by Pat Conroy
6. To assemble: Spread the warm crêpes with a generous tablespoon of warm chocolate. Roll, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar, and serve.
CRÈME BRÛLÉE In the first celebrity cook-off I ever took part in, I wowed the audience with my version of the French classic dessert crème brûlée. For the uninitiated, crème brûlée simply tastes better than most other foods, and it can make you fat much faster than other foods. But it is elegant, classy, and silken and should be saved for those occasions that require a touch of grandeur. I finished second among the celebrities that night. My crème brûlée found itself overmatched by a shrimp course entered by a pretty woman named Shirley Franklin. She called her dish Shrimp Niger, and it was wonderful. Today, Shirley Franklin is the mayor of Atlanta. • SERVES 4 TO 6
2½ cups heavy cream
1 vanilla bean
6 egg yolks
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup packed light brown sugar
1. Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 325°F.
2. Pour the heavy cream into a large saucepan and set aside. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds from inside the pod into the cream. Add the pod.
3. Over moderate heat, bring the cream and vanilla mixture to a low boil. Remove from the heat, cover, and let the mixture steep for 15 minutes. Remove the vanilla pod.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks and granulated sugar until pale yellow. Slowly whisk the egg mixture into the cream.
5. Pour into four to six shallow broiler-proof custard dishes. Set the dishes in a shallow roasting pan and pour boiling water into the pan to come halfway up the sides of the dishes.
6. Bake until the custard is set, about 30 minutes. (The tops will still look jiggly)
7. Remove the dishes from roasting pan and cool on a rack to room temperature.
8. Preheat the broiler.
9. Press the brown sugar through a fine-mesh strainer onto the custards in an even layer. Wipe excess sugar from rims.
10. Broil about 5 inches from the heat source until the sugar liquefies, then starts to bubble and caramelize. This can take from 1 to 3 minutes. Rotate the pan to ensure even browning and be extremely careful not to burn the tops.
11. Remove the custard dishes and cool on a rack to room temperature. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving.
When my daughter Megan called from California to let me know that she and her boyfriend were going to get married, I said that I thought it was time that I learned Terry’s last name. Megan paused, then I heard her ask her fiancé: “Terry, what’s your last name again?” Returning to the phone, Megan said to me, “Giguire. Yeah, that’s it. Giguire.”
A young woman who was always full of surprises and astonishments, Megan then told me that she wanted a traditional Southern wedding like the ones she had read about in Southern Living magazine. I cautioned Megan that there was not a single thing traditional about her madcap and widely traveled life, and that I had never read one article in Southern Living that made me conjure up the image of my pretty daughter. But she insisted that it be both Southern and traditional, and that she wanted the ceremony to take place in Beaufort, South Carolina. She had chosen Beaufort because she knew what the town meant to me, and because she had spent every summer on the beaches of Fripp Island. Also, it was her birthplace as well as one of the prettiest towns on the planet to get married in.
“I plan to be a gorgeous bride, Dad,” she said. “Just want you to get used to the idea.”
“You’ve been gorgeous since the day you were born, kid,” I said.
“Were you there at my birth, Dad?” Megan asked.
“I asked to be. But it was the South. The early seventies. Dr. Keyserling called me a sick sexual pervert and banished me to the waiting room,” I told her.
When Megan Elizabeth Conroy was born on November 5, 1970, the moment the masked nurse lifted her up to the window for the first inspection by the proud dad, I was floored by the outpouring of love for the newborn child that both dazzled and overwhelmed me. Love flooded through me like a great, ceaseless river that I could not control. I remember thanking God that Megan was not a boy, for I carried an irrational yet unshakable belief from my childhood that I would treat a son in the same awful way my father had treated me. I also thought, My God, Megan’s got my nose. No one on earth will want to marry a girl with my nose. But I pulled myself together and studied her more closely. Megan is beautiful. I amended my thoughts. Even with my nose.
I have never met a soul who did not fall in love with Megan Conroy after being with her for five minutes. There may be such people on earth, but you would not want to know them.
