Kitchen Mistakes That Got You Run Out of an Appalachian Grandmother's Kitchen (I Still Make Two)

The next time you bake a pan of biscuits, I want you to shut the oven door and leave it shut. I am seventy two years old and I still cannot do it. My grandmother Ada ran me out of her kitchen for opening that door when I was six. She never raised her voice. She just pointed at the back door with a wooden spoon, and out I went. I grew up at the head of a hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, in a house where eleven people sat down at one long plank table three times a day. That kitchen belonged to two women, my grandmother and my mother, and it ran on rules nobody ever wrote down, because nobody needed to. So I am going to walk you through every one of them, the way they would have been said in that kitchen. The biscuit dough you worked too long. The cold skillet and the cornbread that never sizzled. The lid on the dumplings that nobody touched. The salt in the beans, the crowded skillet, the worried meat, the gravy that lumped, the potato peel so thin you could see through it, and the pot likker you never, ever poured down the sink. And I will tell you about the summer I was seven, when I hit the back screen door at a dead run with her coconut cake in the oven for church homecoming, and what she set on the long table under the trees that Sunday. Two of these mistakes I still make today. I will tell you which two when we come to them.