The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Table by Rick Bragg

 

Summary (from the publisher): From the beloved, best-selling author of All Over but the Shoutin', a delectable, rollicking food memoir, cookbook, and loving tribute to a region, a vanishing history, a family, and, especially, to his mother. Including seventy-four mouthwatering Bragg family recipes for classic southern dishes passed down through generations.

Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. She measures in "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" and "you know, hon, just some." She cannot be pinned down on how long to bake corn bread ("about 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the mysteries of your oven"). Her notion of farm-to-table is a flatbed truck. But she can tell you the secrets to perfect mashed potatoes, corn pudding, redeye gravy, pinto beans and hambone, stewed cabbage, short ribs, chicken and dressing, biscuits and butter rolls. Many of her recipes, recorded here for the first time, pre-date the Civil War, handed down skillet by skillet, from one generation of Braggs to the next. In The Best Cook in the World, Rick Bragg finally preserves his heritage by telling the stories that framed his mother's cooking and education, from childhood into old age. Because good food always has a good story, and a recipe, writes Bragg, is a story like anything else.

Review: "She cooked, in her first eighty years, more than seventy thousand meals, as basic as hot buttered biscuits with pear preserves or muscadine jelly, as exotic as tender braised beef tripe in white milk gravy, in kitchens where the only ventilation was the banging of the screen door. She cooked for people she'd just as soon have poisoned, and for the loves of her life" (4).

Part cookbook part family history, this book pays homage to the author's mother, who is known for her classic southern meals passed down through generations. The author himself describes his book by saying, "I guess you could 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" (27). She does not own any handwritten recipes but has honed them through experience and by learning beside other talented cooks who passed it down through generations. Each recipe in this book, written down for the first time, is prefaced by a family story that helps frame the food. This was such an excellent snapshot of life for working class people in Alabama in the twentieth century. 

I was surprised by how funny this book was! Many of the stories include humorous family incidents. And the recipes themselves include his mother's nonplussed asides and derogatory remarks about the mistakes other cooks make: "But you will need cornbread of some kind; when I asked my mother if hot rolls or the like would do, she looked at me, again, as if I had been abandoned on her doorstep. Some of my kinfolks, hungover, would sometimes eat their pintos with biscuits, or even sliced bread. She regards this as unholy" (86). Later, for a dish that requires a cast-iron skillet: "If you do not own a cast-iron skillet, shame on you; go get one" (90). 

But the stories are also quite profound. The author's mother learned how to cook from her mother, who in turn was taught by her father-in-law. It was this man who has become legend in the family, who taught simple meals with simple ingredients and seasoning, who believed that good food mattered: "He told the girl, in as few words as possible, that she had to think about what suppertime, and all meals, really meant to working people. It did not just mean food was on the table; it meant the backbreaking labor was done, at least for a while. These meals, dinnertime and especially suppertime, were as close as most of them would come to a worldly reward." It was good food that "made the difference between living life and merely enduring it" (61). 

This was a very long book. Some of the family stories read like fiction, as if the author has embellished and added a lot of details for events that happened long before he was born. But in the best way, as all infamous family stories become tall tales over time and much re-telling. Most of the food sounds delicious, but I was put off by the descriptions of catching and preparing possum. 

This is such a loving tribute to a region, to a family, and to simple yet delicious meals. While Bragg is very clear that he is no cook himself, he deeply appreciates his mother's talents. There is a bittersweet quality to the stories, as Bragg captures the stories and recipes as his mother's health is sharply declining and many other talented cooks in his family have already passed away. It is the end of an era, the end of wholesome food cooked at home, largely with ingredients you grew or killed yourself.  It made me wish I could join them at their table for a meal, especially for a biscuit hot out of the oven. 

Stars: 4