JACKSON, Miss.—Nick Wallace’s first memory of cooking takes him back to his family’s farm in Edwards, Miss., where chickens flapped around their coop and cows grazed the land. As a child, he spent the days chasing chickens and goats and searching for bugs, running across sweet-potato roots and alongside fences lined with dewberry vines, and playing in the front yard near the corn and okra crops—part of a garden that wrapped around the property.
Wallace’s grandmother, Lennel Donald, took pride in cooking for the family. She taught her young grandson to bring her items she needed from the garden. He learned to gather greens, pick crookneck squash and dig up sweet potatoes. She took time to advise him on what to look for to know when vegetables were ripe and ready for picking.
As Wallace grew older, Donald decided that it was time for him to learn more inside the kitchen.
“I remember she wanted me to go to get some blueberries off the fence line,” Wallace told the Mississippi Free Press. “So I went and got a bucket of them. I came into the house to bring it to her and she said, ‘You’re gonna finish it.’”
Donald asked her young apprentice to run cold water over the bowl of berries, instructing him in massaging the submerged fruit to clear them of debris. He removed the berries from the bowl and dried them out before the pair placed the berries into a pan on the stove, creating a thick liquid, which Wallace poured into Mason jars. His grandmother dropped the jars into boiling water to better seal them.
The next morning, Donald prepared biscuits for the men heading off to work like she did each morning. She handed Wallace a biscuit, telling him to “pop it open like a soda bottle,” fill it with a spoonful of the fruity jam and take a bite. Her young kitchen-helper was hooked.
“It was one of the most magical things I’ve ever tasted in my life,” Wallace recalled. “I looked at Miss Lennel, and I just fell in love with her again.
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