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Wordtrade.com| 1202 Raleigh Road 115| Chapel Hill NC 27517| USA ph 9195425719| fx 9198691643| www.wordtrade.com Spotlight 17 Tordasi [Epistemata Literaturwissenschaft, Königshausen & Neumann, 9783826062650] Contemporary Nuances Storyworld Possible Selves by María-Ángeles Martínez [Applications of Cognitive Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton, 9783110522532] Table of Contents Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change by The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Leonard Mlodinow [Pantheon, 9781101870921] Momma's Table by Rick Bragg [A Borzoi Book, Alfred A. Knopf, 9781400040414] Essay: Conceptual Framework of The Concept of the Individual All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg [Vintage, 978-0679774020] City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right by Michael Mayerfield Ava's Man by Rick Bragg [Knopf, Bell [Princeton University Press, 9780691165097] 9780375410628] Law and Literature edited by Kieran Dolin The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg [University [Cambridge Critical Concepts, Cambridge Alabama Press, 9780817356835] University Press, 9781108422819] My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt of the South by Rick Bragg [Southern Living, by Helena Rosenblatt and Paul Schweigert 9780848746391] [Cambridge University Press, 9781107105768] Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, The Alchemists: Questioning our Faith in Courts as Race, and Justice Lost and Found by Gilbert King Democracy-Builders by Tom Gerald Daly [Cambridge [Riverhead, 9780399183386] Studies in Constitutional Law, Cambridge University The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and Press, 9781108417945] What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya and The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity 2nd Elizabeth Weil [Crown, 9780451495327] edition edited by Robert Frodeman and Julie Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Thompson Klein [Oxford Handbooks, Oxford University Press, 9780198733522] Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker [Viking, 9780525427575] Bibliography The Fears of the Rich, The Needs of the Poor: My Years at the CDC by William H. Foege [Johns Hopkins University Press, 9781421425290] AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Poison and James Scott [St. The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Martin's Press, 9781250182159] Momma's Table by Rick Bragg [A Borzoi Book, Alfred A. Knopf, 9781400040414] The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio [Pantheon, 9780307908759] Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation by Bob Roth [Simon & Schuster, 9781501161216] Women by the Waterfront: Modernist (Re)Visions of Gender, Self and Littoral Space by Kathrin 1 | p age spotlight|© authors|or|wordtrade.com A celebration of family recipes and the She cooked for the rich ladies in town, melting beef perfect gift for Mother's Day. short ribs into potatoes and Spanish onions, another woman's baby on her hip, and sleepwalked home From the beloved, best-selling author of All to feed her own boys home-canned blackberries Over but the Shoutin' and , a delectable, dusted with sugar as a late-night snack. She pan- rollicking food memoir, cookbook, and loving fried chicken in Red's Barbecue with a crust so crisp tribute to a region, a vanishing history, a and thin it was mostly in the imagination, and family, and, especially, to his mother. deep-fried fresh bream and crappie and hush Including seventy-four mouthwatering Bragg puppies redolent with green onion and government cheese. She seasoned pinto beans with ham bone family recipes for classic southern dishes and baked cracklin' cornbread for old women who passed down through generations. had tugged a pick sack, and stewed fat spareribs Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. in creamy butter beans that truck drivers would She measures in "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" brag on three thousand miles from home. She and "you know, hon, just some." She cannot be spiked collard greens with cane sugar and hot pinned down on how long to bake corn bread pepper for old men who had fought the Hun on the ("about 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the Hindenburg Line, and simmered chicken and mysteries of your oven"). Her notion of farm-to- dumplings for mill workers with cotton lint still stuck table is a flatbed truck. But she can tell you the in their hair. She fried thin apple pies in white secrets to perfect mashed potatoes, corn pudding, butter and cinnamon for pretty young women with redeye gravy, pinto beans and hambone, stewed bus tickets out of this one-horse town, and