by Rick Bragg
First published 2018
Rick Bragg sets out to capture his mother Margaret's cooking knowledge before it vanishes forever. Margaret Bragg owns no cookbooks and measures ingredients in dabs, smidgens, and tads. She bakes cornbread for fifteen to twenty minutes depending on her oven's mysteries. Her farm to table approach involves a flatbed truck. Yet she holds the secrets to perfect mashed potatoes, corn pudding, redeye gravy, and dozens of other Southern staples. Many of her recipes predate the Civil War, passed down skillet by skillet through generations of Braggs. Rick records seventy-four family recipes for the first time while telling the stories that shaped his mother's culinary education from childhood to old age. He weaves together food memories with family history, preserving a vanishing way of life rooted in intuition rather than instruction.
Genres: family-life, memoir, cooking, food, food-writing
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-legacy, intergenerational, preservation-of-knowledge
Setting: South
Period: Civil War, Contemporary
512 pages · Hardcover · Knopf