I get the sense that Bragg walked around this story for years, looking for the best way in. “If you remove the backstory from food,” Bragg reminds us, “you remove the secrets, and even the taste somehow” (368). We see a whole environment, a language and vocabulary, a way of life. Bragg claims this is “one old woman’s story of working mountain-class food” (12), but in her story, we see many others. These are people we do not often see in history books, and rarely are they so well described. He leaves them there, alongside love, perseverance, and pride. He renders their lives in full color, as good storytellers do, “painting pictures of their world and hanging them on the air” (288).īragg does not spare the whiskey or violence or poverty of life in lower Appalachia during the first half of the twentieth century. 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. Through the food of the past, he brings us the culture, in all of its shine, hardship, and complexity its injustice and grit. But with this book, Bragg does a much deeper, poignant, clever, unforgettable thing. Those things are certainly here, in these pages. I imagined them smiling at the sweet girls on the cover and recollecting their own childhoods, their grannies, all the good times. While reading this book, I kept picturing people picking it up in an upscale gift shop.
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