The Best Cook in the World
Tales from My Momma's Southern Table: A Memoir and Cookbook
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4.4 • 36 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Part cookbook, part memoir, these “rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales” (USA Today) are the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s loving tribute to the South, his family and, especially, to his extraordinary mother.
Here are irresistible stories and recipes from across generations. They come, skillet by skillet, from Bragg’s ancestors, from feasts and near famine, from funerals and celebrations, and from a thousand tales of family lore as rich and as sumptuous as the dishes they inspired. Deeply personal and unfailingly mouthwatering, The Best Cook in the World is a book to be savored.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For Southerners, notes Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin'), every recipe is a story, not simply a list of ingredients, and he cannily shares the stories of the meals of his mother's Alabama upbringing. For the book, Bragg asked his mother to share the secrets of her cooking, only to realize that she follows no rules or recipes: "She cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as you know, hon, just some.' " Bragg recalls his grandmother Ava's first real feast cornbread, carrot and red cabbage slaw, creamed onions, boiled red potatoes and butter, and pinto beans and ham bone and the impression it made on his mother. Bragg intersperses his memoir with recipes, including for pinto beans and ham bone (a main course, not a side), collard greens (which are sweeter after the first frost), pan-roasted pig's feet, cracklin' corn bread, baked possum, and pecan pie. In a disturbing though hilarious story, his father, speeding down a country road so he can make it home in time for supper, hits a body and leaves it there (it turns out that the body was that of a dog that miraculously survived and made its way home). Bragg's entertaining memoir is a testament that cooking and food still bind culture together.
Customer Reviews
I loved this book, and cannot wait to read the next one. Thank- you, Mr. Rick Bragg.
I loved everything about this book. What I loved the most, is that an adoring son spent precious time with his beloved Mother, recorded her life and important life work, utilizing his amazing craft of Southern Storytelling and writing.
This book is a gift to his Mother, his family and...... to anyone who reads it. It is truly a labor of love.
Horrible
I hate it
MKL
Excellent!!!