordinarily my cup of tea, Patchett's essay about writing them is full of interest, and applicable to many other kinds of artistic work. On avoiding the distractions of novelty: "I made a pledge that I wouldn't start the sexy new novel I imagined until I had finished the tired old warhorse I was dragging myself through at present." On writing the books she wants to read: "If you wind up boring yourself, you can pretty much bank on the fact you're going to bore your reader." On challenging herself: "Make it hard. Set your sights on something that you aren't quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually. You can also go for broke and take on all three." On sticking to it: "The lesson is this: The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page."

 

       The title essay is actually, and wonderfully, a story about divorce; not just her own disastrous first marriage, but her parents' and her grandmother's. "We weren't the products of our parents' happy marriages; we were the flotsam of their divorces. In the house of my mother and stepfather, my sister and I were the spoils of war." The titular happy marriage came after an eleven year courtship, during which Patchett steadily declared that she was not interested in getting married. Was she wasting time, all that time, or did everything turn out as it was meant to? Does it matter? "We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to."

 

Published by email, November 1, 2020

Surfing the Waves of Alzheimer's

Surfing the Waves of Alzheimers: Principles of Caregiving That Kept Me Upright

Renée Brown Harmon, MD (2020, Many Hats Publishing)

        Renée Harmon lived a perfectly charmed life, until her husband started losing his mind. Harvey and Renée went to college together, then through medical school and residency, getting married after the first year of med school. They went into family practice together near Birmingham, Alabama, where they had both grown up (and where I went to high school with Harvey.) The family grew with the practice; they worked out ways to alternate staying home with the two little girls, and later to trade off school pickups and after-school activities. One would cook, the other wash dishes; one would make breakfast, the other lunch. Renée made time for reading, piano playing, and quilting; Harvey trained to run marathons.

        In December of 2009, while the family was vacationing in Costa Rica, she discovered that Harvey's memory and cognition had developed big holes. He got lost on the trails of the resort, and he couldn't follow instructions, because he couldn't remember them. Renée was concerned, then alarmed, and started doing online research. Wasn't forty-nine too young for Alzheimer's? It's rare, but not unheard-of. And what would they do if he couldn't practice medicine? That first year of waiting, watching, and testing was difficult, not least because Harvey was unwilling to talk about it. He did submit to testing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; the results were awful and Renée let the state board of medicine know, leading to a sudden, devastating retirement.

        Renée describes this book as a teaching memoir, in the sense that she is passing on what she learned over the next eight years, in ways that should be helpful to all kinds of caregivers. The chapter headings tell quite a lot of the story in themselves: "If You've Seen One Case of Alzheimer's, You've Seen One Case of Alzheimer's;" "Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First;" "Enter Their World;" "Acknowledge Your (Ambiguous) Grief." Each chapter closes with Practices for contemplation, whether that be through journaling, or through conversation with a counselor or support group. It's potentially difficult emotional work; the memoir's through-line makes it clear that Renée experienced lots of ups and downs.

         In the first place, she couldn't discuss her loss with her life partner, because he was protecting himself from thinking about it (or, maybe, that kind of self-awareness was the first thing to go.) She had the wherewithal to build a robust support team: Harvey's medical team; legal and financial experts; counseling help and a caregivers' support group; and the people she hired as caregivers and companions for Harvey, both before and after he went into residential care. With experience, she became more willing to ask for and accept help with simple, day to day affairs as well: who'd like to go with Harvey to walk the dog? Who'd like to help him cook, as long as he was able to wield a spoon? Who'd like to sit with him in church, while Renée played keyboards with the ensemble there? Letting people help, when they were so willing, turned out to be a mutual gift.

           Of course, Alzheimer's is incurable, and fatal. We follow Harvey and Renée through his forgetting how to shower and dress, and his gradual retreat into silence. She had good and bad experiences with nursing home care, especially during the period when he was strong, and strong-willed, but not aware of why he was being asked to do things: "Imagine yourself waking up every morning in a hotel in a foreign country where you don't know the language. Now imagine that a stranger walks into your room, and in the native language, tells you that he is there to give you a shower and change your clothes. As this stranger starts to disrobe you, what would you do?" What's termed 'resistance to care' is entirely predictable, though it often presents the challenge of keeping both patient and caregiver safe.

