Tag: Peggy Brown

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Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Fish Breading From Chef Peggy Brown Now Online

Peggy Brown with a package of her fish breading, now available online (Credit: Michael Donahue)

Peggy Brown, meet e-commerce.

Brown, 74, chef/owner of Peggy’s Heavenly Home Cooking restaurant, is now selling “Ms Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Gourmet Fish Breading” online at mspeggysjustheavenlygood.com.

Her breading comes in four flavors:

Hot and Spicy — “I cannot tell you everything that’s in it,” Brown says. “It’s got cayenne pepper in it, let’s put it that way. Black pepper and cayenne.”

Cajun — “A little spicy, but not too spicy. Cayenne and paprika in it.”

Lemon Pepper — “Basically, it’s got salt, black pepper, and it’s got dehydrated lemon peels in it.”

Regular — “It’s got the flour and the meal. Got white pepper and seasoning salt.”

And that’s all she’s going to reveal about the ingredients in her fish breading, which went online about a month ago.

“Well, the history of the fish breading is it’s been in the family for two or three generations. Back in the day, my dad and them ground up their own meal. And my grandmama made her own fish breading. Back then we went to the pond and fished and fried fish and everything. My grandmama cooked fish all the time. Most of the time bream and catfish.”

Her grandmother made her fish breading out of yellow meal, self-rising flour, salt, black pepper, and red pepper. “My grandmama would mix it up in a big old bowl and when dad and them would get through cleaning fish and washing them, she’d put them in that bowl and roll them around in that meal and drop it in that big black skillet and fry that fish.”

Brown used that same recipe until she got a job as a cook in the employee cafeteria at The Peabody in the early 1990s and met noted chef/journalist Burt Wolf, who was the hotel’s head chef. “He told me all about different spices. All kinds of different spices you could mix together that have a good taste. 

“When I got my restaurant, I started mixing the fish breading together, but I added different spices. And everybody has loved that fish breading.”

Peggy Brown with her daughter, Katina Brown, and granddaughter, RaShondrea Alston (Credit: MIchael Donahue)

Customers always ask where she buys her fish breading, Brown says. “I told them I didn’t buy this. I make it.” And their response usually is, “Girl, you need to be selling this stuff online.”

“I decided to put it online. I made up my mind I wanted to do it over a year ago, but I never put it online. So, a friend of mine was eating fish and he said, ‘Miss Peggy, you need to get this stuff online.’ He decided he would do the website for me. Ronald Jackson did the website. He bought the domain for me.”

They went online and Jackson picked out the plastic bags. And he designed and printed the labels. “But I told him how I wanted it.”

She wanted angel wings on the label to go along with the “heavenly” in the name. “I told him I wanted wings on the side, but he decided to put the wings on me. I just wanted the wings basically on the packaging. He said, ‘No, Miss Peggy. I got another idea.’”

Brown wants to eventually get her products in Kroger and other stores. “I’ve got a couple of things going on.”

For now, her fish breading is available online or at her restaurant at 326 South Cleveland Street.

Brown isn’t stopping with the fish breading. “Oh, we’re going to put other products on the website. We’ve got a lot of people who love the turnip greens. We got people that drive all the way from Nashville to Memphis to get these turnip greens. They have a fit about these turnip greens. They said, ‘I can’t find any turnip greens like these. They’re the best I ever put in my mouth.’ They want me to put those turnip greens and candied yams online.”

Which is do-able, Brown says. “Now greens and yams, I can freeze them and ship them anywhere in the country. You can freeze greens. You can freeze yams.”

She wants to package them in two and four-pound containers. But, she says, “This is something we aren’t doing yet.”

Brown is working on getting a Midtown kitchen space, where she can prepare and package her products. It also will serve as as a store. “We’re going to have a kitchen, but we’re also going to have a retail space where you can come in and pick up your banana pudding, come in and pick up your greens, come pick up yams. I’ll cook them. All you do is order them online. Or call me and I’ll cook them.”

Her famous banana pudding is an item that will strictly have to be picked up. She can’t ship it. “Banana  pudding is something you can’t freeze. If you freeze banana pudding, it isn’t ever the same when you thaw it out. When you freeze bananas and thaw them out, the bananas usually turn dark.”

