The cookbook advance copies arrived. I held the book and felt every recipe in my hands — the weight of a hundred dinners, a hundred headnotes, a hundred stories.
The cover: warm, golden, a table set for dinner. 'Dinner at 1800' across the top. My name at the bottom. Inside: photographs that make my base housing kitchen look like a cathedral of food. Ava's work is extraordinary.
I opened to the pot roast recipe. The headnote. The words about Kandahar and Torres and every night I stood at the stove and said 'we're okay.' The words that Sarah said 'don't change.' They're printed now. Permanent. In a book that will sit on kitchen counters and get splattered with sauce and dog-eared at the fried chicken page.
That's the highest honor a cookbook can receive: sauce splatters. Bent pages. Evidence of USE.
Sent a copy to Mom. Priority mail. She'll have it by Wednesday.
'Don't read it without me on the phone,' I said.
'I make no promises.'
She called Wednesday. She was crying before she said hello.
'The fried chicken recipe. You got it exactly right.'
'I told you I would, Mom.'
'The headnote. About me. About standing at the stove during deployments. You wrote about ME.'
'Of course I did. The whole book is about you.'
She cried more. I cried. We cried on the phone for the third time in two years. The Abernathy women: we cry on the phone and we cook and we don't apologize for either.
Made fried chicken tonight. Page 37 of the cookbook. My hands. My cast iron. Mom's recipe.
Exactly right. Always exactly right.
People always ask about the fried chicken — the recipe Mom called exactly right — and the answer always starts one step earlier, with the baking mix she kept in a white canister next to the stove. She made it in big batches, labeled it with masking tape and a marker, and refilled it like it was a utility, like flour or salt. When I wrote the headnote for page 37, I knew I had to include this first, because the fried chicken doesn’t exist without it — and neither, really, does anything else she taught me to make.
Baking Mix
Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: None | Total Time: 10 minutes | Servings: Makes about 7 cups (28 quarter-cup servings)
Ingredients
- 6 cups all-purpose flour
- 3 tablespoons baking powder
- 1 tablespoon kosher salt
- 1 teaspoon cream of tartar
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 cup cold vegetable shortening or cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
Instructions
- Combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, cream of tartar, and sugar until evenly distributed.
- Cut in the fat. Add the cold shortening or butter pieces. Using a pastry cutter, two forks, or your fingertips, work the fat into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs with no pieces larger than a small pea. The mix should feel slightly sandy.
- Check the texture. The finished mix should be dry and crumbly — not clumping together. If it feels greasy or wet, the fat was too warm. Chill the mix for 15 minutes and fluff again with a fork.
- Store properly. Transfer to an airtight container or zip-top bag. Label with the date. Store at room temperature for up to 6 weeks, or refrigerate for up to 3 months. Stir or shake before each use.
- Use as a base. Substitute cup-for-cup anywhere a commercial baking mix is called for — pancakes, biscuits, coatings, and the fried chicken on page 37.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 118 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 5g | Carbs: 17g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 228mg
About the cook who shared this
Rachel Abernathy
Week 465 of Rachel’s 30-year story
· San Diego, California
Rachel is a twenty-eight-year-old Marine wife and mom of two who has moved five times in six years and learned to cook a Thanksgiving dinner with half her cookware still in boxes. She married young, survived postpartum depression, and feeds her family of four on a junior Marine's salary with a freezer full of pre-made meals and a crockpot that has never let her down. She writes for the military spouses who are cooking dinner alone in base housing and wondering if they're enough. You are.