            She kept hearing, 'Renée, you are so strong!' "I guess I am, but what other option was there? I wasn't going to run away. I didn't cry in public often, so most people didn't really know how devastating it all was to me. And I had to be strong for our daughters. They were so young. And for Harvey. I couldn't very well dissolve into tears when his fate was so much worse than mine." She got good help, she took good care of herself, and she always led with love. In memory of the smart, kind young man Harvey was, I'm surpassingly grateful.

 

Here's more of Renee's story: https://www.reneeharmon.com/media/ 

Any Good Books, October 2020

 

How the South Won the Civil War

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

Heather Cox Richardson (Oxford University Press, 2020)

The paradox expressed in Heather Cox Richardson's subtitle does indeed run through all of American history. We have always pretended to a democratic ideal that, in practice, has some significant limitations. Richardson traces the original impulse to John Locke's 1690 Treatises on Government. As a Puritan, Locke believed that each person had a duty to seek a relationship with God, without the mediation of a priestly hierarchy; in that case, he wondered, would God really make one man more valuable and important than another? Conditions in the American colonies, especially the basic fact that they were several weeks' travel from the seat of power, "began to align colonials with Enlightenment political ideas simply out of practicality."

After Thomas Paine's Common Sense swept through the colonies,in 1776, Thomas Jefferson took the next logical step with the Declaration of Independence. "It was not simply an act of rebellion against a particular king; it was an act of rebellion against all kings, a resounding declaration that all men were created equal and had an equal right to have a say in their government."

At the same time, the economy and politics of the colonies had been organized around denying many people those equal rights. Especially in the cotton-growing region, men of property enslaved other people to do the hardest, heaviest work, and the slaves could never be considered equal. "How did slave owners make sense of that crucial contradiction?" asks Richardson? "They didn't. In their minds, freedom and slavery depended on each other." Virginia maintained a hierarchy based on denying the humanity of the enslaved, and James Madison rigged the constitution to protect the Virginian system. Universal white male suffrage was indeed a radical departure, but an oligarchy of wealth was already arising to replace that of aristocratic blood; in the scheme of things, the wealthy planters only had to reassure poor whites that they were superior to the black people, though they might never put together enough wealth to actually exert any influence. It's a game of 'let's you and him fight' that has never lost its salience, though the teams have sometimes changed their names.

What's new to me in this book is the place of the West in the North versus South story; the standard mythology of Texas as a place for independent men on empty land paves over a huge amount of contention between Mexicans, Americans, and various other groups of inhabitants. Free and slave states were inevitably in conflict about whose culture and economy would hold sway in the settlement of the West; the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854 made the Civil War inevitable.

As the South had maintained the pleasant fiction that plantation owners were simply farmers, the mythology of the West posited hardy individuals, who made their living without government help or interference. In fact, mining, cattle, and oil grew up as capital-intensive businesses that rewarded oligarchy, which gave those states a common interest with the South. And while California did not have a substantial number of black people (because slavery was banned) it did have Chinese, Indian and Mexican populations who were excluded from the freedoms accorded to whites. And so it goes.

In the 1950's California was the seedbed of a 'conservatism' that claimed the central government was a very bad thing, and in this, the South was once again a natural ally. The white power structure didn't particularly want to educate black children; to be told they must do so by a bunch of elitists from Washington was all the more galling. And while California pumped out movies celebrating individualism as the essence of liberty, it was getting rich on the largesse of the Federal government. "California alone received more than twice as much annual defense spending as any other state; in the 1950's the Department of Defense poured more than $50 billion into it."

She traces the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley down into the present day, by way of Phillis Schlafly, Roger Ailes, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, who turned the rich loose to get really rich, and leave the rest of us behind. Any suggestion that that might not be fair, or moral, was–and is–met with cries of 'Socialism!' And so on, through Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Rupert Murdoch, a long parade of anti-democratic activists.

The story of how oligarchy is systematically sabotaging democracy makes grim reading, but the clarity of it is bracing. This is bad news, but good information. Read it and weep, and then get to work.

 

 

 

Any Good Books, via email,

September 1 2020