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Ma never once used a recipe card that I saw. It was all in her head, and when she died in 1991, most of it went in the ground with her. What I've got is what I watched standing at her elbow from the
Ezra Cade shares 25 Appalachian cooking tricks from his grandmother, revealing traditional tips that enhance flavor and texture without recipes.
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Key Takeaways
- Traditional Appalachian cooking relies on intuition and experience rather than written recipes.
- Simple techniques like temperature control and ingredient handling dramatically affect final dish quality.
- Resourcefulness and minimizing waste by saving cooking liquids enhance flavor and nutrition.
- Small additions like coffee in chocolate cake or salt in sweets can elevate flavors scientifically.
- Slow cooking and proper seasoning timing are essential for texture and taste in classic dishes like beans.
What the video covers
- The video recounts 25 Appalachian cooking tricks passed down from Ezra Cade's grandmother, who never used written recipes.
- Bacon grease was saved and strained hot to season various dishes, acting as a unique fat-based seasoning.
- Cold ingredients and minimal handling are key to making tender biscuits with flaky layers.
- Cornbread is best cooked in a screaming hot cast iron skillet to create a perfect crust.
- Adding a spoonful of cold coffee to chocolate cake intensifies the chocolate flavor without adding coffee taste.
- A pinch of salt in sweet dishes enhances sweetness and balances bitterness without extra sugar.
- Beans are cooked low and slow with fatback, salted only at the end to achieve soft texture and rich broth.
- All flavorful cooking liquids, like bean water and greens liquor, are saved and reused to maximize nutrition and taste.
- Wilted greens are made by pouring boiling hot bacon grease with vinegar over fresh greens, creating a unique cooked salad.
- Sawmill gravy is made by browning flour in sausage grease before adding milk slowly to avoid lumps, stretching meat flavor to feed many.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Grandma's Cooking Philosophy
- 01:20Bacon Grease as a Seasoning Fat
- 02:41Biscuit Making: Cold Ingredients and Minimal Handling
- 04:09Cornbread in a Screaming Hot Skillet
- 05:09Coffee in Chocolate Cake to Enhance Flavor
- 05:32Salt in Sweet Dishes to Boost Flavor
- 06:12Long, Slow Cooking of Beans
- 06:43Saving and Reusing Cooking Liquids
- 07:45Wilted Greens with Hot Bacon Grease
- 08:36Sawmill Gravy and Stretching Sausage Flavor
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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time I could see over the counter. Here's the twist. Number 21 is a spoonful of something bitter she put in every chocolate cake, and the food scientists have since worked out exactly why it makes the chocolate taste more
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like chocolate. Number 14 is the one thing she did to a biscuit that no store-bought can copy, and it takes 4 seconds. And number one, she never called cooking it all. She'd have laughed if you called it a trick. It's
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just the thing that made her food taste like hers and nobody else's. Let's count down 25 cooking tricks Ma never wrote down. Number 25, the bacon grease can.
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There was a coffee can at the back of every stove I ever ate off of, hers included, and the drippings off every skin of the bacon went into it through a bit of cloth. Bacon grease, sausage grease, the fat off of fried chicken,
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all of it strained down into that one can. That was the cooking fat for the week. Eggs fried in it, cornbread started with a spoon of it, green beans cooked down with it. It carried a smoke and a salt into everything that you
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cannot buy in a bottle because it isn't a fat, it's a seasoning that happens to be a fat. The one rule was you strained it hot. Let it set with the burnt bits in it, and those bits turn on you first
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and take the whole can. Strain clean, it kept on that stove for a month and never went off. Number 24, cold hands, cold everything. For anything with a crust or a biscuit, Ma ran cold. Cold butter, cold buttermilk, and she'd run her hands
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under the pump before she touched the dough. Here's what she was after, and the bakers have this worked out now. You want the fat to stay in little cold lumps and not melt into the flour. When that cold fat hits the hot oven, the
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water in it flashes to steam, and the steam is what blows the layers apart.