baked cabbage, short ribs, chicken and dressing, biscuits sweet-potato cobbler for the grimy pipe fitters and and butter rolls. Many of her recipes, recorded dusty bricklayers they left behind. She cooked for here for the first time, pre-date the Civil War, big-haired waitresses at the Fuzzy Duck Lounge, handed down skillet by skillet, from one generation shiny-eyed pilgrims at the Congregational Holiness of Braggs to the next. In The Best Cook in the summer campground, and crew-cut teenage boys World, Rick Bragg finally preserves his heritage by who read comic books beside her banana pudding, telling the stories that framed his mother's cooking then embarked for Vietnam. and education, from childhood into old age. Because good food always has a good story, and She cooked, most of all, to make it taste good, to a recipe, writes Bragg, is a story like anything else. make every chipped melamine plate a poor man's banquet, because how do you serve dull food to Excerpt: Since she was eleven years old, even if all people such as this? She became famous for it, she had to work with was neck bones, peppergrass, became the best cook in the world, if the world or poke salad, she put good food on a plate. She ends just this side of Cedartown. But she never used cooked for dead-broke uncles, hungover brothers, a cookbook, not in her whole life. She never cooked shadetree mechanics, faith healers, dice shooters, from a written recipe of any kind, and never wrote hairdressers, pipe fitters, crop dusters, high-steel down one of her own. She cooked with ghosts at walkers, and well diggers. She cooked for her sure right hand, and you can believe that or ironworkers, Avon ladies, highway patrolmen, not. The people who taught her the secrets of sweatshop seamstresses, fortune-tellers, coal Southern, blue-collar cooking are all gone now, haulers, dirt-track daredevils, and dime-store girls. and they did not cook from a book, either; most of She cooked for lost souls stumbling home from Aunt them did not even know how to read and write. Hattie's beer joint, and for singing cowboys on the Every time the old woman stepped from her AM radio. She cooked, in her first eighty years, workshop of steel spoons, iron skillets, and more than seventy thousand meals, as basic as hot blackened pots, all she knew about the food left buttered biscuits with pear preserves or muscadine with her, in the way, when a bird flies off a wire, it jelly, as exotic as tender braised beef tripe in leaves only a black line on the sky. white milk gravy, in kitchens where the only ventilation was the banging of the screen door. She "It's all I've ever been real good at, and people cooked for people she'd just as soon have always bragged on my cooking ... you know, 'cept poisoned, and for the loves of her life. the ones who don't know what's good," she told me 2 | Page Spotlight © when I asked her about her craft. "When I was was kind of a big woman? Well, she'd bust through little, the old women used to sit in their kitchens at the double doors to that kitchen, snatch up one of them old For-mica tables and drink coffee and tell them little chocolate puddin's, and eat it in three their fortunes and talk and talk and talk, about bites on a dead run—and not miss a step." their sorry old men and their good food and the Her big sister, Edna, taught her to fillet catfish, good Lord, and they would cook, my God, they crappie, and tiny bream with a knife as thin as could cook.... And I just paid attention, and I done aluminum foil. A brother-in-law, a navy man, taught what they done...." her how to pat out a fine cathead biscuit, but could Most chefs, when asked for a blueprint of their only bake them a battleship at a time. Her mother- food, would only have to reach for a dog-eared in-law showed her how to craft wild-plum pies, notebook or a faded handwritten index card for peach, apple, and cherry cobblers, and cool ingredients, measures, cooking times, and the rest. banana puddings, all in pans as big as she was. Her daddy shared the secrets of fresh ham and "I am not a chef," she said. perfect redeye gravy, and tender country-fried Yet she can tell if her flour is getting stale by steak. And her momma taught her to do it all, even rubbing it in her fingers. with a worried mind. Then, finally, it was her time, and it has been for a long, long time. "I am a cook." "I have to talk to myself now to cook," she said. "I I remember one night, when she was yearning for have to tell myself what to do, have to tell myself something sweet, she patted out tiny biscuits and to handle the knife by the right end. I have to call plopped them down in a pool of milk flavored with myself a name, so I'll know to listen to myself." sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and cubes of cold butter.