Fried catfish with greens and yams at Peggy’s Heavenly Home Cooking restaurant (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Barbecue is Coming to New Site of Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking

Peggy Brown at the new location of Peggy's Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking (Credit: Michael Donahue)

You love her banana pudding. You love her meatloaf and pork chops.

Soon, you’ll also be able to love Peggy Brown’s barbecue.

Brown’s new location of Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking at 942 East E. H. Crump Boulevard came with a barbecue pit. “We’re trying to throw some barbecue in there,” Brown says.

“At one time this was a barbecue restaurant before it was a seafood restaurant,” she says, although the pit needs to be refurbished, which builder Audric Simmons says he’s going to get into shape.

A barbecue pit came with the new location of Peggy Brown’s restaurant. (Credit: Michael Donahue)

Brown is going to use the “special marinade and special sauce” from her father, whose specialty was barbecued ribs. His sauce included cinnamon, nutmeg, and various spices, she says. 

Brown is no stranger to barbecue. “I used to have a barbecue place when I was on Thomas,” she says, and it also was known as Peggy’s.

But she didn’t sell barbecue at her former location at 326 S0uth Cleveland.

“I don’t get rid of my old family recipes,” Brown says. The recipes were passed down, but, she says, “I’m the only one that carries it on.”

A caramel cake made from a family recipe waits to be sliced at Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking (Credit: Michael Donahue)

People can’t get enough of that food made with those recipes. They weren’t happy when she closed for a month before opening at the new location three months ago. “People were so upset when we closed: ‘Peggy, what are we going to do?’ I’d get calls all through the day, all through the night.”

Most of her regulars know she’s moved, but, Brown says, “Some don’t know we’re here.”

Her new location, across the street from the iconic Justine’s restaurant that closed decades ago, is almost twice the size of her former location, she says. There are two spaces: the dining room and the to-go area, both of which are spacious with tables and chairs.                

Dining room at the new Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking (Credit: Michael Donahue)
The to-go area at the new location of Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking (Credit: Michael Donahue)

The dining room walls are white with blue drapes. The to-go area is “yellowish gold,” she says and she’ll add gold drapes to that section and do more decorating as she gets time.

Brown plans to add a glass-topped table to the front entrance. “We’re going to put some flowers on it.”

She’s also got to place her angel statues after the shelves are built. People have been asking her, “Miss Peggy, where are the angels?” For now, they’re boxed up. Asked how many angels she has, Brown says, “We aren’t going to talk about it.” But then she adds, “Probably a couple of hundred.”

She began with four angels she put on a shelf at her former location. Customers would ask, “Miss Peggy, you like angels?” They then began bringing her angels. “I’ve got angels from New Orleans, Florida, Georgia, Texas, New York. People get them when they go on vacation.”

Brown is doing a lot of the cooking at her old location because part of the vent hood was stolen from the roof of the new location, she says. “They took the motor, the fan, everything off the roof.”

It’s going to cost $7,000 to $9,000 for the new vent hood, says Brown, who says she’s already spent $60,000 on the new place. And, she says, “I’m paying rent on this place and the other.” Customers suggested she start a GoFundMe page, but Brown doesn’t know how to do it.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual on a bustling Tuesday morning. Yams are sliced and cooked. Meatloafs are pulled out of the oven. And all are waiting for hungry customers to enjoy.

“God has been good to us,” Brown says. “It’s truly been a blessing for us to do what we do.”

Peggy’s Just Heavenly Good Home Cooking is open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 12 noon to 6 p.m. on Sundays.

Audric Simmons and Peggy Brown (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Stacey Thompson and Peggy Brown decorate for the holidays at the new location of Peggy Brown’s restaurant. (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink Food Reviews Hungry Memphis

Memphis Chefs Talk Mashed Potatoes

Photo: Michael Donahue

After hearing about Memphis being recognized as the mashed potato capital of America by Idahoan Foods, I wondered how Memphis chefs used mashed potatoes at their restaurants. So, I asked around.

