by Pat Conroy
PEPPERY TEA • MAKES 8 CUPS
4 teaspoons black tea leaves
One 2-inch piece ginger, peeled
1 small piece crystallized ginger
1 cinnamon stick
10 whole cloves
10 cardamom seeds
1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns
1 long strip orange zest
8 thin orange slices
1. Bring 9 cups cold water to a boil. As soon as the water comes to a boil, take the pot off the heat and add all the ingredients except the orange slices. Steep for 8 to 10 minutes.
2. Place an orange slice in the bottom of each cup and pour tea.
CAPICOLA
Buy a smoked pork butt (get a soft one that has a lot of fat in it) and remove the casing. Mix 1 cup salt (make sure it’s iodized) and ¼ cup red pepper flakes together, pressing the smoked pork butt in the mixture until all sides are well coated. Wrap the peppered pork butt in white paper towels and secure tightly with rubber bands. Refrigerate (the dampness from the meat will wet the spices and turn the paper towels slightly reddish) until the meat feels hard and the paper towels are dry, about 6 weeks.
MADAGASCAR GREEN PEPPERCORN BUTTER
For each stick (8 tablespoons) of butter, you’ll need 1 tablespoon drained Madagascar green peppercorns (canned and preserved in brine), 1 tablespoon finely minced shallot, and 1 tablespoon finely minced fresh parsley. Soften the butter to room temperature. Mash the peppercorns with the back of a spoon. Fold the shallot and parsley into the butter. Refrigerate or freeze. Bring to room temperature before using on fish or meat.
PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO CARPACCIO
The presentation of this dish is similar to carpaccio, with the taste balanced among the saltiness of the cheese, the sweetness of the olive oil, and the bite of the pepper. Using a cheese shaver, cut long, thin strips of Parmigiano-Reggiano by dragging the blade across the face of a wedge of cheese. Place the strips on a plate (plain white, if possible, so the cheese appears translucent), drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with lots of coarsely ground black pepper. Serve with toasted Tuscan bread on the side.
In the late spring of 1979, I was coming to the end of my time in Paris, and I could feel The Lords of Discipline moving toward completion. I would walk the city at night paying homage to writers who had lived there before me. I paid homage to Proust at his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery, tipping my hat to Héloïse and Abelard, and paid my dues to the excesses of my rock-and-roll generation by spending ten minutes at the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors. I found the shop that had once housed Sylvia Beach’s famous bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, where every English-speaking writer in the world seemed to have landed, but where James Joyce would come for gossip, sustenance, pocket money, and the companionship of a woman who thought he was the greatest novelist on earth. I spent a morning at Victor Hugo’s house and walked past the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died and ate frequent dinners at Le Polidor, the cheap and unpretentious restaurant where every writer who passed through Paris had eaten dinner. Walking across the Luxembourg Gardens, I would stop at the doorway where Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, had kept an apartment, where Picasso and Matisse and Hemingway and Fitzgerald had come to pay homage.
Paris is a city of words and a secret city of words not written. Signs on buildings give away the names of unknown authors who once lived between those walls. You cannot take a step in Paris without walking on the footprints of a thousand artists and writers who have come before you. It excites every cell in your body; it unnerves you that you are adding your voice to the great simmering bouillon of all the writers who have come before you as the great city and time turn their blind careless eyes toward you. There, at the Deux Magots, Sartre sat with his hand on Simone de Beauvoir and his walleye lingering on an actress coming out of the powder room. Baudelaire got drunk in that tavern and Jean Cocteau ate a dozen oysters at the window of that café in the corner, and Mary McCarthy is living on the third floor of that building at this very moment. The light in her office is on.
