Times are a little tough at our house right now. Neither one of us makes a lot of money, but years of experience have taught us how to walk between the raindrops and make it from one month to the next with a fair amount of grace.
I cook a lot at home, more when we’re facing lean times. When I know that I have to keep us fed on not much money, I fall back on my grandmother’s recipes.
She taught me to cook. When I was a kid, my twin brother and I spent long summer weeks and Christmas vacations with my mother’s parents, a rural mail-carrier and a textile mill worker in the mountains of north-west North Carolina.
I didn’t care much for quail hunting or fishing for bass and rainbow trout like my brother and grandfather. Guns were loud and terrifying, fields were gross and full of mud. Also, little David just wasn’t great at killing things. I shuddered when pushing worms on to fishhooks, cried quietly when stuffing bloody limp birds into the game sack.
Turned out, though, that I was really good at baking cakes. So rather than go shiver on frozen mornings in a deer blind praying I wouldn’t have to pull the trigger on this shotgun, I found myself more and more in the kitchen with my grandmother, watching her soft, arthritis-bent hands drizzling corn starch into the filling for a lemon chess pie.
“The more you pay, the worse you eat,” she would say. “Mema” had a near-total disdain for restaurants, particularly expensive ones. I told her once that I’d been to a “soul food” restaurant in New York City where they charged six dollars for a serving of collard greens and she was aghast.
“Somebody needs to tell those people that they can pick their own collards for free on the side of the road!” she said, disgusted. And it’s true. Collards are a weed, but they’re a weed that’s packed with iron, calcium and other nutrients, so my dirt-poor ancestors learned how to cook them and make them taste delicious.
My great-grandmother died when my grandmother – the oldest of nine – was 11 years old. As the eldest daughter, Edith Ray Hall was expected to take on all of the child-rearing duties, grocery shopping (such as it was in the 1930s), cleaning and cooking. She did all of this while attending school and then working full time. I have her high school graduation certificate, which she signed in perfect rounded copperplate script on 6 June 1936.
Throughout the Great Depression and the privations of the second world war, she learned how to make a little food go a long way. Vegetables were cheap, so she cooked a lot of them, mostly only using small amounts of meat for seasoning. Roast beef was a twice-a-month luxury, but there was nothing she couldn’t do with a chicken, every part of it. Nothing went to waste.
I remember once when I was little, I went to scrape some leftover food off my plate and into the trash and she stopped my hand.
“We don’t never, ever throw food away in this house,” she said, pointing at the pot of scraps kept each day for my grandfather’s two bird dogs, Dixie and Sport. “Never, ever. If you’re not going to eat it, give it to the dogs.”
Now I understand that for her food was sacred. The love she felt for us was just as much an ingredient as the flour, salt and pepper breading her fried chicken or the candied pecans on top of her baked sweet potatoes. Once food had passed through her hands, it was sanctified by love.
I feel connected to my grandmother and to her mother and to hundreds of years of family and regional history when I’m in my kitchen making country food. In the delicious smells and the intoxicating blends of flavors on flavors is a long tale of victory over hard times, of conquering starvation – of not just surviving, but flourishing and finding joy and pleasure in every meal of every day.
A big pot of pinto beans are, as Steinbeck said, “a roof over your stomach. Beans are warm cloak against economic cold.” Add rice and a steaming hunk of buttermilk cornbread – two ingredients, buttermilk and hot-rise corn meal – and it’s a nourishing, satisfying meal. Add slices of home-grown tomato and it’s heaven on a plate. Total cost to feed four people: under $10.
From my mother and grandmother I learned to take real satisfaction in feeding people. My grandmother would beam with pleasure over a heavily laden table and say: “Do you know what this would cost at the cafe?”
I never knew what cafe in particular she had in mind, but I knew that the question was totally not fair, because no restaurant anywhere can cook like a grandmother.
But now, thanks to her guidance and years of practice, I can.