Kelly English, owner of Iris, The Second Line, and Fino’s from the Hill, says, “I love crawfish boil mashed potatoes — with everything you would get in a crawfish boil. Just fold some crawfish tails, crispy sautéed andouille, corn kernels, and roasted garlic into your potatoes and season with your favorite Creole seasoning. Saute a piece of fish from the Gulf and pour brown butter and lemon juice over the whole dish.”

Derk Meitzler, chef/owner of The Vault, Paramount, Backlot Sandwich Shop, and Earnestine & Hazel’s, says, “I’ve used leftover mashed potatoes to make loaded tater tots. Put the potatoes, egg, flour, shredded cheddar cheese, bacon, and chives into a bowl and mix together. Form into the shape of a tater tot and roll in panko bread crumbs. Then fry them golden brown.”

Acre Restaurant executive chef
Andrew Adams
(Photo: Michael Donahue)

Elwood’s Shack owner Tim Bednarski shared his warm German potato salad recipe. Boil two pounds of new potatoes cut into fourths in salted water until tender. Render four pieces of bacon. Drain the potatoes while warm. Combine one cup sliced green onions, one-half cup diced celery, one-half cup mayonnaise, one-half cup sour cream, two tablespoons Dijon mustard, one-fourth cup apple cider vinegar, one-half cup chopped parsley, one-fourth cup pimentos, salt and pepper to taste, and “hot sauce for a kick.” Give it “a light mash.”

Veteran Memphis chef Mac Edwards, hospitality director for The Paramount, makes Very Anglo Latkes: “To leftover mashed potatoes, add grated onion, eggs, a little flour, and baking soda. Press into a patty, pan fry in one-fourth inch of oil until crispy and brown. Drain on a paper towel and sprinkle with salt while hot. I make a horseradish applesauce to go with it.”

Karen Carrier, owner of The Beauty Shop Restaurant, Mollie Fontaine Lounge, and Another Roadside Attraction, prepares Green Herb Roasted Garlic Creamed Potatoes, made with Yukon golds and a parsley, mint, and tarragon puree, unsalted butter, roasted garlic, creme fraiche, and grana padano, with salt and pepper to taste.

Saito 2 chef Jimmy “Sushi Jimi” Sinh makes a sushi roll with mashed potatoes. “Inside would be a deep-fried panko chicken,” he says. The roll is “topped with mashed potatoes and thinly sliced avocado.”

Ben Smith, chef/owner of Tsunami, says, “Mashed potatoes don’t play a major role in my restaurant, even though it’s one of the most requested side items. They normally only accompany our grilled filet of beef, but some customers get creative. We frequently have people order our pork and lemongrass meatballs on top of mashed potatoes.

“I’ve also known people to order mashed potatoes with a side of soy beurre blanc, which is kind of overkill because our mashed potatoes are already loaded with butter and cream.”

Acre Restaurant executive chef Andrew Adams says, “When I worked in a restaurant in New Jersey, I would make mashed potato sandwiches at the end of the night when leftovers were mashed potatoes and sourdough bread. I’ve been told that I break some sort of healthy eating rule by eating carbs on carbs. Lately, I’ve been doing the same with leftover cornbread.”

Peggy Brown, chef/owner of Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking, cooks homestyle mashed potatoes: “We use Irish potatoes. Peel, wash, slice them up, put them in a pot with chicken broth, and boil until they get completely done. I also put salt in my pot while they’re cooking. Mash them with a potato masher and put in real butter and black pepper. Sometimes we put a little cream in them.”

If you still don’t have enough mashed potatoes in your life, try making some of these dishes.

Former Memphis chef Spencer McMillin, “traveling chef” and author of The Caritas Cookbook:  A Year in the Life with Recipes, knows his mashed potatoes. “I’ve been making smoked mashed potatoes since 1995,” says McMillin, now executive chef at Ciao Trattoria and Wine Bar in Durham, New Hampshire. “Wash Idaho russets, peel them, simmer — always starting in cold water — drain, smoke with any wood but mesquite, fortify with unholy amounts of hot cream and cold butter, season — kosher salt only, pepper and garlic fight with the smoke — and serve them napalm hot. If the roof of your mouth wasn’t singed with the first bite,  they’re too cold. Smoked mash is the one side dish of mine that has been remembered, sought after, stolen, and stood the test of time.

