![]() ![]() “It’s a hot biscuit opened up, covered with room-temperature tomato (you don’t want a cold tomato), drizzled over with red-eye gravy, which is hot grease from frying pork or ham mixed with hot brewed coffee. “It has all but vanished from kitchens, even in the working, blue-collar South,” he explains. There’s one dish that evokes Bragg’s Southern childhood above all others: red-eye gravy over diced tomato and biscuit. Am I stripping away our credibility here? Well, I just think it’s all part of the adventure!” ![]() It felt inevitable that in Rick Bragg’s new food memoir I would come across a recipe instruction like this one: If you want crispier possum, bake uncovered for about 30 minutes. Because good food always has a good story, and a recipe, writes Bragg, is a story like anything else. Mostly it was her sitting there, talking me through recipes, and me, a non-cook, trying to make those translations. The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Table BY Rick Bragg. 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. “She would say ‘a good handful’ or ‘a little of this’ or ‘some’ - well, what in the hell is ‘some’? And how long do you cook it? ‘Until it’s done.’ Well, when is it done? ‘When it smells right!’” He adds, “Some chefs have asked me if we did recipe testing. “She got mad at me more than once,” Bragg recalls. ![]() Since his mother came from a generation of cooks who never measured, let alone wrote anything down, coaxing recipes from her wasn’t easy. ![]()
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