In the Beginning

By: Chef Tom French

In the beginning there was catfish, cornbread, strawberry shortcake and barbecue. At least that’s how I remember it. I was born into what could politely be called an awkward family arrangement and spent my earliest years being raised by my grandparents in rural Arkansas.

MeMa and Pupa never made me feel like I was anything other than exactly where I belonged. Love wasn’t something they talked much about. It was simply what they did.

Around us was an abundant collection of cousins, aunts and uncles, and towering over all of us was Granny Great. If every family has a north star, she was ours.

Granny Great had crossed the frozen Mississippi River from Kentucky, family in tow, and settled in the foothills of the Ozarks, where my people still live today. Cotton was king, gardens grew in rich soil, and people worked hard, really hard.

In the early years, a trip by wagon to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, took days. Flour, sugar, nails, fabric, denim, sewing supplies and whatever couldn’t be grown, raised, preserved or made by hand had to be brought home. My Granny Great could till, plant, weed, harvest, preserve, cook, bake and sew. Well into her nineties she could thread the eye of a needle like nobody’s business.

She was always there with a kind word, an encouraging smile or — when circumstances required it — a look that suggested you might want to reconsider whatever it was you were about to do. You generally did.

Having the gift of actually knowing my great-grandmother gave me something I didn’t appreciate until much later. A measuring stick. Her life stretched backward into a world radically different from mine, and yet I could sit beside her. Watch her hands, listen to her stories, eat the food she cooked.

I could touch history. She remained a vital presence in our family until the very end.

At ninety-three, she spent a day working in the garden, had dinner with my Aunt Wassie, enjoyed her customary thimbleful of blackberry wine before dinner, went to bed and quietly passed away during the night.

There are worse ways to leave this world. And when I think about her now, inevitably I think about food.

Silky chicken and dumplings, flaky pie crusts, vegetables that had been growing in the garden hours earlier. Fried Catfish, hushpuppies, cole slaw, strawberry shortcake and BBQ, oh man the BBQ.

Meals that somehow made everyone feel like they belonged. Her generation had endured war, economic collapse and environmental hardship. They understood scarcity because they had lived it. But somehow they never lost the soul of the dinner table.

Food wasn’t an activity scheduled into the day, it was part of the ebb and flow of life.

You planted it, you tended it, you harvested it, you preserved it, you cooked it and eventually you sat down together and ate it. Recipes weren’t downloaded or watched on a screen.

They were literally handed down. Technique traveled from one pair of hands to another. You learned by standing close, watching, helping, doing it wrong, doing it again. And eventually, without quite realizing when it happened, knowing.

I remember the excitement whenever Granny Great tied on her apron. Something good was about to happen. Only now do I understand that what she was handing down wasn’t simply a recipe. It was a way of being connected — to the land, to the seasons, to family and to one another.

One Last Thing

Sometimes I wonder if recipes survive because they’re delicious… or because they’re one of the few ways we can still sit down with the people who taught us how to make them.

I still think of Granny Great every time I dust flour across the counter.