“In the restaurants, I always make way too much and find myself trying to merchandise them in other dishes or turning them into new ‘brilliant’ preparations. A kicky shepherd’s pie, creative duchess croquette, savory pancake — so good with braised pork shoulder — or cheddar-laced fritters.”

But, he says, “None of those dishes were as tasty and as simple to whip together during a mad rush as smoked potato bisque. Sweat out some leek and onion in butter, add chicken stock — not that crap in the aseptic box at the grocery store, make fresh — maybe add a bay leaf or two, bring to a simmer, whisk in an appropriate amount of day-old smoked mash — they’re better in this soup — a touch of cream and bam!”

In addition to his sandwiches, Acre Restaurant executive chef Andrew Adams uses mashed potatoes in dishes served at the restaurant.

“I like to make the super smooth extremely rich Robuchon style mashed potatoes or potato puree,” Adams says. “Five large russet potatoes, one pound butter, salt, and a small amount of hot milk. I treat the process like any emulsion, similar to a béarnaise, by slowly adding the butter and then refinishing with milk.”

Mashed potato concoctions don’t need fancy equipment, Adams says. “Years ago, I was eating at a Michelin three-star restaurant in New York City. After dinner, I was having a drink with the chefs who worked there. I was complimenting their truffle potato foam — when that was still popular — on a seafood dish. The sous chef said he spent weeks with aerators, stabilizers, and other high-tech equipment only for the chef to walk by one day and simply toss a spoonful of mashed potatoes into a white wine sauce and blend. The texture ended up so airy and balanced. Fifteen years later, I tried that. I made a simple sauce with white wine, shallots, milk. Then I added saved mashed potatoes slowly until thickened. To this, I added a little brown butter. And that was it. Last year, this made it to our menu. Now I smoke the potatoes. The final smoked potato sauce goes with our potato gnocchi and short rib dish. The gnocchi with ‘smoked mashed potato’ sauce has been a hit. It’s not listed on the menu that way.”

And, Adams says, “If I have leftover chunky mashed potatoes or some with less butter and other liquids, I will use those sometimes to mix with duck confit or duck breast ‘pastrami’ to make potato-duck croquettes. I just mix duck, mashed potatoes, and egg. That gets molded and breaded, fried.

“On days when we make potato rosemary bread, I’ll ask the crew to save the potatoes for the next day. The potatoes get mixed into the dough. The bread is usually used as the base of our country pork pate.”

Justin Fox Burks and his wife, Amy Lawrence of The Chubby Vegetarian blog and cookbooks, shared their Mashed Potato Dumplings recipe: 

2 cups peeled, cubed potatoes

1 tablespoon water

2 medium eggs (beaten)

1 cup semolina flour

one half teaspoon kosher salt

“Place potatoes and water in a microwave-safe bowl with a lid or a plate to cover. Microwave on high for eight minutes and then allow potatoes to rest, covered, for another eight minutes in the microwave. Mash potatoes with a potato masher and add the eggs, four, and salt. Mix with your hands until just mixed. Pat dough out to about one half inch thickness on a floured surface. Using a pastry cutter or knife, cut dough into roughly one half inch rectangles. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook gnocchi for two to three minutes. When they are ready, they will float. Use a strainer to remove them from the water.

For extra credit, extra flavor, and extra texture, sear the drained gnocchi in olive oil in a skillet on high heat before tossing them with your choice of sauce.”

Burks and Lawrence serve their gnocchi with “a garlicky parsley and walnut pesto or paired with a regular jar of tomato sauce and heaps of grated Romano cheese.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Marinated to the Bone: Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking

CREDIT: Jon W. Sparks

Dining-in is down, but Peggy Brown’s chin is up at Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking. She’s weathering the pandemic storm at her Midtown restaurant.

“We got our tables six feet apart,” Brown says. “We’re offering dine-in, but a lot of people really aren’t dining in. I think this virus thing has everybody so scared. But most of ours is carry out. People who normally would dine-in that pick up their food and go on.”