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Warm hands melt the butter in before it ever gets to the oven, and then there's no steam and no layers, just a flat hard thing. Her tale was simple. If the dough started feeling greasy or slack under her hand, she quit and put the whole
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bowl cold pantry for 10 minutes before she went on. Number 23, don't work the dough. Watching Mom make biscuits was watching somebody barely touch them. She cut the fat in, wet it, brought it together, and stopped. 10 seconds of
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handling, maybe less. It's the flour that does it. Work wheat flour with water and it builds gluten, them long stretchy strands that give bread its chew, and chew is exactly the thing you do not want in a biscuit. A kneaded
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biscuit comes out tough and tight. A barely touched one comes out short and tender and falls apart in your fingers the right way. Everybody's first biscuits are hockey pucks, and it's always the same reason. They worked it like they were mad at it. Number 22, the
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screaming skillet. Cornbread went into a cast iron skillet that had been in the oven getting hot with grease in it till the grease was shy of smoking. She poured the batter in, and it hollered.
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That sizzle is the whole thing. Batter hitting metal that hot sets the outside in a second, so it crusts instead of soaking, and the sugars in the meal brown and go toasty at that heat in a way they never do warming up slow.
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That's the crust that a pan of cornbread lives or dies on. Pour that same batter into a cold greased pan, and you get a pale soft brick with no bottom to it.
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Same meal, same buttermilk, same everything. The heat in the pan was the difference the whole time, and it's the thing nobody thinks to do. Number 21, a spoon of coffee in the chocolate cake.
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Here's the bitter thing from the top. Ma would put a little cold coffee, whatever was left in the pot, into every chocolate cake she made. And if you'd ask her why, she'd have said her mother did. Now, the food chemists have since
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gone and figured the why of it, and it's a good one. They tell me the coffee and the cocoa share some of the same flavor compounds, and the coffee grabs onto the chocolate ones and pulls them up two or
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three times stronger. It don't make the cake taste like coffee, it makes the chocolate taste more like chocolate.
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You'd swear she used better cocoa, and she didn't. Use it cold and leftover. Nobody's brewing a fresh pot for a cake, and you don't need to. Number 20, salt in the sweet. A pinch of salt went into everything sweet Ma made. The cake, the
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pie, the cobbler, the candy, sweet things. And this one's real, not just taste. The salt reaches your tongue and quiets down the bitter notes while it lifts the sweet. So, a pinch can make a thing taste noticeably sweeter without a
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grain more sugar in it. That mattered when sugar was dear, and you used no more of it than you had to. Leave the salt out of a dessert, and it don't taste less salty, it tastes flat and dead, and most people can't put a finger
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on why. Number 19, the long, slow pot of beans. Ma's soup beans went on of a morning and cooked till evening, low, with a piece of fatback, and not much else. Four, five, six hours. What you're after is the beans breaking down and
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thickening their own liquor into gravy. That's why it's called soup beans and not boiled beans. You eat the broth.
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And the broth only gets there with time. Rush it hot and hard, and the beans burst on the outside and stay chalk in the middle, and the liquid stays thin.
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And the salt goes in at the end. This one Ma was firm on. Salt the pot early, and the skins toughen up, and the beans never soften.
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Cook them till midnight, and they're still gravel. Salt at the end. Number 18. Save the bean liquor. Save all of it.
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Nothing with flavor in it went down the drain in that kitchen. The water off the beans, the ham bone, the potato water, the greens liquor, all of it got kept and worked back in.
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The liquor off a pot of greens has near everything that cooked out of them sitting in it. The iron, the vitamins, the taste, and you sop it with cornbread because pouring it out is pouring out half the meal.
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Potato water went into bread dough where the starch feeds the yeast and the loaf comes up higher and stays soft 2 days longer.
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A family that threw nothing away ate better than one that bought more and wasted it.
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That's the whole economy of that kitchen in one line. Number 17. Wilt the greens with hot grease.
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First tender lettuce and cress of the spring got tore into a bowl, and Ma poured bacon grease over it straight out of the skillet, boiling hot, with a splash of vinegar in the grease.
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Killed lettuce, it's called, and the hot fat wilts the green down soft in a second, and the acid cuts the fat, so it don't set heavy.
