My mother rarely made Southern food when I was growing up even though she is from the South. She said it was because her mother never taught her. That always seemed likely: My grandmother was a sweet but anxious woman from the small town of Pickens, South Carolina, so poor that her family could not “set a table”—that is, with matching cutlery. A 1940s housewife who felt trapped in her home, curious about the world but left to a life of domestic drudgery. One can understand her wanting to conceal the secrets of her one magic power: cooking.
