photograph by michael donahue
Peggy Brown serves up a plate of meatloaf with yams and collard greens.
Peggy Brown will tell you one special ingredient she uses in her meatloaf at Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking: “The sauce that we put on the meatloaf has got honey in it. But I’m not going to tell you everything that’s in it.”
Her meatloaf, which is served on Tuesdays and Fridays, is one of Brown’s most popular items. They make “8 to 10 sleeves” of meatloaf on those two days, she says. “Each one of the sleeves is anywhere from 12 to 15 slices.”
Her family used honey a lot in cooking when she lived in Arlington, Tennessee, says Brown, 73. “Back in the day, when I was growing up, honeybees had nests in hollow trees. And my dad and his friends would go out and smoke the bees out and grab the honey real quick — four or five buckets.”
Her grandmother, Eliza Jubirt, rubbed meat with honey to tenderize it. “She used honey for everything,” Brown tells me.
True to family tradition, honey isn’t just in her meatloaf sauce, Brown says. “You put the honey in the meat with eggs and bread crumbs and all that.”
Brown’s meatloaf recipe came from Jubirt. “My mother was a good cook, but my grandmother was a great cook.”
Her grandmother lived in Hernando, Mississippi, before moving to Arlington to live with Brown’s family. “She cooked in a big house down there for the folks in Mississippi for a long time before she came here.”
The effort put into the food prepared in the kitchen at Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking isn’t something Brown sees young people doing these days. “They work an hour and a half and they’re half dead,” she says. “We can work all day long and be all right. I don’t understand it. I guess we were made out of that good stuff.”
Jubirt wasn’t living “per se in slavery time,” Brown says. “Slaves had been set free, but even though they were free, a lot of things didn’t change. She was down there on the farm and she worked up in the big house. So, that’s where she did all her cooking until she left.”
Her grandmother cooked and took care of Brown and her two brothers. “While my mom and dad worked out in the cotton fields, my grandma was always in the house. She saw to us because we were little kids. Cleaned up, washed us.”
As for making meatloaf, Brown says, “Whenever she had the meat, she would do it.”
They raised the meat on their farm. “Back then, Dad killed the pigs and cows, and she would grind up the beef in a sausage grinder.” Her grandmother then served the meatloaf with “smothered potatoes, cabbage, or collard greens — always something green with it.”
Brown keeps her grandmother’s memory alive every time she’s in the kitchen. “All the food, basically, is my grandmother’s recipe. That’s why everybody keeps wanting me to write a cookbook. Everybody worries me to death: ‘Peggy, write that cookbook.’ That’s because they want to know the recipes. People that eat our food aren’t used to food like that.”
Then there are the customers who remember yams and collard greens cooked the way they are at her restaurant, Brown says. “I’ve had people sit in this restaurant and have tears run down their face and say they haven’t had food like this since their grandmother or their mama died.
“We do old-style cooking. Not this new-style stuff. It’s scratch. You see what we’re doing. People slicing up sweet potatoes, cutting up greens, cutting up cabbage, slicing up squash when we can get it, fresh lima beans, peas, cornbread. We make our bread from scratch. We don’t use that canned-bagged-box stuff.”
The effort put into the food prepared in the kitchen at Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking isn’t something Brown sees young people doing these days. “They work an hour and a half and they’re half dead,” she says. “We can work all day long and be all right. I don’t understand it. I guess we were made out of that good stuff.”
Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking is at 942 East E.H. Crump Boulevard.