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It ate like a cooked grain and a salad at the same time. And it landed exactly in that stretch of spring when the cellar was empty, and there was nothing else green anywhere on the place.
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Grease has to be truly hot, straight off the fire and still going. Warm grease just makes a cold greasy salad, and that's a sorry thing to put in front of anybody.
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She'd have the bowl of greens torn waiting right by the stove, so the grease didn't lose a degree crossing the kitchen.
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Number 16, the cat-head biscuit and its gravy. Sawmill gravy off a half pound of sausage fed the whole table, and the trick was in the flour.
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Ma all browned the flour in the hot grease first, stirred it till it went the color of a paper sack before ever a drop of milk touched it.
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That browning cooks the raw taste out, and it's a line between gravy that tastes like paste and gravy that tastes like something.
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Then the milk goes in, slow off the heat, or it seizes in the lumps you'll never beat smooth.
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Two cups of milk and a spoon of flour, and the meat quit being the meal and turned into the seasoning for it. She could stretch a half pound of sausage across eight people that way, and nobody rose from that table hungry. That's not
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a recipe, that's arithmetic done with a skillet. Number 15, buttermilk in damn nea
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they told me both. The sour in it, the lactic acid, meets the soda and throws carbon dioxide and lifts the batter, which is your rise. And that same acid works on the gluten and the proteins and tenders the crumb. So, a buttermilk
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biscuit comes out soft, where a sweet milk one comes out tight. That's why the old receipts all call for buttermilk and soda, and the new ones call for sweet milk and baking powder. Baking powder's just soda with the acid already dried
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into it. Ma's cow supplied the acid for free. Turned buttermilk near on the edge, worked better than fresh. She'd not throw out a jug that had gone sharp.
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She'd bake with it. Number 14, letting the biscuit dough rest or not. Here's the fourth second thing from the top, and it cuts against what people think.
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For a biscuit, Ma did not rest the dough. She got it in the hot oven fast, because the soda and buttermilk start throwing their gas the second they meet, and that gas is your lift, and it don't wait around. Let a soda biscuit sit on
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the counter, and a good part of the rise is going up into the air before it ever sees the heat. Yeast bread, you rest, because the yeast keeps working. A soda biscuit, you run. That's a difference, and most people have it backwards. Now,
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she was cutting them in layers, she'd chill, not rest, and that's a different thing. Cold for the steam and quick for the gas, both at once. Number 13, corn shucks and the tamale, not tamale.
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Cherokee families up here wrapped a corn and bean dough in soaked corn shucks or hickory leaves, tied it and boiled it, and it come down to the settler kitchens, too. Bean bread. The wrap is doing two jobs. It holds the soft dough
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together in the boiling water, so it don't just cloud off into the pot, and it puts a flavor in from the leaf itself. And there's a thing underneath it nobody planned. Corn is short one part your body needs, and beans are
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short a different one, and each has got what the other lacks. So, the two together feed you complete where either alone leaves you wanting. People lived on that pairing 400 years before anybody could tell you why it worked. Tie it
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loose, and the water gets in, and you pull a bag of mush out of the kettle instead of bread. The tie has to be tight. Number 12. Leather britches. Now, here's the controversy of a sort because people hear it and wince. Green beans,
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strung whole on a thread with a needle and hung behind the stove to dry for weeks. Hanging there gathering what looks like dust. They dry down to nothing, hard and papery, and they keep a year in a sack. What's happened is the
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water's gone out of them below where anything can spoil, same as jerky. And that's the whole of the preserving, right there. Come January, you soak them overnight and boil them two or three hours with fatback, and they come back.
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And they do not taste like a fresh bean. They taste like a dried one, deeper and a little funky, and mountain people preferred it, and I do, too. The safety of it is real and worth a word. They
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have to hang somewhere dry with air moving. Hang them in a damp corner, and they mold on the string instead of drying. And a molded one you throw out.
