The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Table - Softcover

Rick Bragg is the author of eight books, including the best-selling Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin'. He is also a regular contributor to Garden & Gun magazine. He lives in Alabama.

"Wonderful, rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales about how generations of Bragg's extended family survived from one meal to the next." --USA Today

"A glorious collection of tales. . . . Bragg writes stories about family . . . and he does it better than almost anybody else. His just happens to be a family of excellent cooks who do much of their relating through the food they grow, hunt, prepare and occasionally steal." --The New York Times Book Review

"A tribute, a monument, to [Bragg's] mother and her people, captured here in solid recipes for good food, charming details and funny conversations." --The Wall Street Journal

"A loving, recipe-filled ode." --Garden & Gun

"Put together, all those stories read like a lush and lyrical novel, sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing. . . . Bragg's deep love for his mother, and her cooking, shines throughout." --Tampa Bay Times

"Rick Bragg serves up a feast. . . . A love song to the woman who raised him and who has been his greatest muse." --The New Orleans Advocate

"The stories, as much as the portrait they paint of [Bragg's] family and their times, are baroque and profane, simultaneously moral and amoral, loving and blunt." --San Francisco Chronicle

"One of my favorite writers of all time. . . . Both an incredibly evocative portrait of [Bragg's] mother and a collection of his mother's recipes." --Ed Levine, Serious Eats

"Bragg has a bone-deep empathy for people who endure hard times. . . . [He is] a leisurely, soulful storyteller, a reporter with a poet's eye, and an appreciative diner. Most of all . . . he's a ferociously devoted son." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Affectionate, funny, and beautifully written. . . . Heartfelt, often hilarious stories from an Alabama kitchen, a place from which issue wondrous remembrances and wondrous foods alike." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"An engaging read about food that is dear to me." --Hugh Acheson, Food & Wine

"A testament that cooking and food still bind culture together." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Many of the tales Bragg tells are ones he remembers hearing from his family, which must have been full of the best storytellers of all time. . . . [The Best Cook in the World] winds through family stories, memories of his mother and recipes of their food." --Post and Courier (Charleston)

"[Bragg] generously preserves a way of life that has endured in America's backcountry. His prose evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of a rural Alabama kitchen and transforms apparent poverty into soul-satisfying plenty." --Booklist (starred review)

"One of the finest American writers of our time." --Billy Watkins, The Clarion Ledger (Jackson, MS)

"Bragg writes with a powerful, page-turning punch. The result is unimaginably delectable." --BookPage

"The Best Cook in the World is a cookbook, but not like one of those old Betty Crocker volumes. . . . Bragg's work is more a narrative cookbook that's heavy on stories about growing up poor, wearing out stoves and the role food plays both in his family and his native South, which gets a little more like everywhere else each time Domino's delivers a pizza out in the county." --Associated Press