She’s seen a big difference on Sundays. “After church we’d have all the church people. And a lot of the churches are still closed, so we don’t have our church crowd like we normally would have. So the more people that come in are mostly working class folk — our construction workers. And MLGW. All of them. They come in and dine in. But otherwise, not a lot of people are dining in. A lot of people are working from home.”

Jon W. Sparks

Peggy Brown

Her takeout business is thriving. She began offering curbside, takeout, and Bite Squad and DoorDash delivery as soon as she was able. But, she says, the pandemic “hurt us bad, business-wise. We did about a third of normal what we would do. I had to let some of my people go. It was tough.” But, Brown says, “I came in every day and cooked.”

She opened for dine-in about a month ago. “I was really trying to keep everybody from coming in, but they told us we could have 30 percent dine-in, so people knew we were open for dine-in. And I had some of my customers that live right down the street. They’ve been getting my food to go. They were so happy: ‘Hey, we were just waiting to come in and sit down and get some of this good food.’ I wasn’t going to turn them away. They’re my regulars. They’ve been coming in ever since I’ve been here.”

Brown doesn’t skip a beat when asked to name her most popular items. “Greens, yams, and meatloaf. Everybody loves our meatloaf. And greens? We won’t even discuss those greens. If you don’t have greens people get mad. They all walk out if you don’t have greens.

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“Basically, the story on the greens is we don’t cook with meat. We don’t cook any of our vegetables with meat at all,” Brown says. “Food has its own flavor. So, the only thing I do is add the herbs to enhance the flavor to the greens and not take away from the flavor. The greens have their own flavor. Most people cannot believe that our greens taste that good and we don’t use meat.”

Her fried chicken is “very, very popular. People come every day and want our fried chicken, but we only do fried chicken once a week. We do it on Tuesdays. But I’ve got a special marinade I marinate my chicken in. My chicken is marinated to the bone.

“One of the things in our marinade is we do a little poultry seasoning, a little garlic powder, a little onion powder,” she continues. “And we do a season salt. We’ve got a couple of other things we put in there we try to keep a little secret.”

Her meat loaf, which includes honey in the tomato sauce, is featured on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Brown hasn’t let the pandemic get the better of her. “I never did get depressed or down because, you know what? I’m a religious person. I get up in the church and I believe the Lord will provide. And he always does. I’m a praying person. No, I didn’t get depressed. You just have to pray a lot. That’s the only thing you can do. And not only do I pray for my business, but I pray for the other people’s businesses in the city.

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“I tell you what. Our business is doing great. Compared to a lot of people’s business, our business is really fantastic, to be honest with you. Because of the Lord. My health is good. I can’t complain a bit.”

Sanitizing at her restaurant isn’t something new because of the virus, Brown says. “I grew up in the country. We’ve always been clean. We bleached down. We’d clean down everything. That’s how I grew up. Cleanliness has always been a big thing. Clorox. We’d Clorox our dishes. We mopped our floors with Clorox. We really scrubbed and cleaned. It’s nothing new to me.”

A silver lining was Brown’s recent tie-in with FedEx.“I recently became a vendor for FedEx. I make food for certain shifts.”

So, it’s business — just about as usual — at Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking.

“God did not give us a spirit of fear,” Brown says, adding, “I don’t live in fear. It’s not part of me. You have to take precautions. People are dying from this stuff. I wear a mask if I’m in a crowd. Yeah, I’ll put my mask on.”

And, she says, “Sometimes God has to do things to get our attention. I think things happen in order for him to get our attention and let us know we’re not running anything. We’re not in charge of anything. He gave us a mind to choose right or wrong, but so much has gone wrong. We have strayed so far from the Lord. I think sometimes he has to do things to bring us back.”

Meanwhile, Brown says, “I’ll do my do and talk to the Lord and be blessed. That’s what you do. That’s exactly what you do.”

Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking is at 326 South Cleveland; (901) 474-4938


Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Peggy Brown’s Food Slated to Go Online

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Justin Fox Burks

Peggy Brown

If you’re a fan of Peggy Brown’s meatloaf, greens, sweet potato pie, and other dishes at her restaurant, Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking, soon you’ll be able to order her food online.

“Peggy’s Pies and More” is slated to debut in August, says Brown.

