The Pat Conroy Cookbook

by Pat Conroy

  ROASTED LEMONS

  Preheat the oven to 425°F. Cut the lemons (allow ½ to 1 per serving) in half and brush with olive oil. Roast, cut side up, until the surface is caramelized and the lemon is softened, 45 to 50 minutes. Squeeze the warm juice from the roasted lemons over soft-shell crabs or panfried flounder in place of tartar sauce.

  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. • SERVES 4

  Four 6- to 8-ounce flounder fillets

  Coarse or kosher salt

  1½ cups all-purpose flour

  2 large eggs, lightly beaten

  3 cups fresh toasted bread crumbs

  2 tablespoons bacon drippings

  Peanut oil

  Lemon wedges

  Tartar sauce

  1. Rinse the flounder under cool gently running water and pat dry with paper towels. Lightly salt and set aside.

  2. Place flour, eggs, and bread crumbs in three large shallow bowls (pie tins work well) and arrange on work surface in that order. Dredge fillets in flour, working carefully to make sure entire surface is coated. Shake gently to remove excess. Dip fillets into eggs, again making sure surface is completely coated. Lift the fish slightly, allowing excess to drip back into the bowl. Place the fillets in bread crumbs, pressing down lightly with your fingertips so crumbs stick to the fish. Place the breaded fillets on a plate, cover with wax paper, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before cooking.

  3. Line a baking sheet with brown paper bags (cut the bags open to a single thickness and use the clean inner surface).

  4. In a medium cast-iron skillet over moderately high heat, place bacon drippings and enough peanut oil to rise about ¼ inch above the bottom of the pan. When the fat is hot but not smoking (it will shimmer slightly), place the fillets in the skillet two at a time (overcrowding will prevent browning) and fry until a crisp, golden crust is formed, about 2 minutes per side. Learning how to adjust the heat so that the fat is hot enough to crisp bread crumbs on contact (and keep the fillets from being greasy) takes practice.

  5. Using a spatula, carefully remove fillets and drain on brown paper bags to blot excess oil. Transfer to plates and serve immediately with lemon wedges and tartar sauce.

  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.

  No, that’s a joke. Her shrimp burgers are wonderful, and if you ever get on Highway 21, head for the beach to meet Hilda and her family and her workers. It’s one of the nicest places on earth to be.

  • MAKES ABOUT 1½ CUPS

  1 cup Homemade Mayonnaise (see below)

  2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives

  2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

  1 shallot, finely minced

  1 tablespoon capers, drained and finely chopped

  2 teaspoons sweet pickle relish

  2 teaspoons dry mustard

  Juice of 1 lemon, strained

  Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and stir to mix well. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, preferably overnight. Taste for seasoning before serving.

  Homemade Mayonnaise Let us now praise homemade mayonnaise. In her cooking class, Nathalie Dupree once made all her students make it by hand, ensuring that all of us would honor the labors of French housewives for the rest of our days. But the invention of the blender and the food processor has turned the making of mayonnaise into a matter of seconds. Here is how to do it: Drop an egg into your machine. Turn it on. Beat that sucker for five seconds. Have some vegetable or canola oil ready. Pour it in a slow stream through the feed tube. Soon, chemistry happens and magic occurs before your eyes as the egg and oil unite into something glorious. When the mixture is thick, cut the machine off. Add the juice of half a lemon or two shots of red wine vinegar. That’s mayonnaise. Add a clove of garlic to it. Turn on the machine until the garlic is blended. That’s aioli. Try adding some fresh herbs, and you’ve got herb mayonnaise. Add one-fourth cup Parmesan cheese and a couple of pinches of cayenne, and you have the fanciest, best-tasting salad dressing you’ve ever had. • MAKES ABOUT 1 CUP

  1 large egg yolk, at room temperature

  1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

  2 tablespoons strained fresh lemon juice

  ¼ cup olive oil

  ¾ cup vegetable oil

  ¼ teaspoon sea salt

  In the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade, combine egg yolk, mustard, and lemon juice until smooth. Slowly drizzle in olive oil, processing until thoroughly incorporated. Add vegetable oil slowly, processing until the mixture is smooth and thick and completely emulsified. Add the salt, transfer to a storage container, and refrigerate until ready to use.

