The Pat Conroy Cookbook (8 page)

Nothing is harder to clean than a hard-shell blue crab, and nothing is easier than a soft-shell variety. Take a pair of kitchen shears and cut off the face of the crab just behind the eyes, then lift the shell points on both sides of the crab to remove the gills or the “deadmen.” These look inedible and are lined like spark plugs along the crab’s abdomen. Then turn the crab over and cut away the apron on the rear end of the crab. Rinse the crab with cold water and the dinner bell soon will be struck.

I have also served soft-shell crabs with hollandaise sauce, rémoulade, and tartar sauce, with lemon and butter, and aioli, and have come up with not a single way to spoil this magnificent meal.

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SERVES 2 AS A MAIN COURSE OR 4 AS A FIRST COURSE

PANFRIED FLOUNDER
I cannot order a flounder or sole anywhere in the world without thinking of the first native of New Orleans I ever knew well, Richie Matta. During the day he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps; at night and on weekends he was a rock star. He was mischievous, charismatic, and devil-may-care, carrying an aura of danger with him every step he took. When you were Richie Matta’s friend, his loyalty and devotion to you were unshakable and not for sale. He also introduced me to the world of Cajun seasoning and food.

On a moonless summer night, in the middle of the summer, Richie took me flounder gigging at the end of Fripp Island. We put his johnboat into the Fripp inlet and he fixed a lantern that hung off the bow.

“The tide’s perfect,” he said as he stood and navigated over sand flats, looking much like a gondolier. We drifted over a sandbar where Richie had come across a trove of flounder. Carefully, we traded places, and I poled us across the shallow water on the starriest night of the year. Orion, the Hunter, had left us for the summer, and I longed for his return to the night sky. Richie lunged with his gig and came up with a two-pound flounder that he laid on ice in a cooler. With quick thrusts, he brought six more fish into the boat. Then he demanded that we trade places and we did so again, gingerly. I stood in the front of the boat and saw the lantern’s light revealing the clean-sand bottom of the bar we were passing over. I didn’t see a thing that lived or moved.

“There’s nothing down there,” I said to Richie.

“They’re buried. Look for their shape in the sand. Look for their eyes.”

It was a full two minutes before my eyes adjusted enough to follow Richie’s instructions. I saw the first flounder dimpling the sand. There was a slight, odd-shaped mound in the sand, like the slightly raised women of cameos. I struck with the gig and raised my first flounder into the air.

We took in an even dozen that night. Richie was expert in all phases of outdoor life, and he made a beautifully built fire on the beach at the end of Fripp. He tossed a couple of nuggets of butter into a steel frying
pan, then gutted, floured, seasoned, and filleted two of the fish. In those days I could not cook a quail’s egg and took no interest in his preparations for the cooking. The stars were too brilliant and the smell of the marsh, with its aromas of salt and spartina and working tides that took the essence of the mud and marsh grass back to the sea, was something I could never get enough of. Now I am old enough to know I will never get enough of it.

Nor will I forget the delicious one-of-a-kind taste of the flounder we ate that night. The fish were not only good but cooked to perfection, and that meal remains high on the list of top ten meals I have ever eaten.

“Richie, this is fabulous. The best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said. “What’s that taste?”

He handed me a plastic cup of white wine and said, “That’s Cajun, son. That’s Cajun seasoning you’re tasting.”

Several years ago a woman came up to me on Bay Street in Beaufort and asked me if I knew that Richie Matta had died in New Orleans. I did not and suffered that I had not done enough to keep that seminal and valuable friendship alive. But when the woman gave me such dispiriting news, the first thing I thought of was flounder.     
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SERVES 4

TARTAR SAUCE
I think of the highway that runs along the North Carolina coast then passes invisibly into South Carolina, following the same incursion of the Atlantic that washes up against the southern coast. It runs from Morehead City, North Carolina, down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I call it the tartar sauce corridor. It is lined with the kind of seafood restaurants where you can smell fried fish ten miles
inland. They are gaudy, decorated with seagulls and buoys and shrimp nets, mobbed in the summertime and deserted and locked up in February, but all of them were born to fry things up. One is sure to be identified as an outsider or a weirdo by asking a waitress for a broiled seafood platter. These seafood restaurants are palaces of grease and monuments to the revolutionary idea that fried food tastes better than any other kind.

My lifelong affair with tartar sauce began with a plate of fried shrimp eaten in a restaurant in Morehead City when I was six years old. Tartar sauce can lift a simple fried catfish to the realms of ecstasy, turn a fried oyster into an emperor’s feast, or ennoble a fried shrimp into knighthood.

Six miles from my house on Fripp Island sits the best fried food restaurant in my part of the world, and I love its tartar sauce. It is called the Shrimp Shack, and its founder and owner is the inimitable Hilda Gay Upton, who was voted Best Personality in Beaufort High School’s 1959 graduating class. When my daughter Megan lived in Italy for her junior year abroad, she would write and confess that she would suffer “Shrimp Shack Attacks,” even though she was eating the finest cuisine in the world. None of my family can pass the Shrimp Shack after a long absence from Fripp without stopping for one of the world-class shrimp burgers, which are one of the joys of my life.

Of course this is the place where I would share with the world the culinary secrets of making a perfect shrimp burger, but I am unable to do so because the perfidious and wily Hilda Gay Upton has refused to part with the secret recipe for her shrimp burger. I have pleaded, begged, cajoled, and all those other verbs where you really try to get something but suffer constant frustration. This has gone on for years. I’ve told Hilda about this cookbook, that I would praise her open-air restaurant to the skies and make hers a household name for those who prize fried and fattening foods. Hilda, an obstinate Low Country woman, whose husband is a shrimper, refuses even to tell me if there is shrimp in her “secret recipe.”

Not long ago, I was returning on a flight from New York, where I had dined at Le Bernardin, Daniel’s, and the Four Seasons. It is on airplanes that I read all the food magazines like
Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine
, and
Cooking Light
, and on this occasion a magazine I was unfamiliar with called
Saveur
. While reading
Saveur
with great pleasure, I was startled to come across an article about Hilda and the Shrimp Shack. There was a photograph of Hilda, whom I have known for thirty years, and I was mildly surprised to see a middle-aged black woman named Neecie Simmons who had cooked at the Shrimp Shack since it opened. But I was flabbergasted to see the recipe for the shrimp burger that I had vainly tried to coax from Hilda for more than ten years, written down for all to see.

When my plane landed in Savannah, I headed straight for the Shrimp Shack in what once was called a beeline. I stuck my head through the small window where Hilda takes your order and your money. I held up the magazine to Neecie and said, “Hilda, I apologize; I always thought you were a white woman all these many years until I read
Saveur
magazine today on the plane.”

The real Hilda said, “I knew you’d see that dadgum magazine. Only you. No one else has mentioned it.”

“It was nice of you to part with your ‘secret recipe’ to
Saveur
magazine,” I said, exaggerating the French ending.

“I didn’t give them that recipe,” Hilda said. “They made the thing up.”

“If you don’t give me that recipe before my cookbook is published, I’m going to claim I saw you out collecting roadkill to put into your secret recipe.”

“A secret is a secret,” she said maddeningly.

Early on a Sunday morning of this year, I was driving out on Seaside Road and was shocked to find Hilda Gay Upton shoveling long-dead possums, skunks, and raccoons into the bed of her pickup truck to form the basis of her famous secret recipe for shrimp burgers … she carefully brushed off the flies and maggots.