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You don't soak it and hope. Number 11. Brine in a crock. No jars needed. Before the glass jars got cheap, Ma's mother kept corn and beans and kraut in a stone crock under salt brine with a scalded plate and a creek rock holding it all
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down under the water. The salt holds off the things that rot while the good souring bugs already on the vegetable eat the sugar and turn it acid. And once it's sour enough down there, nothing bad can live in it. Same as kraut. Works on
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about anything. And the beauty was it cost nothing to run. No jars, no lids, no fire to process, no canner. You build a brine, you weight it, you walk off for a month. The one law is the vegetable
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stays under the brine. Let a piece bob up into the air and it molds. And the mold can take the whole crop down with it. Under the brine, always. Number 10, pickling the whole end of the garden.
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When frost was coming and there was still green tomatoes and cabbage and peppers and onions out there that would never ripen, Ma chopped the whole business, salted it overnight to pull the water, and cooked it down in vinegar
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and a little sugar and spice, and put it up. Chow-chow. It's not a recipe so much as an answer to a problem. The garden's dying and none of this will make it. And what went in, depending on what was
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still standing out there. Then it sat on the table all winter and went on top of the beans. And it did the job a fresh vegetable would have done if there'd been one to have. A little bite of acid
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and crunch against something soft and starchy. Every family's was different and every one of them was right. Number nine, the spring house instead of an icebox. Ma's people kept milk and butter cold with no ice and no power at all by
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building a little stone house over the spring and setting the crocks down in the running water. The ground water comes up at about 52-55° the year round and the running water carries the heat off the crock steady, which is why it beat a still water
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cellar. Butter kept. Milk kept couple days. A cooked dish kept overnight in July. They set it where the water was, not where it was handy. Reading the ground to find a cold spring was the skill and the little
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house was just the easy part after. Number eight, kraut by the moon and the feel. Ma's mother made kraut by signs, planted and put up by the moon, and I'll be straight with you the way I try to
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be. There's no science says the moon changes a crock of kraut, and I'm not going to tell you there is. But, here's the part that was real under it. Making kraut by hand, you learn the feel and the smell of it when the salt's right.
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When it's sour and clean and when it's going wrong. The signs were a calendar to hang that knowing on, and the knowing was true, even if the calendar wasn't.
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She could walk past a crock and tell by the smell it needed tending, and no almanac taught her that. 60 years of her nose did. So, I'll not sell you the moon, I'll sell you the nose, because the nose worked. Number seven, rendering
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lard right. Hog killing gave you the fat, and turning it into lard was Ma's job, and it had a right way. The fat cut small and cooked low and slow, rendered gentle, never scorched, and strained clean while it was hot. Low and slow is
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the whole thing. Get it too hot and the lard browns and takes a taste and won't keep, and you've ruined a winter's cooking fat in an afternoon. Done right and strained clean, it's white and near tasteless, and it keeps in the cellar
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for months, and it makes a pie crust that store shortening cannot touch because of how the fat sits in crystals, I'm told. Though all I know is her crust shattered and theirs just bends. The cracklings, the browned bits left in the
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strainer, went into cornbread. Nothing wasted, not even the bottom of the lard pot. Number six, a little vinegar in the pie dough. Ma put a spoon of vinegar in the water for her pie crust, and here again, she just always had. Her mother
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did. and the bakers back her up. The acid keeps the gluten from building up tough while you work the dough, so the crust stays tender instead of turning to leather. And the sour cooks off entire in the oven, so there's not a trace of
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vinegar in the pie. It gave her a little room, a crust more forgiving of handling, which matters when you're making four pies for a funeral and moving fast. Plain white vinegar, and not much, a spoon. Dump in a slug of
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cider vinegar and you'll taste it, and that's a different mistake. Number five, sourdough before anybody called it that.
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There was a crock of starter kept alive on the back of Ma's mother's stove, flour and water going wild and bubbling.
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Fed and used and fed again, older than some of the children. It's just wild yeast and sour bugs out there in the flour, living in there and raising the bread and souring it at the same time.
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Before you could buy a packet of yeast at the store, that crock was how bread rose, and it never died as long as somebody remembered to feed it. Families passed a starter down like a piece of furniture. Let it go too long unfed and
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it turns and you lose it. And if it was your grandmother's starter, you don't get that back. You get a new one that isn't hers.
