Soul Food Sunday: Neck Bones & Rice the Way Grandma Made It

In the winter of 1953, a woman named Ruthie Pearl Dawson fed seven people out of one pot for less than a dollar. Three rooms on the South Side, a window that iced over on the inside, and a sack of rice she carried up from Mississippi in her lap. She never called it poor. She called it Sunday. Today I'm giving you the whole thing — the seven parts of the neck bones and rice pot, counted backward, the way it was actually done before the boxes and the packets and the trays got here. The two waters at the sink. The brown on the bones. The lid you don't lift. The pay in the bottom of the pot that most folks pour straight down the drain.