The Pat Conroy Cookbook

by Pat Conroy

  RATATOUILLE Ratatouille is one of those recipes I can make better than I can pronounce or spell it. When I lived in Paris, there was a shop on the rue Mouffetard that sold ratatouille by the pint, and I remember making a whole meal out of it one rainy night. In the summertime, I like to make this with fresh, peeled Beaufort tomatoes, which I consider to be the finest on earth. Ratatouille is the happiest marriage of vegetables I know of. • SERVES 6

  8 sprigs fresh parsley

  2 sprigs fresh thyme

  ½ teaspoon fennel seeds

  1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns

  1 bay leaf

  4 garlic cloves, smashed

  4 medium yellow onions, diced

  2 pounds (about 6) medium zucchini, cubed

  2 pounds eggplant, cubed

  4 large green bell peppers, cored, seeded, and cubed

  Olive oil

  Two 35-ounce cans whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, drained and diced

  Coarse or kosher salt

  1. Place the first six ingredients in a large square of a double thickness of cheesecloth and, using kitchen twine, tie into a bag. Set aside.

  2. In a large heavy skillet, cook the onions, zucchini, eggplant, and peppers separately in small batches, using only as much olive oil as needed to prevent sticking. (The onions should be lightly browned; zucchini, eggplant, and peppers should be cooked until they begin to soften. To reduce the amount of cooking oil, toss the eggplant cubes lightly in olive oil and set them aside until ready to use.)

  3. As each batch of vegetables is cooked, transfer it to a large stockpot. Then add the spice and herb bag and the tomatoes. Cover and simmer until vegetables are softened, 35 to 45 minutes.

  4. Gently spoon the vegetables into a colander suspended over a large bowl. Transfer the drained vegetables to a serving bowl and return the cooking liquid to the stockpot. Reduce over medium-high heat until thick and syrupy, about 5 minutes.

  5. Pour the liquid over the vegetables, season with salt, and serve at once or allow to cool to room temperature.

  In the summer between my junior and senior years, Bill Dufford gave me a key to the Beaufort High School gymnasium and a job as a groundskeeper for the summer. Because of some incurable wound my father suffered during the Depression, the Colonel instituted an ironclad rule that none of his seven children could take a job that would pay them a salary. Mr. Dufford was absolutely delighted that I would move tons of dirt from one end of campus to another while refusing to take a single dime for my labor. I thought the physical work would be good for me as an athlete, and I spent the summer outdoors in the blazing heat, resodding and planting grass on every bald patch that disfigured the vast greensward of my pretty campus. Mr. Dufford also let me practice basketball in the gym the last three hours of the day before he made me close up at six.

  My favorite part of each day was when Mr. Dufford drove out onto the football or baseball field where I was shoveling dirt and motioned to me to get in his car. “You sorry damned pissant,” he would say. “I may not be able to pay you, but I can damn well feed you.”

  His red Chrysler was high-finned and flashy, and it cruised down Ribault Road like a yacht as he headed toward the business center of Beaufort for lunch. Each day we ate at the same table at Harry’s Restaurant, a town gathering place where businessmen and politicians and retirees came together—all drawn by the shaping, leavening power of gossip. Rumor was always hot to the touch and hot off the plate at Harry’s. Dufford was popular with the old-timers and newcomers alike, and everyone at Harry’s made an appearance at his table before he finished eating. I learned that summer that towns like Beaufort did not need novelists if they had restaurants like Harry’s. Daily, I listened for the news of sicknesses and obituaries and scandals and disasters as they passed in animated conversation between men bent low over coffee and at their leisure. The whole history of the town rose and ebbed each day in the great tides of conversation, and I felt like a deep insider in the underground movements of Beaufort when that summer was over. Mr. Dufford excelled in the art of conversation and debate and the fiery give-and-take that animated the lives of workingmen. My principal was golden and eloquent and in his prime that summer. He mesmerized the movers and shakers in the town with his views on education and politics. The integration of the Beaufort schools was three years away from becoming a reality, yet its storms had already built up hurricane force, gathering at the town gates.

  Harry’s Restaurant also opened up the floodgates of a whole culinary world I never knew existed until that summer as Dufford told me to order anything that suited my fancy. For the first time in my life, I tasted crab cakes and shrimp salad, fried oysters and stuffed flounder. On one magical Friday, I mustered up the courage to order Roquefort cheese dressing to put on my tossed salad. I’d never tasted anything so exotic or delicious in my life. There were chowders and stews and she-crab soups and heaping, glistening salads enlivened with olives, peppers, and generous slices of cheese and meats built from scratch by Harry Chakides’ Greek mother. I drank glass after glass of iced tea, sweet enough to count as dessert. Homemade biscuits and yeast rolls floated out of that kitchen, light as clouds, and the laughter of the black cooks followed the smoking bread to our table. Because of my principal, I learned how a small town worked, how it was held together by the fabulous buzz and pollination of its own most heinous or joyful stories, and I learned it while consuming the best food I had ever eaten. I would leave Harry’s every day feeling as sated and gluttonous as a king. Though, in my mind, Harry’s Restaurant remains a paradise of tastes and smells, it is the first sharp, fresh taste of Roquefort cheese that still leaps out as a small miracle of surprise to my immature palate.