But for me, Paris has always been the city of Ernest Hemingway since I first read A Moveable Feast in my sophomore year at The Citadel. That book took me over like a fever. Hemingway captured all the romance and wistfulness of both the city and the writing life. He made me want to sit in Parisian cafés, smoking Gitanes, taking notes for stories in embryo, reading Le Monde while sipping a café au lait and thumbing through a paperback edition of Madame Bovary. Now that I had done all this I was getting ready to leave Paris, and the thought of it almost killed me, because I realized I had taken a great chance by following my editor and his wife on his sabbatical year to Europe. I could feel that I had changed my whole life because of it. After reading A Moveable Feast, I had promised myself that I would one day live and write in Paris, and I had kept that promise and come to the city with a spirit of adventure that is rare for me. But I had written the last chapter of The Lords of Discipline, and my remaining time in the city was short.
From the time of my arrival, I had made pilgrimages to the places and houses, parks and apartments that Hemingway mentioned in his book. John and Susan Galassi stayed at a charming hotel across the street from where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway had rented an apartment above a sawmill at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine. I would wander for hours amid the prodigious human traffic that made its way down the rue Mouffetard to the Place Contrescarpe, past booths overflowing with vegetables, groaning with massive white heads of cauliflower, rivers of mâche and asparagus and cabbages from the countryside. The charcutier with his trays of sausages and offal sang behind his counter as I passed live chickens in their boxes and the iced-down shrimp and oysters driven over from the coast. The strong smell of cheeses and the bakeries perfuming the streets with the brown aromas of croissants and pastries that made you salivate when you caught their sweet scents in the scrimmage of odors that fought for your attention as you made your way in crowds down that fine, unruly street.
I passed by the tobacconist and the man who sold horseflesh and the one who sold only artichokes and the onion lady who was just before the olive man whose whole existence centered on the presence of olives in France. I headed down the street slowly, Hemingway-besotted, as I tried to remember everything and everyone because the images of Paris would travel with me forever, wherever I went; the rue Mouffetard is carry-on luggage that will be available and on-call wherever I take pen to paper for the rest of my life.
As I write these words on Fripp Island, I realize that I am exactly Hemingway’s age when he first began to write A Moveable Feast at the Finca Vigia in Cuba in 1957. In his prose, I can feel the tenderness he had begun to feel for the fiery, virile young man he had once been, and the regret for things he had done and said. His love for his first wife, Hadley infuses the book, as does his pleasure in the company of his firstborn son, John, whom he nicknamed Bumby It is one of the great books ever written about a writer’s life and art. Its ardent sense of place still makes Paris seem like the most glamorous and enchanting place for a writer to be in the world.
I said goodbye to Paris slowly, and it took two weeks to pull it off. Again I went to all the places Hemingway mentions in A Moveable Feast. I drank a “black” wine from Cahors because he did, and I had a Rhum St. James at a café near Place St. Michel because Hemingway had done so. I lingered outside the sawmill on the night before I would leave Paris for a car trip to Rome with friends.
Then I walked to the Closerie des Lilas to have a cognac at the restaurant where Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had dined in Paris. I had stood outside the restaurant many times, committing the menu to memory but was unable to eat there because it cost a hundred bucks a person at that time, and my budget was too strict to engage in such a guilty pleasure. But I went at dinnertime, in coat and tie, and the maitre d’ led me out to a courtyard, where he seated me at a small table beneath an umbrella. I possessed a sense of completion that I have rarely felt before or since in my lifetime. The book I h
ad written I liked very much, and it pleased me very much that the city of Paris had a hand in the writing of it. A waiter appeared and I ordered an Armagnac.
Two men entered the patio with the maitre d’, and I thought I recognized one of them. The taller of the two was the familiar one; he nodded to me in passing, and I nodded back. They sat two tables away from me, but I was seated looking straight at them. The shorter one was a reporter, and he began interviewing the taller man. After they had spoken for several moments, I realized that Paris had granted me one last extraordinary gift. As I make my way around this life, I look for signs and baubles and charms and amulets and secret texts that there is a meaning and significance to human life that is under the control of some great moderating force. I like the glimpses of sorcery and fantasy that sometimes enter the human arena at the oddest, most unexpected times. At the table in front of me, I watched and listened as John Hemingway, Bumby was interviewed by a reporter for the International Herald Tribune. I did not go up to introduce myself. I have always regretted that, but I was too struck by the wonder of the moment and the incomparable glory of the great city.