She decided to open an online business because people who ate at the restaurant called and asked how they could get a pan of her greens or other soul food items. She told them she couldn’t send her food through the mail. Someone then told her, “Why don’t you start your own online store?”

Brown already had been sending her food home with people. A woman in San Francisco “brings her cooler,” Brown says. “She’ll buy eight plates to take home with her.”

And, she says, “Another man in Georgia, I’ll prepare food and put it in half size pans. I’ll do greens, yams, lima beans, black-eyed peas, meatloaf, salisbury steak. I’ll freeze it and he comes with his cooler and picks it up and goes back to Georgia.”

So, Brown decided to open her own online store. She will put 10 items online. Customers can order the food, which will be frozen, through PayPal. The food will be shipped overnight by FedEx.

Peggy’s Pies and More is at 634 Bellevue at Lamar, which is near her restaurant at 326 South Cleveland, “I’m setting it up now even as we speak. Refrigerator, freezers, and all the stuff we have to have.

“We’re getting with different companies to find out the best containers to ship it in so when you put it in the microwave you get a fresh cooked pot of greens,” she says.

She hasn’t figured out prices for everything, but the pies “will probably bring $19.95.”

Shipping will be included in the price of the pies and other dishes.

They haven’t yet set up a web address, but the site will feature photos of all her cuisine.

Note: the pies, for now, will strictly be Brown’s sweet potato pies, but not just her regular sweet potato pie. You also can order her pineapple sweet potato pie, coconut sweet potato pie, and rum raisin sweet potato pie. “And we’re doing what you call ‘praline and pecan sweet potato pie,’” Brown notes.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Best Bets: Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding

I tried Peggy Brown’s no-cook banana pudding, which is super delicious. So, when she told me also makes her own bread pudding, I had to try that, too.

What made it more enticing was the name: “Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding.”

“To me, it’s just a shortcut from cooking it the way my grandma did,” says Brown, chef/owner of Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking. “I didn’t want to do a whole lot of work, so I just decided to do it that way.”


The ingredients in Brown’s unconventional bread pudding include instant vanilla pudding. She uses day-old bread, but she also uses day-old cinnamon rolls and honey buns.

“My grandma, she beat all the eggs and she did it step by step. I just use the vanilla pudding. I don’t use the cornstarch. I don’t use the eggs. I don’t use a lot of the stuff they use.

“My grandma made bread pudding all the time. Back in the day, people didn’t throw anything away. We had biscuits every day. My grandma would keep all the old biscuits. When she had enough, she’d crumble them all up and make a bread pudding.”

Brown began making her Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding eight or nine years ago. “It tastes about like the ones she made.”

When Brown poured that custard over the bread, I knew it was going to taste fabulous.

If you’re lucky, you’ll hit a day when she serves her bread pudding at her restaurant. “Every once in a while we serve bread pudding. We don’t serve it a whole lot, but we serve it.”

Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking is at 326 South Cleveland; (901)-474-4938.

Best Bets: Lazy Woman’s Bread Pudding

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Cover Feature News

Peggy Brown: Queen of Memphis Soul Food

Peggy Brown was 7 when a pot of coffee fell off a table and severely burned her foot.

“My grandma was so upset,” Brown says. “She made me stay out of the kitchen.” But that didn’t stop her. “As soon as my foot healed, I was back in the kitchen. I got a whipping about being in the kitchen, but that didn’t deter me.”

She’s been in one kitchen or another ever since. Brown, 69, is owner of Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking on Cleveland Street near Peabody Avenue in Midtown, and she recently opened another thriving restaurant, Peggy’s Homestyle Cooking, on Brooks Road. Brown has a reputation for putting out some of the best and healthiest soul food in town. But the road to success was long and difficult.

Until she had her own restaurants, Brown worked in many Memphis kitchens, including one at The Peabody, where she shared cooking tips with noted chef/journalist Burt Wolf.

“I think God gave us all a gift,” Brown says. “And I think my gift was cooking.”

But, she says, “Let me tell you something. I think the things that you go through in life — God shapes you. You don’t understand at that point in time when it’s all happening, but when you get grown and you look back, all these things served to make you strong. I’m telling you. I have survived stuff that would kill anybody else. Believe me.”

