'The Best Cook in the World' is Rick Bragg's tribute to his mother and her somewhat exotic culinary skills

Rick Bragg is no cook, but that doesn’t matter a bit when he writes his mother’s recipes. In his new book, The Best Cook In The World, the Pulitzer-prize-winning author is plenty of other things: a leisurely, soulful storyteller, a reporter with a poet’s eye, and an appreciative diner. Most of all – here, as with earlier family memoirs – he’s a ferociously devoted son.

Some would say Bragg grew up dirt poor, but food provides a clearer measurement of class where he was