Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. She measures by "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" and "you know, hon, just some." Her notion of farm-to-table is a flatbed truck. Many of her recipes, recorded here for the first time, pre-date the Civil War-- handed down skillet by skillet from one generation of Braggs to the next. Here Rick Bragg finally preserves his heritage by telling stories that framed his mother's cooking and education, from childhood into old age. Because a recipe, writes Bragg, is story like anything else.