In great joy Barbara and I brought Megan home to Hancock Street on the Point, where my family and neighbors awaited our return. The dining room table overflowed with food brought by our neighbors. My mother called me aside and said I needed to have a good straight talk with Jessica and Melissa, the two daughters I had adopted after I married Barbara. Their father, West Jones, was a Marine Corps fighter pilot who was killed while giving close air support for the ground troops in Vietnam. When I adopted them, I vowed that they would never feel like second-class citizens in my house. If they did, I would not be worth a nickel as a father or a man.
“Pat, the girls are worried you won’t love them as much now that Megan’s been born,” my mother said. “It’s natural. You just need to reassure them.”
I found the girls on the couch in the living room. They ran to me, and I took them up in my arms. Jessica was coming up on five years old, and “the Woo” was two and a half.
“Peg said you two need to talk to me,” I said.
The two girls looked at each other, and the Woo nodded for Jessica to speak.
“Do you like Megan more than us?” Jessica asked, up front.
“Nah,” I said. “Have you seen her? She cries all the time. Poops in her britches. It’s awful. I don’t know how we’re going to survive this one.”
“But she’s your real child,” Jessica continued. “And me and the Woo aren’t.”
“No, girls. I got a piece of paper saying that you’re my real kids. And I had to pay a lot of money to get those adoption papers.”
“You love us that much?” the Woo asked. “More than Megan?”
“More,” I said. “I love you a lot more.”
“Why?” both girls asked.
“Because I’ve known both of you a lot longer,” I said. “Megan’s a pain in the butt. She can’t even talk. Can you believe that? And she’s so dumb, she doesn’t even know I’m her daddy.”
“She’s just a baby,” Jessica said, defending her sister’s honor.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” I told her. “We’ve got to make Megan as nice and smart as you two girls.”
In truth, as I look back, I had brought Megan home to a house in great and mortal peril. A month before her birth, I had been fired from my teaching job on Daufuskie Island for “gross neglect of duty, conduct unbecoming a professional educator, AWOL, and insubordination.” I had found it difficult to gain other teaching jobs with those words glistening on my résumé. In Savannah, Georgia, a deputy superintendent of education was interviewing me for a job when the phone rang. It was the superintendent who fired me getting his two bits in on my qualifications as an educator. The man hung up the phone and said, “Dr. Trammell said you were the worst teacher he’s encountered in a thirty-year career in education. You’re exactly the kind of teacher we don’t want here in Savannah. Our kids deserve better than you.”
In the first six months of Megan’s life, I would be writing The Water Is Wide, shivering with rage at the injustice of my firing. At the time we brought our first child into our home, I had endangered my family, destroyed my reputation, and stumbled awkwardly into my life’s work. I began writing sentences that had some weight and gravitas and could stand on their own like beaten egg whites. Something in Megan’s birth brought a roundedness and contentment I had never
felt. I remember lofting a prayer that she grow into proud womanhood and not inherit a single one of my itchy, disharmonious traits. Naturally, because of the way the world works, Megan grew into the loveliest of women, but she’s so much like me that my sarcastic tribe of brothers and sisters have labeled poor Megan “Pat with boobs.”
Whenever I pull The Water Is Wide from the shelf and read the jumpy sentences of the iridescent, wet-behind-the-ears kid I was back then, to me the book still feels Megan-shaped, even Megan-induced. I was trying to force myself into a career that could support a comely child, her mother, and her frisky sisters. Bearing down, I completed the book in three months, and Megan’s infant cries were the background music of that book. I had produced a “Beaufort girl” with my first daughter, the first Conroy ever to be a native of this small town I had thrown my arms around as a fifteen-year-old boy.
