The book includes 75 recipes, which read like oral tradition even though they’re written down (one ingredient list includes both lard and luck.) The stories surrounding each meal are just as rich ... By turns grim and funny, he can describe the flavors of raccoon, possum, bear, even squirrel brains (cook them with scrambled eggs, 'to cut down on that metal taste,' his mother advises), making it clear that they’re desperation meals for people with no better options. He also recognizes how “blue-collar Southern cooks” use time and skill to transform humble ingredients into rapturous feasts. Most of the book’s recipes are gloriously tempting examples from that canon – hand-mixed biscuits swimming in sweet cinnamon-scented milk, ham and redeye gravy, pecan pie, cracklin’ cornbread, even creamed onions that sound simple but are harder than they look to cook to perfection ... the characters remain indelible, as when Bragg writes how he sometimes sees an old woman tottering along the roadside, stuffing poke salad greens into a burlap bag. He slows the car to make sure it’s not his mother. At times, it is.
The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Table...is a collection of stories — wonderful, rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales about how generations of Bragg’s extended family survived from one meal to the next ... the reader can skip the recipes altogether and concentrate on the stories wrapped lovingly around them — and still get a cooking lesson, how Margaret Bragg made plain food, well-seasoned, taste like a preview of kingdom come.
Anyone who has tried to 'read' a cookbook will understand that a memoir full of recipes and frequent digressions on topics like the perfect tomato, the benefits of pokeweed and the value of a well-cooked possum will take some patience ... Readers may occasionally be tempted to skip over a recipe to more storytelling about his family and their adventures. But be sure to mark the pages on recipes of interest.The concept of a food memoir can be challenging and probably would not work in the hands of a less skilled storyteller. Those who thumb through cookbooks at length will probably sail through the recipe sections. And Bragg often uses the recipes to launch into another yarn. What he does best is present the memorable characters of his youth in a continuing narrative from one of his books to the next.
Bragg’s translation of the uncertainties of his mother’s cooking into modern, scientific recipes may sap some spontaneity, but he generously preserves a way of life that has endured in America’s backcountry. His prose evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of a rural Alabama kitchen and transforms apparent poverty into soul-satisfying plenty.
You can read this book for the stories, or the recipes, or for the language. Or for all of the above. It’s likely that you’ll find this book mouth-watering and likely, too, that you’ll want to eat traditional Southern cooking of the sort that Rick Bragg’s 'momma' made ... The Best Cook in the World celebrates poor Southern whites, though to read about the food that the author’s family ate most of the time they might not have thought of themselves as poor, or even as white. There’s very little in this book about skin color, race, and African Americans. One wonders why Bragg didn’t venture into the complex and tangled arena of black/white relationships in the Old South ... In addition to the bragging, there’s Bragg family lore and legend. Still, there are plenty of family photos to go with the family legends, so you know the people are real, or at least as real as a photograph can be ... The book definitely conjures a world with its own sights, sounds, and smells.
It took no more than a few pages for Bragg’s storytelling to seduce and to realize that even his recipes are more story than scientific formula. Each of his attempts to gather details about a new dish sends Margaret and her siblings off into another elaborate yarn ... The stories, as much as the portrait they paint of his family and their times, are baroque and profane, simultaneously moral and amoral, loving and blunt. Bragg, the recipe collector, may be honoring the simplest of food, but Bragg the storyteller knows that every tale is better for the diversions and incongruous details he lards it with.
Heartfelt, often hilarious stories from an Alabama kitchen, a place from which issue wondrous remembrances and wondrous foods alike ... Affectionate, funny, and beautifully written: a book for every fan of real food.
