Pull up a chair, baby.
About Mama Ozella
Selma, Alabama. Thirty-two years in the lunchroom. Still cooking.
Ozella is 74 and has lived in Selma, Alabama, all her life, fifty years of it in the same old house. For 32 years she cooked in an elementary school lunchroom, feeding a few hundred children before noon. On Sundays she ushers at First Baptist.
She is a mother of three and a grandmother of seven. What she knows about cooking, she learned from her mama and her Grandmama Lula, standing on a chair by the stove.
Thirty-two years of trays
In a school lunchroom you learn fast. You cook for two hundred with what the budget gives you, and it still has to taste like somebody cares. Ozella learned how to stretch a pot of beans, how to make rolls the children asked for by name, and how to rescue a pan of something at a quarter to eleven.
Those tricks are all through her cookbooks, scaled back down for a home kitchen.
Why she wrote it down
Grandmama Lula never owned a measuring cup. She cooked by a pinch, a handful and "till it looks right." When she passed, a lot of those dishes nearly went with her.
So Ozella sat down and wrote out what she remembered, in real cups and real oven heat, so her grandchildren would not have to guess.
After her husband Earl passed, she had to learn to cook for one, too. Big packages went bad and half a pot went to waste. What she figured out became its own book.
The house taught her the rest. Fifty years in the same old house, kept the way her mama kept hers: five plain bottles, rags, an open window, and never once an exterminator. Those ways became the two house books.
What it always comes back to
Waste nothing
The pot likker is soup. Old cornbread is dressing. A ham bone is a pot of beans.
Take your time
Greens, beans and gravy want low heat and patience. Most of the old tricks are about not rushing.
Feed people
A table of twelve or a plate for one. Either way, it should feel like somebody cooked for you.
Write it down
If nobody writes it down, it is gone. That is the whole reason for these books.
That's Ozella. These are her books.
Pull up a chair
Six large-print books: four for the kitchen, from the everyday pot to the holiday table, and two for the rest of the house.