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Number four, reading the fat for frying. No thermometer ever hung in that kitchen, and Ma fried in lard that was exactly hot enough every single time by flicking a drop of water or a pinch of meal in and reading what it did. Meal
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that just sits there, the fat's too cold and your chicken soaks it up greasy.
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Meal that scorches black and smokes, too hot, and it burns outside and stays raw in. Meal that dances and browns slow and even, that's a winner. And she hit it by eye because 40 years of frying taught her exactly what that dance looked like.
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That's a whole secret to fried chicken that isn't greasy, right heat. And she read it off a pinch of cornmeal. I can tell you to look for the dance. I can't give you the 40 years that taught her
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what the right dance was. Number three, the whole hog, salt and smoke. This is the one that fed them clear through the spring and it was a man's job and mine as a boy, but it landed on Ma's table,
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so I'll count it. After the hog killing, the hams and shoulders got packed in salt, brown sugar, and pepper and laid on the salt 6 weeks in the cold. The salt pulls the water out of the meat and
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a thing with the water pulled out of it can't rot. That's a whole of curing in one sentence. It had to hold between 36 and 40° the entire 6 weeks. Too warm and it spoiled before the salt took. Too
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cold and the salt wouldn't strike. Then hickory smoke, 30 days of it, never pine. A proper country ham then hung and aged a full year before anybody cut it.
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The men who could read a smokehouse by the smell of it are about gone now.
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There were three on our creek when I was a boy. There's none. Number two, cornbread and buttermilk in a glass. The plainest thing Ma's people ever ate and one most folks alive have never had. Cold cornbread crumbled down
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into a tall glass, buttermilk poured over, ate with a spoon. That was supper, not a snack, supper, a thousand nights.
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At the end of a day when there was nothing else and everybody was too wore out to cook another thing.
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And it feeds you better than it sounds. Corn is short of a thing your body needs and the milk fills it back in. So the two together stick to you where the cornbread alone would leave you hungry by dark. Nobody in that kitchen knew the
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word protein. They knew it held you till morning and it took a minute to make.
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I still ate it. My daughters think it's the saddest thing they ever saw a man eat, and they're wrong.
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Number one, cooking without a single measure. Here's the one Maw would laugh to hear called a trick. She never measured anything. Not a cup, not a spoon, not once that I saw. A handful of this, a couple fingers of that, flour
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till it looked right, salt till it smelled right. She knew a biscuit dough was wet enough by how it pulled off the side of the bowl.
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Knew a cake was done by the smell before ever she opened the oven. Knew the beans wanted salt by tasting the broth off the back of a spoon.
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That's not sloppiness. That's the opposite. It's knowing a thing so deep down in your hands that the measuring cup would only slow you down and lie to you besides, because a cup of flour weighs different wet days and dry ones,
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and her hand knew the difference, and the cup never would. And that's exactly the part that couldn't be handed down.
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She could give you the receipt for the cake. She could not give you the hands that knew when it was right, because those took 60 years of standing at that stove, and she only had the one lifetime. And when it was over, the
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knowing was over. That's what actually dies, not the recipes. We've got plenty of recipes.
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What dies is the hands, and there is no writing the hands down. And that's the truest thing on this whole list. Here's my challenge. Pick one and go do it, and do it by feel, not by a cup. Put the coffee in the
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chocolate cake. Get the skillet screaming before the cornbread goes in or crumble cold cornbread in a glass of buttermilk and find out it isn't sad at all. Then tell me in the comments and I want the specific thing. What did your
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grandmother do in the kitchen that she never wrote down anywhere that you only know because you watched. Whose was it and what county did she cook in? I want to get some of it down before it's gone because that's the whole reason for
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this. None of it was ever written. It lived in one woman's hands at a time and it died with her every time over and over all up and down these mountains and most of it is gone now and not coming
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back. They knew. Now it's written down.
Topics:Appalachian cookingtraditional recipescooking tricksbiscuit tipscornbreadchocolate cakefood sciencesouthern cookinghome cookingEzra Cade