  CORN PUDDING This is comfort food, pure and simple. I think of this as a great recipe because it is easy to make and can be thrown together in a hurry when uninvited or surprise guests show up at the front door. My stepson Jason Ray, who is a chef, once brought a rock band from Birmingham to our home on Fripp Island. I walked out from my bedroom and found six young men sleeping in various stages of undress. I counted nine tattoos, but those were only the visible ones. We went to Gay’s shrimp dock to buy seven pounds of shrimp. We doubled the recipe for corn pudding. The band was a hungry one, and we remember those young men for their unappeasable appetites, not their tattoos.

  • SERVES 6

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

  ¼ cup sugar

  3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  ½ cup evaporated milk

  2 large eggs, lightly beaten

  1½ teaspoons baking powder

  Two 10-ounce boxes frozen white corn, thawed and kernels blotted dry

  1. Place a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350°F.

  2. Butter a 2-quart casserole and set aside.

  3. In a medium saucepan over low heat, melt the butter. Mix together the sugar and flour and stir into the butter. Stir in the milk, eggs, and baking powder.

  4. Add the corn and pour into the prepared casserole. Bake until lightly firm, about 45 minutes.

  You can also add sautéed green onions, blooming chive blossoms, or a pinch of cayenne pepper.

  COCONUT CAKE I cannot say “coconut cake” without conjuring the beloved image of my beautiful aunt Helen Harper. Every time I saw her during my boyhood, I would ask her to bake me a coconut cake, and she never let me down, not once. To the Conroy children, the Harper household was a basin of permanence and stability as we rambled from base to base up and down the Southern seacoast. The Conroy family could walk into the Harper house at 945 North Hyer Street in Orlando, Florida, and nothing would have changed since the last time we had visited. The same five buck heads would stare down from the wall of the den, the same Book of Knowledge would be on the bookshelf in cousin Russ and Bobby’s room, on the kitchen table the pepper shaker was a rooster and the saltshaker was a hen, the same unused piano stood at attention in the living room, and at seven every evening Aunt Helen would conduct a Bible reading.

  On my tenth birthday, Aunt Helen made me a coconut cake and made me part of the process by having me break open a coconut with a hatchet. She invited Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Joe down from Jacksonville, and they brought the three Gillespie cousins. (Cousin Johnny had not been born yet.) It would mark the only time in my life that family members other than my own would attend one of my birthday parties. It was a joyous day, and I got to cut the cake because, as Aunt Helen said, “It’s Pat’s day.” The coconut cake was perfect, always perfect. • SERVES 8

  FOR THE RUM SYRUP

  ⅓ cup sugar

  ¼ cup coconut or plain rum

  FOR THE TOASTED COCONUT

  1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut (available at health food stores)

  FOR THE CAKE

  2 cups cake flour

  ½ teaspoon baking powder

  1 cup sugar

  1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

  2 large eggs

  1 cup canned coconut milk (Goya brand if possible, Leche de Coco), well shaken

  ½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

  1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (1 large lemon)

  ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

  FOR THE FROSTING

  2 cups chilled heavy cream

  2 teaspoons sugar

  1 cup untoasted unsweetened shredded coconut

  1. To make the syrup: In a small saucepan, combine the sugar, ⅓ cup water, and the rum and heat over medium until the mixture comes to a slow boil. Continue boiling for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside until the cake is baked. (The syrup can be made one day in advance. Refrigerate until needed and reheat until almost boiling to use.)

  2. To toast the coconut: Preheat
the oven to 350°F. Spread the coconut on a baking sheet and toast until edges turn a light brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Toasted yet still pale shredded coconut will add another layer of flavor and a slight crunch to the frosting. Check it carefully during the toasting; coconut can burn quickly. Total toasting time should not exceed 4 minutes. Remove immediately and transfer to another (not hot) baking sheet to cool. Reserve.

  3. To make the cake: Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.

  4. In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and sugar. Stir in the coconut.

  5. In another bowl, whisk the eggs and add the coconut milk and melted butter until the mixture is smooth. Stir in lemon zest and vanilla.

  6. Using a wooden spoon, mix the egg mixture into the flour until just blended.

  7. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan. Bake at 350°F until cake is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 55 to 60 minutes.

  8. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for about 20 minutes. Invert the pan and release the cake onto a clean work surface or a cake stand. When the cake is cool, cut horizontally into two equal layers, using a serrated knife and pressing down lightly on the top of the cake as you cut. Transfer each half, cut side up, to an individual plate and prick holes in several places on the surface. Rewarm the rum syrup and brush the syrup over the cut surfaces of the cakes.