  There was another surprise at Harry’s that took me over a month to ask Mr. Dufford about, but it was so incongruous and out of the order of things that I did not know how to phrase the question at first.

  “Mr. Dufford,” I said, “I thought that Beaufort was segregated by law.”

  “It is, pissant. It’s not going to be for long. But you’ve got our all-white high school and two miles down the road, you’ve got the all-black Robert Smalls High School. It doesn’t get more segregated than that.”

  “Then why’s Harry’s Restaurant integrated?” I asked.

  “It isn’t,” he said. “It’s against the law to serve food to black people.”

  “What about that man?” I said, pointing to a long, slim black man who was eating at the lunch counter.

  “That’s Tootie,” Mr. Dufford explained. “Tootie Frutti, the kids call him. He leads all the parades at football games and the Water Festival. Sometimes he’ll direct traffic at the big intersection.”

  “How come he can eat here? Everyone smiles and laughs when Tootie comes in. Like he’s their best friend in the world. Harry feeds him lunch every day right in front of all these white folks. How come?”

  “Tootie’s retarded, Pat. I think pretty severely. A couple of years ago, he came in here for the first time and things got pretty quiet. Harry sat Tootie down and tried to explain to him about integration and segregation, and Tootie didn’t know what Harry was talking about, so Harry said the hell with it and just brought him lunch.”

  Bill stared at Tootie with new awareness and said, “Come to think of it, I’ll be damned. Who’d’ve believed it? Tootie Frutti integrated the restaurants of South Carolina, all by himself, and it didn’t require a court order or a single demonstration or calling out the National Guard.”

  Because their impact cannot be measured, the teachers of the world drift through their praiseless days unaware of the impact and the majesty of their influence. I want to fall on my knees in gratitude whenever I conjure up the faces of those nameless men and women who spent their finest days coaxing and urging me to discover the best part of myself in the pure sunshine of learning. Because this country dishonors its teachers and humiliates them with lousy pay and a mortifying deficiency of prestige among other professions, they do not rece
ive the gifts of gratitude that brim over in men and women like me when we remember and honor their patient, generous shaping of us into citizens of the brighter world. Bill Dufford occupies a place of highest honor among the teachers who found me directionless and yearning to become a person of consequence as I stumbled through my childhood. That summer, I took the time to study Bill as he made his way among his fellow townspeople. He attracted people with his authentic approachability the full attention of his gaze, and the passionate authority he brought to bear on any subject that arose in Harry’s. I wanted people to look at me with the admiration that those Beaufortonians showed to my high school principal. From watching Mr. Dufford, I learned that the principal of a high school is one of the central players and politicians in the life of a town. I discovered that Dufford was principal in parlous, aggravated times. The subject of integration was on everybody’s minds and lips that summer of 1962. I got to watch Bill Dufford going through the painful switch from his upbringing as a Southern racist to his transformation into a Southern liberal who would play a courageous part in the integration of South Carolina schools.

  “Have you ever gone to school with black kids, Pat?” he asked me at lunch one day.

  “Yes, sir, I have.”

  “What did you think about it?” he asked.

  “I never thought anything about it, Mr. Dufford,” I said. “I’m Catholic. It’s a sin if I believe in segregation.”

  “That’s what they teach you? I’ll be damned,” he said, amazed. “What kind of sin?”

  “The mortal kind. The kind where you burn in hell,” I said.

  “What a hell of a way to handle it,” Dufford said. “Why didn’t the Protestant church think of that? Did you go to school with black kids in Washington last year?”

  “Yes, sir. There weren’t many in Gonzaga, but every class had some.”

  “So what did you think? Did you get to know any of them personally?”

  “Louie Jones was in my class,” I said. “He was a great guy.”

  “What kind of student was he? Could Louie Jones keep up with the rest of the class? Was he a troublemaker? How’d he get along with the other kids?” Mr. Dufford said, fixing me with his fully engaged gaze.

  “Louie was the smartest kid in the class, Mr. Dufford,” I said. “Maybe Mike Higgins was as smart. But everyone liked Louie. He was elected secretary of my homeroom. You’d’ve loved Louie Jones, Mr. Dufford. He was your kind of kid.”

  “It’s coming,” Dufford said. “It’s coming, and it’s coming soon and I don’t think anyone in this whole damn state is ready for it.”

  “Are you ready for it, Mr. Dufford?” I said, the first time I remember teasing Bill Dufford. He looked at me oddly, then said, “You sorry damn little pissant, you’re damn right I’m ready for it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, Pat. I’m Southern to the bone and was raised to defend the Southern way and I’ve done it my whole life. I’ve defended segregation my entire life, until lately. I think of segregation and then I think of words like ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ I think of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. I think of the teachings of Jesus Christ. See where I’m going with this, Pat?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “If people in this restaurant heard what I just said to you, I’d be fired tomorrow,” he said. “Could you have brought Louie Jones home to your house? To eat dinner? To spend the night?”

  “Yes, sir. Everybody’s welcome at our house,” I said.

