Culinary Roots - The Joy Of Eating (Part 2)

The joy of eating: how I became a foodie.

King Biscuit Time and the Kitchen Radio

My musical roots intertwined with my culinary roots: Blues harmonica god Sonny Boy Williamson was based in Helena, Arkansas. He died in 1965. He played on the radio every Saturday at 1 p.m. on KFFA. Sponsored by King Biscuit Time, I would listen to him over my grandmother’s old-timey radio that she kept in the kitchen and always had set to the Jesus station. She liked to listen to gospel music while she cooked or baked. She would get mad when I would forget to rotate the dial back to her station.

Rutha McAbee and Cottonfield Cooking

My grandmother, Rutha McAbee, was born in 1898 in Paducah, Kentucky. Her family emigrated to Arkansas when she was a child. From ages 14 to 30, Rutha cooked for cotton pickers working in the fields that surrounded her parents’ sharecropper home. Fieldhands ate two breakfasts, one at daybreak and a second at 11 a.m. Field cooks had to get the “most-est from the least-est,” as plantation and cottonfield owners wanted to feed the most-est number of fieldhands for the least-est amount of money. All field cooks in those times faced the same challenge: who can create the best-tasting food using the cheapest of ingredients?

The only meat they had to work with were throwaway cuts of pork. The overlords kept all the beef for themselves and took the best cuts of pork before turning over the tough, unwanted pig leftovers, the offal and carcass meat, to fieldhand cooks. Young Rutha was schooled by women that had lived through the Civil War and knew how to make tasty the nasty bits. They repurposed inedible pig parts. These innovative field cooks broke down tough meat using the low-and-slow methods that birthed southern barbecue.

Making the Most-est from the Least-est

As in any other occupation, some are better than others. My grandmother was in high demand for a decade and only stopped cooking when she married the town barber, Will Moore. They had several children in quick succession. They owned an acre plot on a gravel road a mile outside tiny Rector. Will cut hair while Rutha raised children, chickens, geese, turkey, dogs, and cats. She tended a large truck garden, canned fruit and vegetables, and bartered sewing for pork. When Will died, Rutha carried on. Her hodgepodge home did not get an indoor bathroom until 1965. Before that, it was an outhouse in the chicken yard in February with a flashlight. Hope you don’t get a spider bite.

River Coffee, Biscuits, and White Pepper Gravy

She loved to cook for company. You would wake up to the smell of baking biscuits and ultra-strong “River Coffee.” My favorite breakfast was a big mug of hair-raising black coffee while reading The Clay County Democrat. This was followed by four, fresh from the oven, fluffy biscuits, crispy brown exterior, steaming pillow interiors. I would break them in half and douse them with butter from nearby Thompson’s Dairy.

After allowing the butter to melt into the biscuits, I would drench the buttered biscuits with however much of her “perfected over decades” white pepper gravy was in the gravy bowl, knowing there was always more. Her white pepper gravy over made-from-scratch butter-drenched biscuits represented to me the high-water mark of hardcore southern hillbilly culinary expertise: take flour, water and some bacon drippings and create something so incredibly cheap and so incredibly delicious that it kept man and beast alive through the bleakest, hardest of times for the least amount of money.

Rutha would shuffle in with four perfectly cooked sunny-side-up eggs, deep orange yolks, along with crispy strips of thick bacon or assertive pork sausage patties. This was just the first of three serious meals, always kicked off with ethereal biscuits and gravy. A bacon-grease sieve sat on her tiny, four-burner porcelain propane stove, this to recycle the wonderful pork lipid. Her little white stove had a small oven from which sprang her legendary lard-crust fruit pies.

Garden Vegetables, Pork, Catfish, and Hushpuppies

Depending on the season, she served whatever vegetables were fresh-plucked from her truck garden. I loved green beans and carrots broken down slow and low with thick slices of fatback. Winter fare included ham hocks with white beans. I became addicted to rich spinach topped with butter and salt. Watermelon centers were my favorite fruit. While my family were big on okra, I did not like it one bit. This was farm-to-table eating before the phrase had been invented. No one ate salads. I never saw a salad made or eaten.