Like all children, Megan was a baby, then suddenly I blinked my eyes, and she had transformed herself into a toddler wearing tiger pajamas. While I planted a camellia bush in the side yard, turned around, Megan was walking into first grade. I bought a new fountain pen to write The Great Santini, and then watched as Megan blew out ten candles on her birthday cake. Time began to speed up, and I heard something behind me—Megan was walking across the high school stage to receive her diploma from Paul Bianchi. A letter came from Barbra Streisand that she wanted to make a movie of The Prince of Tides; a phone rang in the background, and it was Megan telling me she had fallen in love with a boy named Terry Giguire. I spun around in the new terror of aging, wondering who had stolen my life from me and where they had taken it. I looked in the mirror and saw a fifty-four-year-old stranger staring back at me.
In 1995, the year that Beach Music came out, I was in a bookstore signing stock with the help of a handsome, cheerful young man who was asking me questions about how I went about turning myself into a writer. I gave him the usual thumbnail sketch about my career, then asked him where he was from.
“Boulder, Colorado,” he said.
“No kidding? My daughter went to the University of Colorado,” I told him, as he passed me copy after copy of Beach Music.
“What was her name? It’s a huge place, but maybe I ran into her,” he said.
“Her name is Megan Conroy” I said, and the young man gasped aloud as he stepped back from me.
“Hey, pal?” I asked. “Why are you gasping when you hear my daughter’s name spoken aloud?”
“Mr. Conroy,” he said in total admiration, “your daughter Megan was the biggest party animal in the history of the University of Colorado.”
“Thanks, kid. I think,” I said, then asked him: “Wasn’t the University of Colorado voted the best party school in America by Playboy magazine?”
The kid lit up again and said, “Yes, sir. Four years in a row. The same four years that Megan Conroy was there.”
That night I called Megan and told her the story.
“Who was that guy, Dad?” she asked. “What was his name?”
“I forget his name, but I’ll never forget his story,” I said. “What exactly does it mean, Megan?”
“It means, Dad,” Megan said without a trace of defensiveness, “that I love to have a good time … just like my daddy.”
To his everlasting credit, my son-in-law, Terry Giguire, tells my family that he loves that story more than any I tell about my legendary daughter.
The problem with giving Megan an old-fashioned Southern wedding was that Barbara and I did not raise Megan to be an old-fashioned Southern girl. We raised all our girls to be bright, sassy, liberated, and the life of every party they walked into, anywhere in the world. But if my girl wants something, I can do Southern with the best of them. I called my cooking partner, Suzanne Pollak, and told her about Megan’s wedding plans. With the extraordinary generosity of spirit that marks her every waking hour, Suzanne offered the use of her house and gardens. She lives in a matchless Southern house with a garden that smells like the inside of a perfume bottle in the spring. My sister Kathy Harvey put in a call to Butch Polk, one of the best football players ever to come out of Beaufort High School, and he promised to put on a Southern barbecue that Terry’s California family would talk about the rest of their lives. For the reception, we hired the great Beaufort caterer Steve Brown to fix Southern dishes like crab cakes and shrimp gumbo and dozens of others. Megan bought a wedding dress that had a classic Southern look, and set her father back—let’s see—I don’t quite remember the price and have been criticized in my life for my powers of exaggeration, so let me be conservative about the actual cost, but it was somewhere near a billion dollars or so. All the engines of smalltown Beaufort life were set into motion to give my daughter Megan the traditional Southern wedding she desired.
On the day of her wedding, the bridesmaids and friends arrived in sets. First came Molly Malloy Bebe Allen, Erin Bradley, and Anna Kramer, all of whom had gone to school with Megan at Paideia School in Atlanta, the last place in America to send a girl to be taught as a traditional Southern girl. The next group was composed of her college friends from Colorado: Julie Lindsay, Katie Gjorolina, Kristin Pierce, Alex DeNeva, and Jenny Hatifield, the radiant young women who had collaborated in Megan’s noble quest to be “the biggest party animal in the history of the University of Colorado.” Yet another group was made up of family, the sisters of the bride and groom. The prettiest women in the state of South Carolina had gathered under my roof to honor my daughter, and I was moved by the sight of such beauty and freshness and devotion to her. My gift to Megan was that I would prepare the traditional bridesmaids’ lunch.
