Rick Bragg’s The Best Cook in the World Emily Blejwas (bio) The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table. By Rick Bragg. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. 512 pp. $28.95. ISBN 978-1-4000-4041-4. While reading this book, I kept picturing people picking it up in an upscale gift shop. I imagined them smiling at the sweet girls on the cover and recollecting their own childhoods, their grannies, all the good times. Those things are certainly here, in these pages. But with this book, Bragg does a much deeper, poignant, clever, unforgettable thing. Through the food of the past, he brings us the culture, in all of its shine, hardship, and complexity; its injustice and grit. He uses food as a way to lift up a whole mountain of people who are disappearing, so we can see them as they are. He renders their lives in full color, as good storytellers do, “painting pictures of their world and hanging them on the air” (288). Bragg does not spare the whiskey or violence or poverty of life in lower Appalachia during the first half of the twentieth century. He leaves them there, alongside love, perseverance, and pride. These are people we do not often see in history books, and rarely are they so well described. Bragg claims this is “one old woman’s story of working mountain-class food” (12), but in her story, we see many others. We see a whole environment, a language and vocabulary, a way of life. [End Page 301] “If you remove the backstory from food,” Bragg reminds us, “you remove the secrets, and even the taste somehow” (368). I get the sense that Bragg walked around this story for years, looking for the best way in. He chose well. He tells his family’s story, beginning with an old man teaching a young, stubborn bride how to cook. We learn alongside her, and also alongside Bragg, who learns from his own mother throughout the text. The resulting narrative is rolling and conversational and the tone is kind and familiar, even within the recipes themselves. The learning is not intimidating because it is done so gently, casually, as if we are standing in the kitchen next to Bragg, looking into the pot. Through these recipes and stories, Bragg conveys the importance and meaning of food in early-twentieth-century rural life. At this time, most southern families were subsistence farmers. They depended on whatever they could grow, pick, trap, catch, or hunt for survival. If the weather or animals or seeds or dirt failed to cooperate, they suffered. These were people on the brink, and food was the center of their world because their lives depended on it. As Bragg says, they “could not afford to remain ignorant of the sky, the rain, and the chemistry of the turned earth underneath … or fail to see the potential in a seed the size of a speck of dust that could save your life if your luck was running high” (93). They also needed to eat well for strength, to stave off sickness, or to heal quickly so they could return to work. These were self-reliant people who had little control over their jobs or fortunes. They could not depend on the government, or the company, to look out for them. “In the trees,” Bragg points out, “you did not rely on anybody in a necktie” (135). In this world, cooks and caregivers were revered based on their ability to stretch food to feed many and to make simple things taste incredible. As Bragg’s opening sentence declares of his mother, “even if all she had to work with was neck bones, peppergrass, or poke salad, she put good food on a plate” (4). This ability to produce good food, enjoy life, and thrive despite having so little fueled a strong sense of pride and self-worth among the mountain people Bragg describes. He cites the happiness of [End Page 302] loggers who know “there was not a rich man in the fanciest house on the highest hill who was eating any better than they were, right...