Brown grew up on a farm in Arlington. “My mom was part Indian … white, black, and I don’t know what else. My dad was black as these shoes I got on. When we got old enough, we’d go to the field and pick cotton and chop cotton. The sun didn’t like me. I would welt up and be at home at night crying.”

She made her kitchen debut at the age of 8, because her parents made her “stay at home and cook.”

Brown’s mother and grandmother — her father’s mother who lived with them — did the cooking. “My mom was a good cook, but my grandmother was a great cook. I don’t know what it was, but she could make anything taste good.”

Brown says her grandmother was “what you called a Mississippi cook. That’s old South. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas. All of it is going to taste similar because the recipes were passed down from one generation to the next generation.”

Cutting out biscuits with an empty jack mackerel can was Brown’s first kitchen duty. “It was like playing with Play-Doh for me.”

She progressed to making the biscuits and, finally, making lunch. “I knew how to make things because my grandmamma made them.”

Brown cooked lunch until she was 15, when her mother and father separated. “They went their separate ways,” she remembers. “And everything just seemed to fall apart. After that, I stayed with my grandmamma. My mom disappeared for about three or four years.

“My brother was a baby when my mother left. I was a child raising a child. My grandmother was a fantastic cook, but she was also an alcoholic. That’s who my mom left us with — my dad’s mother. She drank like a fish. And half the time I don’t think she knew if we were living or dead. Because the older she got, the more she drank.”

Brown’s mother finally returned, and she had remarried. At that point, Brown says, “Everything — as old people say — went to hell in a handbasket. Nothing was ever the same again. Everything was just different. Basically, we had a stepdad who wanted to be married to our mom, but didn’t want to be bothered with her children. It was just one of those things.”

Brown and her brother continued to live with their grandmother. Their stepfather “was very mean to us. My mom did not allow him to hit us, but, you know, words hurt worse than nicks sometimes. That’s the reason I tell people, ‘You have to be careful what you say to children. You can damage children by talking down to them all the time.’ That’s what he did. He always said, ‘Well, your children ain’t going to be nothing because their dad wasn’t nothing.'”

Brown was raped when she was 15. She refused to have an abortion and gave birth to her first child, Marvin Anderson. After he was born, she took a job washing dishes at the old Shelby Restaurant. But even then, she couldn’t resist the lure of the kitchen. “The frozen pies they would buy, they were just plain old pies to me. I would always take butter and sugar and everything, kind of dress them up and put them in the oven and make them taste good.”

After her stint at Shelby Restaurant, Brown worked at a Chinese restaurant and, later, at a doughnut shop. Then she got a job cooking at Shoney’s, where she “doctored on a lot of things,” including their meatloaf and soup.

Brown left home at 18. “For the longest time, I didn’t speak to my mother. I felt like she should have left that fool and taken her children. She shouldn’t have let us be abused and talked to that way.”

Brown had another son, named David Nelson, who has since passed away. She got married in 1972 and had a daughter, Tina Brown. But after her marriage didn’t work out, she moved to Indiana and began cooking for a division of Ford Motor Company. The company paid for her to take cooking classes at a local college.

But fate — and her family — intervened. “My mom got sick,” Brown says, “and I ended up moving back home.” By then, she had forgiven her mother, influenced by a woman at church who told her “hatred is one of the worst diseases you can have. It’s a disease that can destroy you.”

Then came a career change that would shape the rest of Brown’s life. In the early 1980s, Brown got a job as a cook in the employee cafeteria at The Peabody, where she met Wolf, who was then head chef. “I thought he was the most amazing person I had ever met in my life,” Brown says. “I still do. Because he knew so much about food. I knew things that he didn’t know. And he knew things that I wanted to know.

“He knew about filleting fish. He knew about pork chops. He knew how to marinate meats and everything to make them taste good, make them tender. He just knew so much, but he knew nothing about Southern cuisine. That was not his thing.”

After she got off work, Brown would stay and watch Wolf cook. He asked her what she was doing in the kitchen after hours. Brown said, “I’m up here hanging with the chefs because I want to know what y’all know.”

And before long, that’s what began to happen.