I had selected the menu with the help of both my wife, Sandra, and my cookbook partner, Suzanne. It was tomato season in Beaufort, and there is nothing in the world that tastes as good as a Beaufort tomato picked fresh from Dempsey’s Farm on Highway 21. I sliced up a platter full and spread them like a deck of cards, then anointed them with a splash of extra virgin olive oil from Lucca. (Ever tasted Southern olive oil?) Then I threw a handful of basil from our garden over it. I fixed a chilled cucumber soup with fresh dill, then made a squash casserole and a salad with a dressing I had first tasted in a Charleston mansion. The main course was a swordfish salad that I had eaten at Suzanne’s house at a dinner party the year before, and I shamelessly stole Suzanne’s recipe. The dessert was the part of the meal that meant the most to me. I made Sandra’s mother’s famous pound cake to honor a woman who had died five years before Sandra and I met. In honor of Pat King, I used her recipe and made a cake that will help her memory live on and that validated her fame as a nonpareil Southern cook. I served the pound cake with fresh peaches and whipped cream, and it was sublime. My daughter rose and toasted me for preparing the finest bridesmaids’ lunch any of them had ever tasted. She said it was the only one ever fixed by the father of the bride that they knew of, and I bowed deeply from the kitchen.
The weather turned cool for June, and Megan’s wedding was out of a storybook. She and Terry exchanged vows that are ancient and important and moving every time I hear them (or take them). But there is one metaphor of that weekend that I hold dear and priceless. It makes me laugh every time I see it. When the photographs of the traditional Southern wedding came back, I looked at the first photograph and thought, This is what my entire life has been like. This photograph could tell everything about the chaos and dissonance and breakdown of all order and serenity or fealty to custom in my squirrelly life. In the photograph is my handsome son-in-law, Terry, in his tuxedo. His arm is behind Megan, the beautiful bride, looking ravishing in her billion-dollar wedding dress. But what makes this photograph Conroyesque in the extreme is the presence of the sweet-faced Molly Jean Giguire, my one-year-old granddaughter, who is riding on her mother’s hip, barefooted and enjoying every single moment of her mother’s traditional Southern wedding.
CUCUMBER SOUP The ripening of the tomato and cucumber fields is one of the clearest augurs of summer’s arrival in Beaufort. I like to make cucumber soup with Be
aufort cucumbers because it gives me the false sensation of a deep connection with the Low Country. Since most of you will have no access to Beaufort cucumbers, we include the hothouse variety in the recipe. There are many variations of this recipe, most of them delicious.
In Mobile, Alabama, Eugene Walter once fixed me his version, which included fresh-picked strawberries, a combination that sounded revolting to me. But it was cool and refreshing, and even exciting, as he said it would be. I’ve made this soup with buttermilk, whole milk, skim milk, and heavy cream. The fresh dill is the essential ingredient.
In New York City, I once ordered cucumber soup at the restaurant of the impeccable chef Daniel Boulud. He garnished it with smoked fresh trout, quail eggs (I think), and tomatoes, but he almost ruined it with the subtle addition of cilantro, Satan’s own herb. I do not know why I react so strongly to cilantro (which often travels under the equally unsavory alias of coriander), but its addition made it seem as though Monsieur Boulud had thrown a bar of soap into his soup. My aversion to cilantro is so well established that I had a wonderful visit to Bangkok having learned to say only these three words: “No pai chi.”
• SERVES 6 AS A FIRST COURSE
3 seedless cucumbers
1 small jalapeño chile, halved, seeded, and chopped
2 shallots, coarsely chopped
¼ cup plain yogurt (not nonfat)
½ teaspoon coarse or kosher salt, or to taste
Finely chopped fresh dill
Sour cream
1. Peel and halve the cucumbers lengthwise. Use the tip of a teaspoon to scoop out the seeds. (This variety typically has very few.) Cut the cucumbers into small pieces and place in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade.
