Mama Odessa's Kitchen
Mama Odessa's Kitchen
I was the fourth of seven children in a sharecropper house in the Mississippi Delta, and nobody at our table ever went hungry. My grandmother Cleo carried a whole kitchen in her hands and never wrote down a word of it. I have spent fifty years of Sunday dinners learning what she knew, and now it is all here: 152 secrets, tricks, and full recipes across two cookbooks, written out so plain you can cook from them tonight.
Nothing in my grandmother's kitchen was ever written down. So I wrote it down.
Not a recipe collection with the soul left out. The front of the book teaches you the way we actually cooked, and the back of the book puts it on the table, from Sunday fried chicken to sweet potato pie.
The bread crumb that tells you when the grease is ready. The heavy lid that turns a cheap cut tender. The pot likker you were about to pour down the drain. And then the recipes that use every bit of it: the fried chicken, the greens, the cornbread, the pies. 46 secrets and 46 full recipes, each one written out step by step, with the small note nobody bothers to put online.
Set the same table two ways: brought in, or cooked the way our grandmothers cooked it. The left column is what most families pay. The right column is the same food, done right, for less.
This food was born cheap. It came out of kitchens that turned neck bones, a sack of cornmeal, and a bunch of greens into a table people still dream about. Somewhere along the way we started paying restaurant prices for a weaker version of it. This book turns that back around.
That is a gap of more than $50 every single Sunday, close to $3,000 over a year of them, from a book that costs $37. Once.
Prices are typical grocery and takeout figures and vary by store and city. The gap is the point, and the gap travels everywhere.
Ninety-two entries across ten chapters, every one of them listed right here. Nothing hidden behind the cover.
Real comments, left by viewers under the kitchen videos on the Odessa Mae channel, quoted the way they 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 standing on a kitchen chair next to my grandmother Cleo in Humphreys County, Mississippi. Sharecropper kitchen, wood-handled skillet, seven children to feed and never quite enough to do it with. She did it anyway, every day, and she made it taste like plenty.
For more than fifty years I have cooked her way: the whole animal used, the pot stretched without being watered down, the cast iron passed from hand to hand. The neighborhoods that taught us this food are mostly gone now, and the cooks who carried it are leaving us. So I wrote it down. All of it, plain enough that my grandbabies, and yours, can cook it without ever having stood on that chair.
This is not fancy cooking. It is faithful cooking.
Instant access: in your inbox within a minute of payment. Read it on any phone, tablet, or computer, or print the pages you use most and keep them by the stove. 7-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked: if it is not for you, send one email and the $37 comes back. You keep every page.
Ten chapters that hold the whole kitchen: cast iron, seasoning, gravies and pot likker, frying and smothering, cornbread, stretching the pot, and then the recipes, from Sunday mains and greens to breakfast plates and the dessert table. Each one written out step by step. Start where your family's table starts, and go from there.
Every family has a cook whose food nobody can quite make again. This book is my answer to that: 152 secrets and recipes for $37 at the First Edition price, with a whole second cookbook and two kitchen guides thrown in free. Cook one Sunday dinner from it. If it does not taste like coming home, one email brings back every dollar, and the books stay on your shelf.
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