Mama Odessa's Kitchen
Mama Odessa's Kitchen
Seven children in a sharecropper house, and nobody at our table went hungry. My grandmother Cleo carried a whole kitchen in her hands and never wrote a word of it down. Fifty years of Sunday dinners later, I did: 152 secrets, tricks and recipes across two cookbooks, plain enough to cook from tonight.
Nothing in my grandmother's kitchen was ever written down. So I wrote it down.
Learn how we cooked, then cook all 152 of them: Sunday fried chicken through sweet potato pie, a few dollars a head.
The bread crumb that tells you the grease is ready. The heavy lid that turns a cheap cut tender. The pot likker you were about to pour down the drain. Two cookbooks, 152 secrets and recipes, every one written out step by step. Feed six for about what one takeout meal costs.
One Sunday cooked from this book instead of brought in pays for the whole thing. The other 151 are yours for nothing.
One year, same family, same food. On the left is what it costs without any of this. On the right is the same year with the secrets, the tricks and all 152 recipes in hand.
This food was born cheap. Neck bones, a sack of cornmeal and a bunch of greens fed a whole table. Now you pay restaurant prices for a weaker version of it.
More than $4,200 back in your pocket this year. The package costs $37, once, and earns it back before the first Sunday is cleared.
Typical grocery and takeout prices; yours will differ by store and city. The gap travels everywhere.
All 92 entries in the main book, listed by name, plus 60 more in the bonus cookbook.
Left under the kitchen videos, quoted the way folks wrote them.
Things I saw grandma and great grandma do, I am now 70 and this brought so much back that forgotten.
My Grandma passed away when I was in college. When I started cooking real meals, memory took over. I've recreated many of Grandma's recipes and I utilize her techniques every day.
I remember my grandmother and my mother cooking just like that. I'm 64 years old now and both my grandmother and mom are gone. I cook the same way. So many memories came flowing back and they felt like home.
I learned to cook on a kitchen chair beside my grandmother Cleo in Humphreys County, Mississippi. Sharecropper kitchen, wood-handled skillet, seven children and never quite enough to feed them. She made it taste like plenty anyway.
Fifty years I have cooked her way: the whole animal used, the pot stretched but never watered down, the cast iron handed on. The neighborhoods are mostly gone and the cooks who carried this are leaving us, so I wrote it down plain enough for my grandbabies and yours.
This is not fancy cooking. It is faithful cooking.
In your inbox within a minute. Read it on any phone or computer, or print the pages you cook from. Not for you? One email inside 7 days brings the $37 back, and you keep every page.
One download: 46 techniques, 106 recipes across two cookbooks, two kitchen guides. Cast iron, gravies and pot likker, frying and smothering, cornbread, Sunday mains, greens, breakfast plates, the dessert table. All of it written out step by step.
One Sunday cooked from this book instead of brought in pays for the whole thing. The other 151 are yours for nothing.
Every family has a cook whose food nobody can make again. Here is mine, written down: 152 secrets, tricks and recipes for $37, with a second cookbook and two guides free. Cook one Sunday from it. If it does not taste like coming home, one email brings back every dollar and you keep the books.
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