My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg Page B

slowly drips down to season the already perfectly seasoned beans, as much like other beans as a Tiffany necklace is like a string of old beads left in a tree. How do you explain how anything—anything—served on a melamine plate with a side of potato salad can rival meals you have paid $200 to enjoy, and, if you were true to yourself, you would actually rather have the plate of beans? For the rest of my life, I will remember watching my teenage stepson devour a plate of Betsy’s beans and smoked sausage without taking time to talk or apparently even breathe, then announce that he really, really wanted to go to school in New Orleans. He lived the first 16 years of his life on chicken fingers and cheese pizza. But he knew magic when he tasted it.
    It is the same outside the city, from corner to corner, pocket to pocket in this state. You can even be hexed in a Holiday Inn.
    In Gonzales, just off the interstate and affixed to a chain hotel is a Mike Anderson’s restaurant that prepared a crawfish bisque that is nothing like the chalky, fake mess most places prepare. It is a rich, brown stew, redolent—I have always liked to say redolent—with onions, bell pepper, crawfish tails that do not taste like they came from a hold of an oceangoing freighter, and crawfish heads stuffed with a dressing that is best devoured by fishing it out with a crooked finger. Local people—not just tourists and weary travelers—piled in by the carload on weekend nights, proof that it is not just the visual or sensual appeal of this state that fools us into thinking things taste better here. I mean, it’s in a damn Holiday Inn…
    Sometimes, though, the spell this place casts settles around me so completely that I wonder if I can ever leave it and eat the way regular people eat. It happened in the warmth of a corner table at the Upperline in New Orleans, on something as humble as cornbread. But here the sweet cornbread came topped with grilled, spiced shrimp, and shaved purple onions, and something that looked like rich folks’ mayonnaise but I now think might have been some kind of potion. They only gave me two little squares, about six bites in all. I looked at the empty plate with such awful regret, thinking, “If I had just taken smaller bites…”
    It happened again at Commander’s Palace, white lights glintingin the trees on the other side of the glass. A waiter brought out a dish called bread pudding soufflé and poked a hole in the top of it with a spoon so he could ladle a rich, sugary sauce deep into the thing. I forgot, after a spoonful or two, that I was bound up like an asylum inmate in my too-tight sport coat, forgot every warning my doctor ever gave, forgot that when you leave this place there are potholes of doom ready to swallow you whole and daiquiridazed drivers waiting to run you down.
    You forget everything here, in this Louisiana, for a spoonful of time. If that is not magic, I by God don’t know what magic is.
     

    SEASONED IN THE SOUTH
    Southern Living , Southern Journal: November 2014

    T he first time I noticed them, Thanksgiving was coming. The knives in my mother’s kitchen were black with age, the blades paper thin, wickedly sharp. They made better steel when steel was dear, in a time before world wars, maybe long before.
    But most of the points were broken; the wooden handles—only a Philistine would use a plastic-handled knife—were also worn thin, slick and smooth. When I was a boy, I saw hoe handles that looked like that. You don’t give up on a good hoe handle, not for a generation or so. You drive a nail through the split, twist some electrical tape around it. And one day, when you are gone from this earth, your grandson will finally break it in two and prop the handle, just the handle, in the corner of the shed, like some old man who has finally retired and does not know what else to do but lean.
    But I wanted my mother, the best cook in the entire universe, to have new, proper tools for her most