Brock - Heritage

With contributions by

MARION SULLIVAN and JEFF ALLEN

Photographs by

PETER FRANK EDWARDS

New York

To everyone who has believed in me, worked by my side, and eaten my food, especially Renee Brock, Homer Brock, and Audrey Morgan, for eternally inspiring me to work harder than the person beside me.

Contents

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Introduction

I often tell people that Im from the part of western Virginia that should have been in Kentucky. I grew up in Wise County, deep in the coalfields and hollers of the Appalachian Mountains. Have you ever seen the movie Coal Miners Daughter? Well, thats what it looks like where I am from. That part of Virginia has a unique voice; you can hear it in the food, the art, the music, and the storytelling.

People in Southwest Virginia have a very distinct way of living. Most of them live off the land. If you dont have a kitchen garden, youre considered lazy. And if you dont have a freezer full of venison or catfish you caught yourself, youre not upholding the traditions passed down from your dad and grandpa. When I was a kid, everyone had a garden, and I mean everyone. It denoted status. Who could grow the best beans or the best tomatoes? Who had fewer weeds in her garden? Who took better care of his tractor?

If you grow up like I did, you learn to appreciate food on a different level. You see firsthand the work that goes into getting food onto the dinner table. You watch your family handle food with care and respect. Its in my blood; its part of my DNA. My family loves food and appreciates it more than I can describe. Few people get as excited over a ripe tomato with salt on it or a perfectly executed cheeseburger from a diner as my mother does. I was taught to appreciate things that were made with care at a young age. It doesnt matter if its chicken and dumplings or Oysters and Pearls from The French Laundry. If its made with care, it is special.

I suppose it was my destiny to take over my fathers coal trucking business and keep the Brock Trucking Company legacy alive. I would have been content surrounded by coal, literallyin my childhood memories there are piles of it as far as the eye can see, and I spent my days exploring old abandoned coal mines on my four-wheeler. I watched my father manage a rowdy crew of bearded coal truck drivers with names like Rooster Daddy and Fatboy. Coal provided for my family and all the families around me.

When I was eleven years old, my father died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-nine, and Brock Trucking was no more. My mother, brother, and I moved in with my grandparents, and those years would prove to be the foundation for my love affair with food. My grandparents had an enormous garden (much larger than what I see people calling farms these days), and it was their passion project. They plowed the fields with Haflinger horses and grew plants that were indigenous to our culture. My chores were those of a farmhand. While most kids would have hated these chores, I embraced them and actually looked forward to them. I loved being in the dirt and soaking up the sun. I loved the silence of the field, occasionally broken by a roosters crow or a hungry horses nicker. My grandmother Audrey was a master of many crafts. If she wasnt in the kitchen, she was in the garden, and her understanding of both domains was truly a marvel. My formative years with her were filled with amazement and respect. I was a very inquisitive child, and I asked too many questions. I wanted to know how things worked. I was lucky enough to have a grandmother who had most of the answers. I absorbed every piece of knowledge that she passed to me, and I wanted to be just like her. You could see the wisdom in her eyes, and you could see the years of work worn into her hands.

My grandmothers home was a beautifully mysterious playground, filled with bubbling vats of homemade wine and fermented ears of corn. Every square inch of her basement was covered with preserved foodI will never forget the smell of that basement. She saw that I loved food early on, and when I was thirteen or so, she bought me a hand-hammered wok from an infomercial. It came with a video and a cookbook. I watched the videos of workers forming the cast-iron woks with hammers at lightning speed. I was amazed that those hammer indentions served the purpose of holding the food up on the sides while the juices could run down and be reduced or thickened. I had grown up making biscuits and gravy, but this wok was something that opened up another part of the world to me. I started watching TV anytime there was a cooking show on. And just like that, I was hooked. I blame that damn wok for my food obsession. To this day, every time I use it I can hear my grandmother preaching about the importance of taking care of cast iron. I can only hope my wok lasts as long as the cornbread pans her grandmother gave her have.

Youll read more about my grandmother in the pages of this book, because shes been the greatest influence in my life. When I was a kid, we ate three meals a day at home. I thought thats what everyone else in America did too. In fact, I dont have a single memory of dining at a restaurant with my grandmother, and I probably didnt eat in a real restaurant until I was sixteen, which is pretty crazy considering what I do for a living. There were no restaurants in the town I lived in and only one sort of crummy grocery store. So you cooked what you grew, and you always knew where your food came from. That mentality influences everything I cook today, even if I no longer live in the Appalachians.

These days I am lucky enough to enjoy both the sophisticated foods that challenge me professionally and the comfort foods that nurture me on a regular basis. I appreciate and crave the best versions of both things. Its what drives my cooking. And so youll find recipes for all kinds of foodshighbrow, lowbrow, and everything in betweenwithin these pages. Some of the best food in the world is cooked in the most unassuming places by people who will never have their names in lights. And while I love caviar and foie gras dearly, I crave nostalgia. If you were to ask me what the most pleasurable thing in the world for me to eat is, I would tell you the story of Robos Drive-In, located in my hometown of Pound, Virginia, and the amazing burgers they turn out daily for hungry truck drivers and peewee baseball stars. Nothing can beat eating a burger at a place where my dad took my mother on their first date.