ROASTED WHITE ASPARAGUS WITH PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO • SERVES 4
1¾ pounds white asparagus (about 20 stalks)
Olive oil
Shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano
Coarsely ground black pepper
2 Roasted Lemons (page 51)
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Rinse and dry the asparagus. Using a vegetable peeler, peel the bottom half of each stalk.
3. Place the asparagus in a shallow roasting pan, drizzle with olive oil, and place in the oven. Roast until tender, about 20 minutes.
4. Transfer asparagus to serving plates. Top each serving with a couple of shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano and ground black pepper. Serve a roasted lemon half alongside the asparagus.
Roasted White Asparagus with Shallot Butter While the asparagus is roasting, sauté 2 finely chopped shallots in 4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter until lightly browned. Transfer the asparagus to serving plates, season with salt and pepper, and top with the shallot butter.
Roasted White Asparagus with Tasso Ham and Pecans While the asparagus is roasting, sauté ¼ cup finely chopped pecans in 2 tablespoons unsalted butter until browned. Stir in ¼ cup diced Tasso ham and cook until warmed through. Transfer the asparagus to serving plates, season with pepper, and top with pecans and ham.
SOLE EN PAPILLOTE I once went on a parchment paper frenzy that lasted about six months. It was the showy moment of presentation when I cut open the packet and the steam rose up in all its perfumed glory that I adored. I have come across no better way to cook seafood. It is also a great way to show off and bring attention to yourself.
• SERVES 4
2 leeks (white parts only), cleaned and finely chopped
2 carrots, julienned
4 sole fillets (about 6 ounces each)
Olive oil
Unsalted butter
8 sprigs fresh thyme
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper
1. Preheat the oven to 400° F.
2. Cut four 12 × 12-inch squares of parchment paper.
3. Place an equal amount of leeks and carrots in the center of each parchment square and top with a sole fillet. Drizzle olive oil over each fillet, dot with butter (sparingly), and top with 2 sprigs thyme.
4. Bring the open ends of the parchment together over the center of the fillet and fold the paper over once (along the entire length) to seal it. Gently but firmly continue folding the paper down and crimp the ends into an airtight packet.
5. Transfer the packets to a baking sheet and brush them with olive oil.
6. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes (the paper will begin to brown and the packet will start to puff up), turning the pan once to ensure even cooking.
7. Transfer packets to serving plates, tear (or cut) open the tops and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Serve immediately, while the steam is still rising from the packets.
ROAST CHICKEN WITH GRAINY MUSTARD SAUCE When I lived in Paris while finishing up The Lords of Discipline, the nonpareil food writer Waverley Root wrote an article saying the great French chefs were ultimately judged by how well they roasted a chicken. The second great test was how the chef prepared a plate of lamb’s kidneys, a subject I know much less about. In the cooking of meat, there is only one unforgivable crime, which is overcooking until a piece of meat is dry and tasteless and irredeemable. In the world of meat, dryness is taboo unless you happen to be making beef jerky. The chicken meat here should be tender and irresistible. The tarragon is très French and très Julia Child.
• SERVES 4
¼ cup olive oil
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter
Two 2½-pound chickens (fryers or broilers)
4 shallots, peeled
4 garlic cloves, smashed
4 sprigs fresh thyme
4 sprigs fresh tarragon
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 lemon, halved
Grainy Mustard Sauce (see opposite)
1. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
2. Place the olive oil and butter in a small saucepan over moderate heat until the mixture gets foamy, about 3 minutes. Rinse the chickens (inside and out) under cool running water and pat dry with paper towels. Fill the cavity of each bird with half the shallots, garlic cloves, thyme, tarragon, and peppercorns. Rub each chicken with half a cut lemon and then put it in the cavity, too.
