My grandmother, Dora Gregory, about 1910, and I made tonight’s dinner—oven-fried chicken and mashed potatoes—thinking of her. Her fried chicken, although I only had it a few times, was divine. It was what I’d call Border State Fried rather than Southern Fried—no batter, but the pieces sprinkled with top-secret seasonings and then coated in flour.

I remember that there would be a bunch of salads–macaroni and fruit, I think, and one made with hominy, and vegetable casseroles, with green beans a favorite, liberally flavored with bacon, sweet potatoes laced with butter and brown sugar—it’s a wonder I’m not dead yet.

(There would also have been, irrelevant as it may seem, sliced ham. Her ham deserves a whole separate post. Her husband, my grandfather John, raised hogs; slaughtering, curing and smoking happened in winter and whole families would participate, moving from one neighbor’s Ozark Plateau farm to another until all the hams were hung. It would’ve been a dreadful time of year to be a hog.)

Of course, Grandmother’s crowning glory, and even the chicken took a little bit of a back seat, was her mashed potatoes, fluffy as clouds. The chicken cracklings and their lubricant would be turned, through some kind of sorcery, into flour gravy ladled over the potatoes, with a little crater in their midst. But I thought that since her mashed potatoes were so good, the gravy was better used over biscuits.

(I like to think that my grandmother would love my mashed taters. Here they are.)

This was in Taft, so it must have been insufferably hot to cook.

The older men ate with linen napkins tucked into their shirt collars; finger-licking was forgiven. All that food would be washed down with iced tea and then the men would take naps while the women kept working.

Many of the men, of course, would someday die of coronary arrest. So it goes.

Then there was dessert. Some of those men, in their last moments, dreamed of lemon meringue pie. That may have been the vision that got them over to the Other Side.