The Pat Conroy Cookbook (28 page)

I hired my old friend Butch Polk to put on an old-fashioned outdoor barbecue the night before the bridesmaids’ luncheon. Since the groom, Terry Giguire, and his family came from California, I thought they deserved a taste of the Old South. In the middle of the barbecue, a ten-foot alligator, who lives in the lagoon behind our place, made his evening run past our house. To this day the Californians think I hired that alligator for the pure shock value it gave to my new West Coast relatives.

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SERVES 6

SQUASH CASSEROLE
I have been looking for an opening to praise fresh mozzarella, as opposed to that tasteless, hardened glop we Americans have used to ruin perfectly good pizzas. With this single squash casserole, which is a breeze to make, I seize my opportunity.

The Ruggieri brothers’ shop on the Campo de’ Fiori was my favorite place to buy food in Rome. It was the youngest of the brothers who introduced me to mozzarella di bufala, made from the delicious milk of water buffalo that graze the pastures of Campania. The cheese was silken and bone white and freshly made. I had never seen cheese that came packed in water, but this cheese is perishable and needs to be eaten soon after it is made. It is a sweet, delicate cheese with a slight tartness in the after taste. I have found it in gourmet cheese shops in New York and California, and American cheesemakers are making gallant attempts to make a fresh mozzarella of their own. If you are ever in Italy, order a Caprese salad: slices of mozzarella di bufala, fresh ruby-red tomatoes, julienned basil leaves—all anointed with extra virgin olive oil. You will not eat a better meal in your life.      
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SERVES 6

SANDRA’S MAMA’S POUND CAKE
I have lived a life of many regrets, things I’ve said that I shouldn’t have said, things I have written that caused grief to people I loved, women I should have married, women I shouldn’t have married, friends I should have pursued, and friends whose aura was so dangerous I should have sprinted away from them after our first handshake. But I ache when I realize that my current wife’s mother, Pat King, died a full five years before I fell in love with her daughter. I hear the stories whenever the rowdy King tribe gathers at the peanut farm in Pinckard, Alabama, where Sandra’s father, Elton (Tony), still lives and prospers and fishes every day of his life for bass and catfish.

Pat King was a legendary Southern cook and, to hear her three daughters tell it, a package of kinetic movement who could do everything well except sit still. Her grandsons talk about her Christmas and Easter feasts as if James Beard and Alice Waters had flown into Pinckard to cook them. While at the farm, sadly exiled among Alabama football fanatics, all of whom look and act like extras in the film version of James Dickey’s
Deliverance
, I enjoy the endless discussions of Pat King’s wizardry in the kitchen. Sandra herself is a marvelous cook, but even she agrees that she could not hold a frying pan to her mother’s natural gifts. I’ve met no one in Alabama who says they ever met a finer cook than the sweet-faced Pat King.

So, in honor of my daughter Megan, and in honor of my beloved wife, I made Pat King’s famous pound cake to cap off the bridesmaids’ luncheon with a bang. There is one secret that I carry around with me about Pat King: she might have been a superb cook, but she was much better at raising daughters.

1. In preparation, turn a large tube pan upside down; place a piece of wax paper over the bottom and trace the outline. Cut the paper to fit, including a hole for the center tube, then invert the pan and put the wax paper in the bottom. Lightly grease the paper as well as the sides and the center tube of the pan with pure vegetable oil, then dust with flour, shaking out the excess. This method will ensure that the cake can be removed without falling apart. Preheat the oven to 325°F.

2. With an electric mixer on medium speed, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each, then stir in the vanilla. With a spatula, stir in the flour until thoroughly mixed into the batter, but do not beat, which will cause the cake to be tough. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top lightly with a spatula so cake will bake evenly.

3. Bake for 1 hour, then check appearance, since ovens vary. Normally it takes 1¼ hours. (My mama checked for doneness with one of the clean, slender broom straws she kept for this task; lacking this, a toothpick or bamboo skewer will do.) Let cake rest in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes. To remove the cake from the pan, place a rack over the top, invert, and carefully lift the pan off the cake. Do not shake or force the cake out. If it does not immediately loosen, turn it back over and let it cool for another 5 minutes before trying again. Let cool thoroughly on a rack before slicing, if you can stand to wait. This makes a large and showy, picture-perfect cake.

4. Serve thin slices (it’s very rich) with sliced peaches and whipped cream.

S
outhern grief at a funeral of a loved one often gets mollified by the scrumptious feast that follows the ceremony. In the South, you often eat as well after the burial of a family member or friend as you do on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas. It is the custom of the place for friends to bring a dish of delicious food to the home of the deceased—it is one of the binding social covenants that still survive in even the most estranged and disconnected enclaves of the South.

Cooking food for a grieving family and their friends is still one of the classiest ways to send a love note that I can think of. I still get teary-eyed and grateful when I think of the sheer amount and quality of the food that the people of Beaufort and Fripp Island, South Carolina, sent to my house after the deaths of my mother and father. Such generous responses tie you to some places of the earth forever. My family was overwhelmed by the kindness of the neighbors who had loved our parents. They cared for us, fed us wonderfully well, comforted us, and eased the grief of our parents’ passing with astonishing grace.

When I lived in Atlanta during the seventies and eighties I developed a signature dish I would deliver to the houses of friends or loved ones on
the night before a funeral. I would fix a half-gallon jar of pickled shrimp from a recipe I had brought from the Low Country for special occasions. I missed the Low Country the whole time I lived in Atlanta, and the taste of pickled shrimp was a sure way for me to engage in time travel without leaving the city limits.

When Olive Ann Burns’s husband, Andy Sparks, died after a long illness, I brought over the jar full of pickled shrimp, and the author of
Cold Sassy Tree
made me give her the recipe before I left her house that night. I happened to know that Olive Ann had adored her husband and was brokenhearted at his death, but talking about food at a funeral is one of the ways we start to heal ourselves. When the novelist Paul Darcy Boles died a few years earlier, I made the pickled shrimp at the same time I worked on his eulogy. Pickled shrimp is my answer to death in Georgia. In South Carolina, I generally respond with a shy and unexpected gift of Dunbar Macaroni, the only dish in my repertoire whose origins spring from the singular and comely borders of Newberry South Carolina. I have never tasted or seen a recipe for Dunbar Macaroni outside of Newberry. It is indigenous to the town and part of its history.

In 1962, I was playing the first baseball game of the season with Beaufort High School. The boy who sat next to me in Gene Norris’s English class was Randy Randel, the son of the school superintendent. Randy was a superb athlete and a delight in the classroom: mouthy, irreverent, and extroverted.

Mr. Norris would get exasperated with Randy and say, “Sit down in your seat, Randy, you fool. And hush your mouth, boy.”

“Norris,” Randy would say sadly, “don’t forget who my father is, Norris. Your job’s hanging by a thread, Gene. One word from me and you’re in the unemployment line.”

“Don’t you dare call me Gene, you little scalawag,” Mr. Norris would say. “How dare you threaten me with my job.”

“No threat, Gene,” Randy would say, grinning at the class. “I’m talking fact here, son.”