3. Using a basting brush, coat the birds (on all sides and in crevices) with butter and olive oil mixture. Place in the oven and roast until skin is crisp and meat is thoroughly cooked but still juicy, 55 to 60 minutes. (An instant-read meat thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh should read 165 to 170°F.) About halfway through, rotate the pan so the chickens brown on all sides.
4. Transfer the chickens to a cutting board when done, and let them rest 10 minutes before carving. To carve, use a sharp heavy knife to separate the legs and thighs and the wing portions. Then slide a knife with a thinner blade down each side of the breast bone, scooping out the breast section and leaving the skin intact. Each chicken will serve two people: overlap one leg, thigh, and wing to form a base for one side of breast meat. Top with sauce and serve.
Grainy Mustard Sauce •MAKES 1 % CUPS
½ cup dry Vermouth
1 cup Chicken Stock (page 11)
¾ cup heavy cream
¼ cup grainy Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh tarragon
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh thyme
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Add the vermouth to the chicken stock and, in a large saucepan over moderately high heat, reduce the mixture by half. Place the heavy cream in a small bowl and whisk in about ¼ cup of the hot stock. Slowly whisk the cream mixture back into the hot stock. Whisk in the mustard and reduce the heat, simmering until slightly thickened, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the herbs, season with salt and pepper, and ladle over the chicken.
BRAISED SHORT RIBS My wife, Sandra, and I like to cook braised short ribs on those lamentable occasions when we are visited by the loutish and randy sons of her first marriage. I generally tell people that Sandra told me on our first date that she had never married and never had children, but that is a demonstrable lie. What she did do, with extraordinary craft and guile, was to keep her brutish sons out of sight until the marriage vows were spoken, after which the freeloading, broke hucksters made a beeline for my house. They brought the appetites of hippopotamuses with them, along with bags of filthy laundry, tattoos, and holes in every part of their anatomy for the careful placement of earrings, nose pieces, and accessories. They have the IQs of what you might expect of boys raised in Alabama. (That’s a joke, Alabama and Doubleday lawyers.)
As a literary aside, I would like to note that my wife wrote her superb novel The Sunday Wife about her many years’ experience as the w
ife of a minister. Her main character, the demure and pretty Dean Lynch, seems based with some accuracy on Cassandra’s own life, with one glaring exception: Dean Lynch is childless, and after meeting my “sorry” stepsons (my nickname for them), I understand why better than anyone else. The boys are named Jim, Jason, and Jacob, an obvious J obsession running through the family. Sandra admitted to me she had already picked out the name of her fourth son if she’d had one—Jesus. Which is exactly what I would cry out when they pulled into the driveway, penniless, unshaven, with their dilapidated automobiles and their wallets full of canceled credit cards. Sandra and I fed them very well, then sent them reeling back to live out their desperate and wild lives with the sad-eyed young women who love them.
Fortunately, the “sorry” stepsons have a terrific sense of humor since they have to put up with this kind of joking on every visit. Jim, Jason, and Jacob are actually marvelous and successful young men: Jim’s a doctor and neurobiologist, Jason an artist and a chef, and Jake a therapist, working toward a doctorate. • SERVES 4 HEARTY EATERS
2 bottles dry red wine
2 parsnips, coarsely chopped (about 1 cup)
2 carrots, coarsely chopped (about 1 cup)
1 red onion, coarsely chopped (about 1 cup)
5 pounds beef short ribs, cut flanken or Korean style
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1. In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, bring the red wine to a boil. Add the parsnips, carrots, and onion and remove from heat.
2. Place the ribs, flat side down, in a shallow baking pan (large enough to hold the ribs in one layer). When the red wine cools, pour wine and vegetables over ribs. Turn the ribs in wine and cover with aluminum foil. Marinate overnight, turning at least once.
