The Pat Conroy Cookbook (31 page)

W
hen I first arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1961, I had never eaten an oyster, nor entertained any plans to do so in the future. Though I grew up surrounded by salt marshes and rivers, my mother had a landlubber’s disdain for all varieties of seafood, but held a special contempt for the lowly and despised oyster. I remember her wrinkling her nose as she held a pint of oysters aloft, saying, “I wouldn’t eat one of these balls of mucus in a famine.”

But we had come to the land of the great winter oyster roasts, where friends and neighbors gathered on weekends armed with blunt-nosed knives, dining on oysters that grown men had harvested from their beds at dead low tide that same day. At an oyster roast on Daufuskie Island thirty years ago, Jake Washington came up to me as I was devouring, with great pleasure, oysters he had gathered from the Chechessee River earlier that day. The afternoon was cold and clear, and I washed the oysters down with a beer so icy that my hand ached even though I was wearing shucker’s gloves. Among Daufuskie Islanders and folks from Bluffton and Hilton Head, there is a running argument about which river produces the most delicious and flavorful oysters: the Chechessee or the May River. I
have partaken of both, and the sheer ecstasy of trying to make the subtle distinctions that make arguments like this arise makes me shiver with pleasure.

“You like those oysters, teacher?” Jake asked me. “They taste good?”

“Heaven. It’s like tasting heaven, Jake,” I answered.

“You know what you’re tasting, teacher?” Jake said. “You’re tasting last night’s high tide. Them oysters always keep some of the tide with them. It sweetens them up.”

Once when my boat broke down on the May River while going to Daufuskie, I drifted into an oyster bank and spent the hours awaiting rescue by opening up dozens of oysters with a pocketknife. Of all the oyster bars I have frequented in my life, none came close to the sheer deliciousness of those tide-swollen oysters I consumed that long-ago morning, which tasted of seawater with a slight cucumber aftertaste. The oyster is a child of tides and it tasted that cold morning like the best thing that the moon and the May River could conjure up to crown the shoulders of its inlets and estuaries. A raw oyster might be the food that my palate longs for most during the long summer season in Beaufort when we give our oysters their vacation time and they grow milky from their own roe. But then I remember my first roasted oyster, dipped in hot butter and placed on my tongue. As I bit into it, its succulence seemed outrageous, but it made my mouth the happiest place on my body. That first roasted oyster ranks high on my list of spectacular moments I have experienced while meandering through the markets and restaurants of the world—my first taste of lobster, truffle, beluga caviar, escargot, and South Carolina’s mustard-based barbecue.

An oyster roast must take place on a cold day for it to work its proper magic. You should invite only those friends who have never heard of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
. It is not a milieu that induces euphoria among highbrows and intellectuals. You’ll seldom hear talk about quantum physics or quadratic equations as newspapers are spread out over picnic tables. There will be a lot more pickup trucks than Lexuses in the parking lot, and the dress code is decidedly casual. The expectant hum of the crowd is what hunger sounds like. Great sacks of
oysters are cut open with knives, and several men, who know exactly what they are doing, tend to an oak fire with a piece of tin laid over it on cinder blocks. It does not have to be tin, but it has to be a metal that will not melt into the fire. When the tin is iridescent and glowing from the fire, several men shovel bushels of oysters, many in clusters, onto the slab of tin and cover the oysters with wet burlap sacks.

The crowd cheers when the first oysters are shoveled on because we know the process is quick. Another cheer arises when the heat forces the first batch of oysters to pop open, the juices of the oysters hissing against the tin and causing a redolent, noisy steam to rise in the air like a secret fog. The men with the shovels then distribute the roasted oysters to the restless waiting crowds, who grab them up, hot as bricks in a kiln, warming their gloved left hands as they pry the shells apart with their right hands. There is no labor at an oyster roast. The fiery heat has done all the work for you. Your one job is to eat as many oysters as you can while they are still steaming off the fire. A lukewarm oyster is beside the point and always a disappointment to the spirit.

I love to dip my oysters in a bath of hot butter, but other Low Country people swear by the catsup and horseradish, or cocktail sauce, route. Yet I have known people who carry whole lemons and who would not even consider adding another condiment to such a distinct and natural taste. Others believe that any addition at all is a form of heresy, and they eat their oysters as God made them, savoring that giddy briny essence of the Low Country as it comes from its shell.

Always, in the Low Country, you eat more than you should at an oyster roast. I never have left an oyster roast without thinking that I should not have eaten the last seven oysters I forced down. But how do you turn your back on something so enchanting and delicious? For the half-shell people, an oyster roast always sounds like an abomination unto the Lord, but the tradition dates back to the Yemassees, Kiawahs, and other tribes that once roamed these forests. Is a roasted oyster ever as good as a chilled oyster on the half shell? Perhaps a Chilmark, a Sailor Girl, a Point Reyes Pacifica, a Cotuit, or that Rolex of oysters, the snooty Belon—No, it’s not, not to me, but it is still terrific all the same. The camaraderie and the gossip
and the sheer goodwill of the crowd set the oyster roast apart for me as something particularly Southern and indigenous, a rite that poor people have access to because our rivers are open to everyone and our oyster banks are fecund and public and healthy.

My favorite oyster roast was not planned. When
The Lords of Discipline
came out, I was spending the night with my friends Dana and Sallie Sinkler at their house on Wadmalaw Island. Before dinner, Dana and I rode out in his boat to an oyster bank across the river, where we gathered the evening meal with tongs. With a boatful of oysters, we recrossed the river at sunset, the water turning gold around us, and the wake of our boat kicking up a more startled form of gold behind us.

Before we left, Dana had started his own oak fire in his hearth and had laid a piece of tin across it. We roasted the freshly harvested oysters in Dana and Sallie’s living room. Sallie brought bread and bacon-laced coleslaw out of her kitchen. There was beer and wine and grand talk as we sat in front of the fire, and I could feel our friendship deepening while we opened the oysters and told each other the stories of our lives.

Last year, I bought two bushels of oysters from an oysterman on St. Helena Island for a roast of my own. The Low Country is always capable of astonishing me anew.

“Sir, are these oysters local?” I asked after paying him.

“No, sir. Gotta be honest. I harvested these oysters over three miles from here.”

OYSTER ROAST
    
•
SERVES 12

Low Country Aioli
      
•
MAKES ABOUT
3½
CUPS