2018_September-October.indd

BOOK EXCERPT

“ ‘What would you even call it?’ she asked me, of a cookbook on her food. ‘The Best Cook in the World,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even the best cook that lived on our road,’ she said. I told her we couldn’t call it The Third-Best Cook on the Roy Webb Road, because that just didn’t sing.”

H er food is not the world-class cuisine of Charleston, Savannah, or New Orleans, not reliant on the Gulf, or the Atlantic, or estuaries of the coast and the Low Country. It is the food of the high places, of the foothills, pine barrens, and slow brown rivers. It is not something done by the great chefs in Atlanta or Birmingham for people who spend more on a table for four than a working family spends on groceries for a month. It was never intended for everyone, but for people who once set a trotline, or slung a wrench, or rose from a seat in the city auditorium to testify during an all-night gospel singing. Her brothers would pitch legendary drunks when they were younger men, and would inevitably wind up on our couch to sleep it off. My brothers and I, little boys then, used to stand and stare at them, thinking perhaps they might be dead. But my mother cooked for them as if they were sultans or senators, cooked to bring them back to life. Sometimes, if they had the terrible shakes, she had to help them to the table for plates of baby limas, backbone, corn muffins, stewed cabbage, and tea as black as her coffee, but not so sweet as to be silly. My uncle Jimbo is not a gourmet, or an unbiased and veracious critic; he once ate a bologna sandwich sitting on a dead mule, to win a bet, and can out-lie any man I have ever known. But he would tell her, hot tears rolling down his cheeks, that he had not eaten stewed cabbage that fine since his momma was alive.My mother never needed much validation beyond that, no grander praise. It truly never occurred to her to open that lore to a wider world and share her skill with cooks she never even met, to translate into the twenty-first century recipes from a time when marching off to war meant foraging for shell corn in the Cumberland, and people still believed that if you chopped a snake in two with a hoe the pieces would rejoin in a circle and roll off like a hula hoop. It would be like singing a song to people in a language they do not understand, or one they knew long ago, as children, but can no longer recall. “A person can’t cook from a book,” she told me. Her mother, Ava, baked tea cakes and put them in a clean white flour sack to keep them soft and warm, because even a Philistine knows they taste better, somehow, lifted from that warm cloth. My mother would feel foolish, she said, trying to explain why such things should be honored in a modern world. “A person,” she said, “can’t cook from numbers.” She believes a person learns to cook by stinging her hands red with okra, singeing her knuckles on a hot lid, and nicking her fingers on an ancient knife as she cuts up a chicken, because a whole chicken tastes better than one dissected in a plant and trucked in from Bogalusa. You learn by tasting and feeling and smelling and listening and remembering, and burning things now and then, and singing the right songs. Jimmie Rodgers, who sang of trains, chain

gangs, and the shooting of untrue women, lived in our kitchen. “We had a whole big ol’ box of his records that we played on the Victrola,” before the awful summer of ’47, when they warped and melted in the heat. The great Hank Williams lived there, and the Dixie Echoes, Patsy Cline, the Carter Family, and anyone from the Heavenly Highway Holiness Hymnal. “I guess you can learn to cook from a book,” she relented, “if it was a real, real old book. “It takes an old person to cook, or ...” She struggled to find her meaning, but the closest she could come was a young person with old ways, with an old soul. The recipes inside her head come from across an ocean, from the French countryside, where my mother’s people once lived, and from the Irish, English, Scots,Germans, even the Nordic people. Others came from those already here, from the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee, as the blood of them all mingled over the passing years. There is a recipe for coconut cake that, we are pretty sure, tumbled straight from God. “Young people can cook some stuff, I suppose,” she said, grudgingly, “but, you know, they’d have to go to school.” I told her we could preserve it all, dish by dish, not by doing merely a litany of recipes, as in a traditional cookbook, but by telling the stories that framed her cooking life and education, from child- hood to old age.The stories behind the food would not be difficult to gather; they well up here, from a dark, bottomless pool. The harder part would be the recipes themselves, the translation from the old ways, and her own peculiarities in the kitchen. “Does that mean I am peculiar?” she asked, when I read her this. “Well,” I said, “yes.” She does not own a measuring cup. She does not own a measuring spoon. She cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as “you know, hon, just some.” In her lexicon, there is “part of a handful” and “a handful” and “a real good handful,” which I have come to understand is roughly a handful, part of another handful, and “some.” It would be romantic to believe she can tell, to the tiniest degree, the difference in the weight of a few grains of salt or pepper in one cupped hand, but it would be just as foolish to say she guesses at the amounts, or cooking times, or ingredients. She just remembers it, all of it, even if she cannot always remember when or where she learned, and you can believe that or not, too. She can tell if her cornbread is done, and all the rest, by their aromas alone — that, or the angels mumble it straight into her ear. It’s not the clock that tells you when it’s done; the food does. 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. We got her a microwave once, which lasted one week before the first nuclear accident and resulting blaze; I am pretty sure she did it on purpose. Her stainless refrigerator,

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