I enjoyed all the fill in areas, talking about the family and all their quirks, and their ability to make some mighty fine sounding food with very little ingredients. This book focuses mainly on his mother’s cooking and even goes a bit further back to tell you where she received her cooking skills. If you’ve heard Rick Bragg before, you know what a joy it is to listen to his calm southern voice. Rick Bragg is incapable of writing a bad book Because good food always has a good story, and a recipe, writes Bragg, is a story like anything else. 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. The irresistible stories in this audiobook are of long memory - many of them predate the Civil War, handed down skillet by skillet, from one generation of Braggs to the next. 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. Her notion of farm-to-table is a flatbed truck. She cannot be pinned down on how long to bake corn bread ('about 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the mysteries of your oven'). She measures in 'dabs' and 'smidgens' and 'tads' and 'you know, hon, just some'. Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. Despite the amount of recipes here, though, it’s more a work of folklore and family stories than a pure cookbook, one as rich in humor as it is in taste.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, his mother. The recipes include southern staples that are still around – ham, black-eyed gravy – as well as more obscure ones, like a use for possum. But, he ruminates at the beginning, there’s a story in every recipe, and so here he shares a few dozen recipes and prefaces each with a story that brings the dish to mind – whether it was the first recipe his grandmother ever learned (butter rolls), pie recipes from a neighborly feud, or turtle soup made most memorable when an old monster of the Coosa river was finally taken down. The Best Cook in the World is his attempt to capture some of his mother’s culinary magic into book form, if nothing else so that her recipes won’t be lost with time. Bragg hails from Calhoun County, an area of the state rather different from my own – marked by the Appalachian foothills instead of wide-open cotton fields and belts of pine forest. One of my New Years resolutions is to cook more, and that has unexpectedly introduced me to Rick Bragg, a storyteller much favored by the reading public down here.

“Good stuff always has a story,” she said. The Best Cook in the World: Tales from my Momma’s Table

Rick bragg the best cook in the world