Mountain Food

All you get out of life is what you eat. Mike Stinson (1923-2017)

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The best memories of my recent trip to Mississippi are reuniting with family and the food. I last saw my cousin Jeannie in 1984. With 34 years to recount, we talked of triumphs and trials of family, toured Vicksburg to find the sights and sounds I remembered and some now lost, and shared numerous suppers (please do not call it dinner). My cousin was gracious enough to prepare my favorites including black-eyed peas and cornbread with porkchops, spaghetti, and red beans and rice with sausage.

One morning, we went to visit her mother (my Aunt) and the subject was food:

“Do you remember spaghetti with black eyed peas?” she asked.

“Spaghetti and black-eyed peas...? Now that you mentioned it, yes! And, I was going to remind you of your field peas and cornbread.” I answered.

All this was brought further into focus by my new favorite book: The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg. In a time when folks have become “foodies” and Americans spend more on eating out than groceries, Rick’s book is a refreshing and sobering look at “mountain food” in the rural south along the Alabama-Georgia border.

Rick Bragg writes in a folksy manner and intimacy that takes me back to my childhood and the stories my mother told of growing up in the depression.

Rick won me over when speaking of the greatest of all southern foods: cornbread:

Beans and cornbread are almost one word down here, so pair them, unless you are a Philistine.

And, his appreciation for the most important tool in the kitchen:

“If you do not own a cast-iron skillet, shame on you; go get one.”

As a southerner once removed (my parents are from Mississippi and I never lived there), I appreciated the distinction of southern food versus mountain food – a food dependent on biscuits, cornbread, beans and greens. Not only because it is healthy, but, as Rick writes, because:

No one, no one with cash money, the old man told his daughter-in-law, “has got no use for a helpless poor man. Greens is medicine. All greens is medicine. Beans will steady a body, but greens will cure one…but t’ain’t no reason it can’t taste good, too.”

Rick’s grandmother (the daughter-in-law) is featured in the book. She was taught to cook by her step father (the old man) who cooked for railroad workers. When Rick broached the subject of a book, she was skeptical:

“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 The Third-Best Cook on the Roy Webb Road, because that just didn’t sing.

Not convinced:

She wondered, aloud, if people outside the family even see value in food like hers anymore. “What if people don’t like it?” she asked. I told her some people don’t like Patsy Cline.

Here in Maryland, we are blessed with a delicacy that also provides a soulful fellowship. There is nothing more full filling (yuk, yuk) than gathering with family, friends, and steamed crabs. In fact, we do not call it supper or dinner, we call it a (Crab) Feast.

How about you? What is your favorite food? Share a story!

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