The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Southern Table: A Memoir and Cookbook

by Rick Bragg Narrated by Rick Bragg

Overview

From the beloved, best-selling author of All Over but the Shoutin', a delectable, rollicking food memoir, cookbook, and loving tribute to a region, a vanishing history, a family, and, especially, to his mother.

Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. She measures in "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" and "you know, hon, just some." She cannot be pinned down on how long to bake corn bread ("about 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the mysteries of your oven"). Her notion of farm-to-table is a flatbed truck. But she can tell you the secrets to perfect mashed potatoes, corn pudding, redeye gravy, pinto beans and hambone, stewed cabbage, short ribs, chicken and dressing, biscuits and butter rolls.*The irresistible stories in this audiobook are of long memory -- many of them pre-date the Civil War, handed down skillet by skillet, from one generation of Braggs to the next. 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. Because good food always has a good story, and a recipe, writes Bragg, is a story like anything else.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Lisa Abend

You approach a book with the subtitle "Tales From My Momma's Table" with trepidation, expecting treacly bits of maternal wisdom stirred into a creamy bowl of heartwarming anecdotes. Happily, Bragg doesn't truck in treacle. Instead, he delivers rollicking stories from rural Alabama about a possibly murderous great-grandfather who knows how to conjure dessert from a bit of flour and a tin of condensed milk, a grandmother who takes unseemly pleasure in choosing which chicken's neck to wring and a cousin who cusses like a stevedore as she pats out a meatloaf. Bragg writes stories about family, in other words, and he does it better than almost anybody else…Rather than a cookbook, this is a glorious collection of tales about how one particular family makes sense of who they are.

Publishers Weekly - Audio

★ 06/25/2018
Cookbooks don’t translate easily to the audiobook format, but Bragg, reading in a friendly Southern drawl, manages to effortlessly transform this collection of his mother’s Southern comfort food recipes into an utterly captivating listening experience. This is largely due to the narrative component of the book, which includes stories from Bragg’s mother’s life in the South and is intertwined with 75 recipes for dishes including “fried chicken, potato salad, and slab of pie,” which Bragg’s grandmother served his grandfather at a barn dance and which helped to seal her fate as his future wife. The recipes themselves are rooted in the oral tradition, and many of them include measurements such as “enough” and temperature guidelines such as “you’ll know.” Bragg clearly developed each recipe while observing his mother in the kitchen. He captures his mother’s razor-sharp judgment and confidence as well as her frequent disclaimer of “Some people may do it that way, but I don’t.” As with his previous audiobooks, Bragg renders the banter of his blue-collar Southern family with pride and heart. This is that rare food-centric audiobook to savor. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 01/01/2018
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. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

Wonderful, rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales about how generations of Bragg’s extended family survived from one meal to the next.” —USA Today

“A glorious collection of tales. . . . Bragg writes stories about family . . . and he does it better than almost anybody else. His just happens to be a family of excellent cooks who do much of their relating through the food they grow, hunt, prepare and occasionally steal.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A tribute, a monument, to [Bragg’s] mother and her people, captured here in solid recipes for good food, charming details and funny conversations.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“A loving, recipe-filled ode.” —Garden & Gun
 
“Put together, all those stories read like a lush and lyrical novel, sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing. . . . Bragg’s deep love for his mother, and her cooking, shines throughout.” —Tampa Bay Times

“Rick Bragg serves up a feast. . . . A love song to the woman who raised him and who has been his greatest muse.” —The New Orleans Advocate
 
“The stories, as much as the portrait they paint of [Bragg’s] family and their times, are baroque and profane, simultaneously moral and amoral, loving and blunt.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“One of my favorite writers of all time. . . . Both an incredibly evocative portrait of [Bragg’s] mother and a collection of his mother’s recipes.” —Ed Levine, Serious Eats
 
“Bragg has a bone-deep empathy for people who endure hard times. . . . [He is] a leisurely, soulful storyteller, a reporter with a poet’s eye, and an appreciative diner. Most of all . . . he’s a ferociously devoted son.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“Affectionate, funny, and beautifully written. . . . Heartfelt, often hilarious stories from an Alabama kitchen, a place from which issue wondrous remembrances and wondrous foods alike.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“An engaging read about food that is dear to me.” —Hugh Acheson, Food & Wine
 
“A testament that cooking and food still bind culture together.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Many of the tales Bragg tells are ones he remembers hearing from his family, which must have been full of the best storytellers of all time. . . . [The Best Cook in the World] winds through family stories, memories of his mother and recipes of their food.” —Post and Courier (Charleston)
 
“[Bragg] 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.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“One of the finest American writers of our time.” —Billy Watkins, The Clarion Ledger (Jackson, MS)
 
“Bragg writes with a powerful, page-turning punch. The result is unimaginably delectable.” —BookPage
 
“The Best Cook in the World is a cookbook, but not like one of those old Betty Crocker volumes. . . . Bragg’s work is more a narrative cookbook that’s heavy on stories about growing up poor, wearing out stoves and the role food plays both in his family and his native South, which gets a little more like everywhere else each time Domino’s delivers a pizza out in the county.” —Associated Press

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

Prepare to hunger for genuine Southern fare as author Rick Bragg pays tribute to his delightful mother—and to the food and storied culture of the region itself. In a Southern drawl, Bragg offers up a memoir that’s wrapped around recipes and the stories they’re rooted in. Describing a long family history of preparing the ultimate slow food requires an unhurried narration and many side journeys, so this audiobook is not for the impatient. Those who settle in will feast for hours at Bragg’s memory buffet while meeting his colorful ancestors—and of course, his momma, the best cook in the world. Listening to the recipes is itself entertaining; Bragg fully captures his mom’s colorful directions and commentary: “Grits is to carry the other flavors of stuff . . . Grits ain’t nuthin’ just left by theirself.” J.C.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-01-23
Heartfelt, often hilarious stories from an Alabama kitchen, a place from which issue wondrous remembrances and wondrous foods alike.Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Bragg (My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South, 2015, etc.) matches the tales he assembled about his father in The Prince of Frogtown (2008) with an equally rough-and-tumble collection of folk wisdom served up courtesy of his mother, who "cooked for people she'd have just as soon poisoned, and for the loves of her life." There's an aching nostalgia throughout, not just for years gone, but also for a way of life that seems to have faded away, a Southernism of which "our food may be the best part left." It's a food that African-Americans call "soul food" because it transcends bodily pain and torment and, Bragg writes, offers "a richness for a people without riches." Over the course of this long narrative, the author's mother turns over the stage to other relatives, and webs of stories are spun, to say nothing of well-observed notes on old-fashioned Southern foodways: raccoon is stinky, snapping turtle is sometimes eaten, "but that, too, is complicated," and tomatoes are to be cherished if you can find one that tastes like a tomato, to say nothing of a chicken that tastes like a chicken. Bragg's mother is a worthy guide throughout, unyielding in her judgment: "Use brown eggs when you can get 'em," she warns. "They're more like real eggs." In this inauthentic world, there's nothing like some comfort food: greens, grits with just a little hint of cheese, fried chicken, and black-eyed peas—not to mention ham and redeye gravy ("smoked ham steaks can be used as a shortcut, if you are a Philistine"), government cheese, fried bologna sandwiches, and fried okra (not battered, since it "defeats the purpose of fresh food").Affectionate, funny, and beautifully written: a book for every fan of real food.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171850678
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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Prologue:
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Excerpted from "The Best Cook in the World"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Rick Bragg.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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