The main proteins were chicken, always fried, and pork, mostly bacon and sausage, occasionally sublime massive pork chops with acidic sauerkraut and cold applesauce rife with apple chunks. We ate quite a bit of monstrous Mississippi River catfish, always cut like a steak, dredged in flour or cornmeal, and deep fried. My favorite taste treat were cornmeal hushpuppies, fried crispy in the catfish oil.

She was a master baker and created wonderful fruit pies. In the cold months she would select from her ample collection of canned fruits and vegetables. She kept frozen proteins in a giant freezer that sat in the guest bedroom. When guests visited, my grandmother would walk out to the chicken yard, open the gate and quietly, nonchalantly, pick up a three-foot section of rebar with a hook on one end.

Fried Chicken and the Primal Food Memory

Grasping the rebar in her right hand, she would casually stroll through the chicken yard, looking, looking, looking, until she came upon a bird to her liking. With a lightning-fast movement that only comes with decades of practice, and in defiance of her age, she would hook a webbed foot, pull the rebar toward her, grab the confused chicken, wring its head off and toss the chicken head over the outhouse and into the dark woods in one seamless motion.

She would drain and pluck the bird. These chickens were what we would now call free-range, fed on human scraps and supplemented by bountiful bugs and crawlies that inhabited the semi-swampy patch of land that was the chicken yard. I never knew her to roast a chicken. Her fried chicken was seasoned, battered in King Biscuit flour, fried in bacon grease or lard to produce super-crispy skin with a moist interior. As a 15-year-old, I easily ate an entire fried chicken she had made for company that canceled at the last minute.

Rutha was a primal woman living a primal life and living it alone. Someone once asked chef god Jacques Pépin, if he could choose, what would be his last meal? He got wistful and teary as he specified his mother’s perfectly roasted free-range chicken, a chicken from their chicken yard on the family farm. He added that the meal should include small red potatoes, carrots and onions, set in the bottom of the roaster pan. I would second Jacques’ emotion, substituting fried chicken and biscuits and white pepper gravy. I too knew that ancient primal taste Jacques remembered and craved; I too have Jacques’ selfsame retrospective longing.

Safety Note for Rustic Cooking, Food Memory, and Nutrition

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW first-person perspective on family cooking, rural food memory, appetite, training, and nutrition. It is not individualized medical, nutrition, food-safety, cooking, butchering, weight-gain, weight-loss, or programming advice.

Traditional high-fat meals, fried foods, pork fat, offal, home butchering, poultry preparation, and old-school food handling are part of this memoir. They are not universal dietary or food-safety recommendations. People with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal disease, food allergies, eating-disorder history, medication concerns, pregnancy, or significant medical conditions should follow qualified medical or nutrition guidance.

Home poultry handling requires food-safety knowledge, sanitation, temperature control, and legal / local compliance. Stop or seek qualified help for foodborne-illness symptoms, allergic reactions, severe gastrointestinal distress, faintness, chest pain, unusual shortness of breath, rapid unexplained weight change, disordered eating patterns, or any symptom that feels different from normal training effort.

Equipment Notes for Training Around Food and Recovery

Equipment does not create culinary roots, appetite, or recovery. The food, the rest, the training plan and the timing do that. Equipment simply gives the lifter a way to put the recovered body back to work.

For the resistance-training side of this story, readers and facilities can compare dumbbells, barbells, and kettlebells. Specific options such as IRON COMPANY rubber hex dumbbell sets, CAP Barbell Olympic standard barbell sets, and Body-Solid rubber kettlebells with chrome handles may fit certain training spaces when the user, room, floor, and intended training style align.

For conditioning that supports appetite, recovery, and work capacity, compare exercise bikes and indoor rowing machines. Specific options such as the Spirit Fitness CU800 commercial upright fitness bike and the TKO AirRaid indoor rower may fit some home or facility settings.

The equipment supports the training. It does not replace the food, the rest, or the judgment.

Related Culinary and Nutrition Reading

For more Marty Gallagher writing on nutrition, food culture and culinary judgment, read The Food Taliban and What We Can Learn from Elite Chefs.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast.

About the Author: Marty Gallagher

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of multiple books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.