Margaret Bragg’s Impeccable Hamburger
The reasons to read Rick Bragg’s new book The Best Cook In The World are as tender, sweet, soulful and surprising as his mother’s butter rolls, rounds of biscuit dough baked in a bath of sweetened condensed milk, whole milk, sugar and butter. “Serve them while they’re hot, or throw them out,” Bragg orders. Best, eat them the way Bragg’s ancestors did: in a bowl with the warm milk spooned over the warm, just-browned, cushiony biscuits.
Bragg’s maternal great grandfather, one of the best logging camp cooks and meanest people in the Alabama/Georgia/Tennessee geography, taught his disinterested daughter-in-law to make these dumplings. In fact, he taught this unwilling student to make most of the family’s particular dishes, because her husband (his son) was afraid his new wife was such a terrible and uninterested cook that he would starve. Bragg’s mother Margaret inherited these cooking lessons - dictated with Escoffier-like discipline and care - along with favorite recipes from kin and friends, making her The Best Cook In The World. The family stories that accompany each recipe make the Snopes family seems bourgeois and Tom Sawyer witless.
Rick Bragg received a Pulitzer prize for his work at the New York Times, where he covered the Oklahoma bombing and the Elian Gonzalez stories, among many. His first memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, about growing up near the Coosa River and close to the Georgia line in Northeastern Alabama with his single mother (daughter of the petulant wife above) and two brothers, received a Notable Book of the Year Award and was a bestseller. Two more family memoirs followed, The Prince of Frogtown, about his brutal, alcoholic father and Ava’s Man, an elegy to his grandfather, Charlie Bundrum (son of the logging camp cook). The collected stories in these books explained more to me about America - what we have lost for what we have found - than my History textbooks.
For me, the greatest value of The Best Cook In The World is this: it reclaims reverence for ingredients, skill, and the art of cooking as the territory of working class Americans, snatching it back from the local/organic movement whose members claim to be the only people ever to appreciate a bowl of heirloom beans. You have not met a food snob until you have met Margaret Bragg. In the words of her son, here is Margaret on tomatoes, from Chapter 18 of The Best Cook in the World:
The thing is, she is so disappointed in the quality of the tomatoes that the vendors, whether in a big produce section or standing beside their trucks, agree with her, and tell her they will try to do better.
“They just ain’t real good, are they?” she says, sniffing.
“No, ma’am, they surely ain’t.”
I usually just stand there uncomfortable.
Sometimes these men grew the tomatoes in their own gardens, sweated over them, stooped over them, prayed over them.
“Well, give me that basket there,” she finally says, pointing at one that looks just like all the rest of them.
I have seen it happen all my life. The only decent tomatoes she gets are from our kin, from my brothers, who raised her a garden at various times, or her nephew Mac, (who is not really her nephew but might as well be), or other kin who come by bearing bags and bags of tomatoes, mostly for her to can. But for slicing and eating, those, too, are less than ideal to a perfectionist.
I asked her, finally, if she could ever remember a passable tomato in the last, say, decade.
“Why, sure,” she said, and waited for me to read her mind.
“When was that?”
I watched her pick through them in her memory like it was a curb market she had happened by, gathering, sorting, discarding, and arriving, finally, in only disappointment. “I’ll need to study on it a little more,” she finally said. After a while, she just said no, there were none, after all.
Margaret Bragg learned from her mother, the daughter-in-law who finally succumbed to her father-in-law’s exacting ways in the kitchen, a combination of understanding how to make scant resources into a feast and being an appreciator of the feast. This family understands good food, reveres good food, and takes the time necessary to create it. Margaret, as her grandfather did, stirs up the biscuit dough right in the ten-pound can of flour, adding the wet ingredients to the top layer, feeling with her hand just how much flour to fold in without dampening that below. Margaret doesn’t just make her sons bologna sandwiches; she smokes a whole rag bologna (the bologna that was once sold in a net, thus the name, but now comes in a plastic mesh), slices it warm, brushes each slice with her tomato barbecue sauce, and serves it on a hamburger bun with purple cabbage slaw. This sandwich kicks Banh-mi and Croque Monsieur right down the road.
Reprinted from the book, here is Margaret Bragg’s “Impeccable Hamburger,” an exquisitely considered balance of texture and flavors: soft, gooey, hot and meaty, hot and sweet, cool and crunchy, cool and sweet, soft again. (There is a whole section in the book on “American Cheese.” Bragg and his mother mourn the “government cheese” once distributed to those receiving government subsidies. Apparently it was a well-flavored, good melting cheese. Margaret always shared her distribution with knowing and eager relatives.)
Bragg and his mother scorn the prepackaged sliced American cheese, but that was all I could find. I’d love to know if someone has a memory of that government cheese, and a modern replacement. My burgers were a little bit too fat for Margaret’s taste, but I did cook them in a cast iron skillet on top of the stove; by all accounts they were impeccable.
Margaret Braqg’s Impeccable Hamburger
makes 4 - 5 burgers
What you will need:
1/2 head iceberg or romaine lettuce
1 large ripe tomato
1 vidalia onion
3/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup yellow mustard
`1/2 teaspoon mustard
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1.2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon soy or Worcestershire sauce
1 pound ground beef (this makes 4-5 patties)
1 tablespoon bacon grease
salt to taste
4 to 8 slices American cheese
4 soft hamburger buns
handful dill pickle chips
1/2 cup good mayonnaise
How To Cook It
Obviously, a grilled burger, cooked outside, is best. But for the sake of history, we’ll cook this one inside.
First prepare your sauce and toppings. Shred the lettuce, slice the tomato about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick, and the sweet onion the same.
In a small pan, combine the ketchup, mustard, cayenne, garlic salt, chili powder, and Worcestershire, and heat till it bubbles a bit. Set aside.
It’s time to cook the hamburgers.
The patty is everything. You want a thin patty, no thicker - not a sliver - than 1/2 inch, and even thinner is better, and a good inch bigger around than the buns.
It does not matter if the patties are ragged. It does not even matter if you can see through them in places. The more ragged, the better they will taste. I don’t know why.
In an iron skillet, melt a little bacon grease. This will help, especially if the ground beef is too lean. Salt and pepper each side.
Let the fat sizzle a bit, lower the heat to medium, and lay in the patties. It is the crisping that carries the taste here, which is why thin patties can have more taste than a big blood burger. Cook to taste, but adjust your heat to make sure both sides get some crunch. They will, or course, cook very quickly.
As they finish, cover each with a slice of cheese, or preferably two. This will make a mess but will be worth it, we believe. If you are cooking for a voracious meat eater, just put two patties, separated by a slice of cheese, on the bun. Again, it is the crispness that matters.
To build the burger:
Do not toast the buns. Place the patty - or two - on the bottom of each bun, cheese side down.
This will keep it from sliding around.
On the patty, put a nice dollop of sauce - enough to cover it, but not sloppy.
Then, in this order, add about two pickle chips, one slice of tomato, a handful of lettuce, and one wheel of Vidalia, the whole slice. Spread a little mayonnaise on the top bun.
Serve it with chips or, of course, fries, and a side of slaw.
A root beer does not hurt.