  “Have you ever used the word ‘nigger’?” he said. “And I want an honest answer.”

  “When I was five, I used it and my mother heard me. I thought she was going to beat me to death. She wore my fanny out with a switch.”

  “Why’d she beat you?”

  “Said she was raised colored. That her folks were poorer than all the black families around them. She said the black families brought food to her house during the Depression. Said she’d let us be anything but white trash. She doesn’t tolerate white trash.”

  “Your mother sounds like a hell of a woman,” he said.

  “Mom’s something,” I said.

  I spent that summer so full of joy I never wanted it to end. I moved dirt in wheelbarrows and planted and cut grass with my principal coming out to help me in the fields. Dufford loved physical labor and the outdoors and sweating in the man-eating Beaufort sun. I would hitchhike the ten miles into town early each morning, receive my assignments from Mr. Dufford, work hard until lunch at Harry’s, finish my work in the afternoon, then hit the gym at three, where I would spend three hours trying to turn myself into the best basketball player in the state. My ambitions exceeded my talent by a long shot but I didn’t know that then, and I drove myself to the point of collapse each day. I worked on going to my left all summer, and during one of those hours each day I would only dribble with my left hand and only throw up left-handed hook shots off the drive. I invented dribbling and passing drills for myself, and I played imaginary games from start to finish in my head. Those imaginary games, populated by a whole nation of made-up players, were my first attempts at writing short stories, and all the games ended the same way, with me in a heroic, winner-take-all, last-second shot on a drive down the lane with my invisible enemies closing the lane down around me. Hard labor, great food, basketball—I had everything—the best summer of my life.

  CRAB CAKES Somewhere, lost in the high alps of Beach Music, the narrator, Jack McCall, evidently gives out his recipe for crab cakes to someone. So when I sign books in faraway cities, people often ask me about that recipe for crab cakes, and I write it out for them. I think I make the best crab cakes and shrimp salad in the world, and I will take on all comers.

  I became so connected to the crab cake during the Beach Music tour that I was invited on the Good Morning America show to cook crab cakes for Charlie Gibson. I love everything about Charlie Gibson except the time I have to get up for the show. It is usually five in the morning, and my habits are such that years go by when I never see the planet at five in the morning. But, for the crab cake session, they forced me to rise at 4 a.m. so I could prove to a staff member that I could actually cook a crab cake. I learned this only when I got to the studio and was met by the staffer herself, a pretty, self-confident woman dressed in a chef’s apron.

  “Do you really know how to cook a crab cake?” she asked. “If you can’t, I’ll show you how to do it.”

  “I’m from the coast of South Carolina,” I said. “In the summer I set a crab pot every day.”

  “But can you cook a crab cake?” She pointed to three containers of picked blue crabmeat.

  I washed my hands thoroughly and began to pick over the crab, removing all shell fragments and ligaments.

  “Why are you doing that?” the young woman asked me. “No one’s going to eat them.”

  “Then I will eat them,” I said. “This is beautiful crabmeat.”

  “Ah!” she said. “Why don’t you use any breading, like sodacrackers?”

  “If I wanted soda crackers, I would eat a soda cracker. I like crab, just crab.”

  If memory serves me right, I used a scallion that day instead of the snipped chives in the recipe below, and I tossed in some capers and chopped red pepper for effect.

  I gave the young woman one to taste; she said, “This is delicious!”

  So I went live on TV across the nation, where my only surprise was that Charlie Gibson peppered me with so many questions I discovered I could not cook and talk at the same time. Charlie is animated and cheerful in the early-morning hours, and he asked questions about every phase of the assemblage of the proper, well-schooled crab cake. When the ordeal was over, I was exhausted, but edified when a charge of cameramen who descended like vultures for the carcass of a possum devoured those crab cakes in the time it took to do one commercial.

  One of them said, “No one is hungrier than cameramen who work the morning shows. No one.”

  And the pr
etty young woman who made me prove that I knew my way around crabmeat? I did not get her name at five in the morning. I was channel-grazing years later when I saw her on the Food Network, and I recognized her immediately. Whenever I see Sara Moulton on her wonderful cooking show, I always think of crab. • MAKES 8

  1 pound lump crabmeat, picked over and cleaned, with all shell fragments removed

  1 egg white, lightly beaten (until just foamy, not stiff)

  1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons finely snipped fresh chives

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

  2 teaspoons coarse or kosher salt

  3 tablespoons unsalted butter

  2 teaspoons peanut oil

  Lemon wedges

  1. Place the cleaned crabmeat in a medium mixing bowl. Pour the egg white over crabmeat slowly, stopping occasionally to mix it through. When the crabmeat has absorbed the egg white and feels slightly sticky to the touch, sift the flour over crabmeat and sprinkle the chives, black pepper, cayenne, and 1 teaspoon of the salt evenly over the top. Lift the crabmeat from the bottom of the bowl, turning it over gently, to mix the ingredients without overhandling.

  2. Separate the crabmeat into 8 equal portions and gently roll each between the flattened palms of your hands to form loose balls. Flatten slightly and transfer to a plate. Sprinkle both sides liberally with the remaining 1 teaspoon salt and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before cooking.