2018_September-October.indd

the Home Cooking issue

Rick Bragg and his mother, Margaret Bragg — photo by Terry Manier

which she does not approve of and secretly wishes would die, is shiny, new, complicated, and as hard to operate, she complains, as a rocket ship. “And it’s too quiet,” she says. “You don’t know when it’s working.” She preferred her old Frigidaire, purchased during the Johnson administration, even though she had to chip out her Popsicles with a butcher knife. It ran like an International Harvester, shook the floor every time it throbbed to life, and caused lights to flicker as far away as Knighten’s Crossroad. “I don’t like new stuff,” she likes to say, usually as she stirs a pot so battered and dimpled it will not sit flat on the stove and spins on the red-hot eye like it has been possessed. Her knives, most of them, are as old as she is, the wood handles worn to splinters, the blades razor-sharp and black with age. She had to dig her nine-inch iron skillet, her prized possession, from the ashes of her burnt-down house, in 1993.Well-meaning relatives offered to get her a new iron skillet, but she said she would have to season a new one to get it to

the telephone, she says, and smack him a good one. Progress is fine, in all. But with food, she says, you should not be able to taste it. You should taste the past. “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. “Your aunt Edna was a fine cook. Our momma was a fine cook.” I told her we couldn’t call it TheThird-Best Cook on the Roy Webb Road, because that just didn’t sing. She thought about that a bit, about its veracity, and her reputation. Her momma was an excellent Depression-era cook, but was widowed young and never had the variety of ingredients to flex her

cook right, and that could take the rest of her life. She would just keep the old one, thank you very much. How do you hurt a skillet, anyway, in a fire? Other well-meaning people send her gadgets and diamond-coated pans and garlic presses, and even cookbooks on Southern country food; she sells them at yard sales, next to her pickles and preserves, for ten cents apiece, and she worries that she is asking too much for something of so little practical use. That said, she recognizes progress when she sees it, or tastes it. Self-rising flour and cornmeal were perhaps the finest inventions since the polio vaccine, and even canned biscuits and store-bought pie shells have their limited use. Electricity was, she concedes, also a fine idea. But she would like to meet the man who invented

muscles in the kitchen the way her daughters would, in somewhat gentler, fatter times. Edna Sanders, my mother’s oldest sister, was a true master of Southern country food, in every way, who could grow it from the dirt, fish for it, run it down and kill it, skin it, and make gravy from it, on dry land or floating on a houseboat or bateau. “I guess me and Edna did run a pretty good race,” my mother said, her humility slipping a little bit. I told her I believed she was the best cook in the world, and I got to say. “Well,” she said, “I did wear out eighteen stoves.” I told her there were only thirteen stoves, off and on, there in the weeds. “I wore out some since then,” she said. I could tell, after a while, that I was beginning to wear her down.

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY

SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2018