“[Wolf] started showing me things. He’d show me how to cut up this and how to marinate this and what to put in this. And we just started sharing things.”

There was the “turkey fiasco during Thanksgiving time,” Brown remembers. Wolf made “stuffing” for the employee holiday dinner. “I said, ‘Chef, what in the world is this? People in the South don’t eat this.’ It wasn’t anything but just dough. Dough rolls. People in the South eat cornbread dressing.”

Wolf told her to serve it anyway. “So, we wheel all this stuff downstairs to the employee cafeteria. Phones start ringing upstairs. ‘Chef, what’s this mess you sent down here?'”

Wolf, knowing when he was licked, told Brown to make her dressing. She made cornbread stuffing with sage, onions, celery, bell peppers, butter, and margarine. “I had to make my giblet gravy and everything. I don’t know what kind of gravy chef made, but it was a mess.”

She added some turkey meat to her dressing and took a cup to Wolf in his office. “I said, ‘Chef, here you go, dude. This is what you have in the South for Thanksgiving.'”

Wolf ate the dressing and then asked her for another cup, Brown says.

Wolf kept passing along his knowledge to Brown. “If you admire a person for what they know,” she says, “a lot of times they don’t mind teaching you.”

After Wolf left Memphis to open the Peabody Orlando, Brown stayed at the Memphis hotel another year and then went to work as the chef at Stonebridge Country Club. When the club was sold, the former owner wanted Brown to relocate to a club elsewhere in Tennessee, but she refused. “I wouldn’t because my mama was still sick and I wasn’t going to leave her.”

Brown briefly went to work for a diner, but says she “got tired of the racism.” At that point, she decided to open her own restaurant.

“I kept telling everybody I was going to have my own business and work for myself. I was serious as a heart attack. One of the other girls asked me, ‘Miss Peggy, what are you going to name your place?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s going to be ‘heavenly’ something ’cause you have to put God first.'”

As for the kind of food she’d serve? Brown says, “I just wanted people to have a good, home-cooked meal. Because everywhere I went to eat food, most of it was out of a can and people can’t cook worth a crap.”

Brown opened her first restaurant in 1996 — Heavenly Hash on Highway 51. She closed it three years later, after her mother died. “When I opened that restaurant,” she says, “it was because I wanted to buy my mom a house. She always wanted her own house. After mom died, it just didn’t have any meaning for me anymore.”

Brown then bought a restaurant in North Memphis and named it Peggy’s Just Heavenly Home Cooking. After a fire struck the restaurant, Brown briefly got out of the business. But it wasn’t long until her daughter asked her to cook at the restaurant where she was working. Brown eventually bought the restaurant, now called Peggy’s Healthy Home Cooking. She serves meatloaf, chicken, and pork chops, but the emphasis is on healthy food, Brown says. And business is good.

Noted songwriter/producer David Porter is a big fan of Brown’s restaurant. “The consistency and the quality of the meals is just something you can be comfortable with,” he says. “You know if it’s good on Monday, it’s going to be good on Tuesday. It’s one of the best soul food restaurants in Memphis.”

Former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton is also a fan. “You might as well forget about the salt and pepper shaker,” he says. “It’s ready to eat. All you need to do is add fork and knife. It reminds you of back home, watching your mama cook in a small pan. And every morsel tastes the same way.”

Of Brown, Wharton says, “She’s always willing to sit down and talk a minute and catch up on the news. Just a lot of good common sense talk. So, it’s just like being home around the kitchen table.”

“I think God allowed me to go through all the hardships and all the hurt and all the pain and anger and stuff that I went through,” Brown says. “I couldn’t understand why it was happening then, but I think I understand it now. Because I feel like God has put me in a place where I was going to meet people that had been through the same things I’ve gone through.

“One day I was praying, talking to the Lord. I talk to God the same way I talk to you. I said, ‘Lord, just let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man. Because [there are] so many hurting people. And I think I know how people feel. Just give me a little house by the side of the road.’

“Well, he didn’t give me a house by the side of the road, but he gave me a restaurant by the side of the road.”

No Cook Banana Pudding from Michael Donahue on Vimeo.

Peggy Brown: Queen of Memphis Soul Food