The Pat Conroy Cookbook (36 page)

“I found the white porpoise scene in your novel a little much,” she said, toying with her salad. Critics are mostly bulimic, rail-thin—no great appetites there. “Homage to Herman Melville. Right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “Alex Sanders told me the story.”

“Who is Alex Sanders?”

“The greatest of all South Carolinians,” I answered. “I thanked him in the acknowledgments.”

“You thanked everyone in the acknowledgments,” she said. “But there’s no white porpoise, right?”

“Wrong. I saw the white porpoise swimming in Harbor River when I was at Beaufort High School.”

I could tell she did not believe me, but she went on with the next question.
“In your book you have a Bengal tiger at a gas station. How ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, eating happily “Another story from Alex Sanders. That was Happy the Tiger at an Esso gas station on Gervais Street in Columbia. I once fed Happy a chicken neck after I got my car washed.”

“Let’s go on,” she said, her voice skeptical. “The moving of the town? To make way for a plutonium plant?”

“Want to go to the town?” I asked. “It’s called New Ellenton.”

“You claim it’s true.”

“I could get you a radiation burn at the plant, if you’re so inclined.”

She looked over her notes, then said, “And you’re going to tell me Alex Sanders told you this story.”

“It’s one of his best,” I said.

“Do you pay Alex Sanders royalties?”

“If I were a good and decent man, I certainly would. But I prefer to simply rob him of all his material and take full credit for it. He does the same to me.”

“Do you ever have any ideas of your own?” she asked scornfully.

“Every once in a while I borrow from my meager pantry of ideas. But not often.”

“What does this Alex Sanders do? Is he employed?”

“He’s the chief justice of South Carolina’s Court of Appeals, and he teaches at Harvard Law School.”

She studied me for a moment, then said, “You’re exaggerating again.”

“Hotshot reporter like yourself could find out in a jif,” I said, my voice revealing my irritation.

“You sound hostile.”

“You find me dishonest.”

“I’m skeptical,” she said.

“That makes me hostile.”

“Does the great Alex Sanders find you hostile?”

“He finds me perfectly delightful in every possible way,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I feel the same way about him. I’d rather spend an evening
with Alex Sanders than anyone I’ve ever met. You’d feel the same way if you knew Alex. Everyone does.”

Again, her eyes went to her notes, and her hostility was like a condiment to the meal. She said, “Let’s go to the old chestnut. If you could invite any three people in history to a dinner party, who would they be?”

“Alex Sanders. Alex Sanders. Then Alex Sanders again.”

“You’re making fun of the question,” she said.

“I certainly am. You want me to answer Jesus of Nazareth, Genghis Khan, and Eva Braun. Something like that.”

“Something like that,” she said, then she looked around at the décor of the unsurpassable Four Seasons. “Why did you want to eat in a place like this? I find it pretentious.”

“It was recommended to me by Alex Sanders and his lovely wife, Zoe.”

The reporter rose up to shake my hand and said, in parting, “I haven’t believed a word you’ve said.”

I found this strange encounter in one of my journals and wanted to include it in this book because Zoe and Alex are unlike any two people I have ever met. They entered my life like two sharply tanged sorbets, coming in the middle of the meal to cleanse the palate and ready you for the feast that is on its way from the kitchen. Always, they have surprised me with their uncanny and inexhaustible generosity.

When I last saw Alex, he told me about selling a litter of Boykin spaniels from the back of a pickup truck to a group of rich Yankees at William Buckley’s house in Camden, South Carolina. Then he launched into one of the greatest love stories I’ve ever heard, about a shepherd in France who falls in love with a beautiful French reporter. The reporter climbs for six hours to reach the upper pastures where the shepherd tends his flocks in plain sight of the Alps. But I only hint at these stories with the hope that I live long enough to include them in future novels I have stolen from the brimming imagination of the greatest of all South Carolinians, Alex Sanders.

SOUPE DE POISSON
Near the docks of Marseilles, in a restaurant that looked more dangerous than enchanting, I followed the maitre d’ to a small table with a starched, no-nonsense tablecloth; a glacial waiter moved toward my table. My guidebook said the restaurant served one of the best bouillabaisses in Marseilles, where the dish marked its provenance. I had eaten Zoe and Alex Sanders’s fish soup on two occasions—once in the mountains of Georgia at Joe and Emily Cummings’s house, and once in their own house in Columbia. I noted that these were two of the finest home-cooked meals I had ever eaten. This soup is celebratory and generous of spirit, and you fall in love with the friends who take the time to make it for you. It is a soup of great simplicity, yet the taste resonates along the palate.

I thought I was going to catch grief from the waiter for dining alone because Julia Child had forewarned in her book
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
that bouillabaisse was best made for a table of six. The French waiter asked me if it was my first time eating bouillabaisse in Marseilles, and I said in pidgin French that it was. “The bouillabaisse of Paris is not bouillabaisse,” he said in one of the only French sentences I’ve ever understood.

When he emerged later from the kitchen, I could smell the meal racing ahead of him in the air. He set it in front of me and told me to inhale the steam rising from the broth. The smell was clean and deep, as though I were living inside an aquarium. I took a spoon and made sure I shaved off the southern portion of the rouille, a piece of sole, the scented broth, and a piece of the toasted French bread at the bottom. It was good beyond my powers to dream.

France, ladies and gentlemen. France.

•
SERVES 6 AS A FIRST COURSE

GRILLED FENNEL AND PEPPER SALAD
    •
SERVES 6 TO 8

T
here are austere rules in the writing of novels that vex the young writer every bit as much as the rules of finesse and discipline and cuisine vex a headstrong apprentice. Young masochists are drawn toward melodrama and coincidence; thus young writers and young cooks have much in common. As do older writers and master chefs.

I speak now of coincidence and the detached collisions of fate. In the early eighties, I spent an extraordinary week in New York City where I attended plays and thrilled to an opera with my agent, Julian Bach, having dinner at the Four Seasons afterward. Like a bird-watcher, I keep a list of great restaurants that I would like to eat my way through during my passage on this earth. I crossed off Lutèce and La Côte Basque on this journey, during which I presented the full outline of
The Prince of Tides
to my lovely editor, Nan Talese. But Julian Bach and Nan Talese were not coincidences, rather part of the natural architecture of my life.

On the Delta flight back home to Atlanta, fate cleared its throat as I heard a handsome young man in the aisle seat across from me whistling softly. I am not the kind of man who starts up conversations with strangers on airplanes and who then pulls out pictures of his children to show to any passenger within earshot. When I travel, I prize my
anonymity and solitude and have no desire to be seated next to a compulsive chatterbox. The whistling from the right drew my attention, but it was the stack of cookbooks that riveted me. In a neatly stacked pile, the young man was looking up recipes from the very best cookbooks published in that year. These were on the cutting edge and the outer rim—it was long before the dawning of the era of the celebrity chefs and the Food Network, but that revolution was in the air. Already, extra virgin olive oil had started to appear in Southern supermarkets, bringing sex, at last, to Southern kitchens. Arugula, watercress, and daikon radishes were making shy appearances in produce departments in my part of the world, and Paul Prudhomme had already made his mark in New Orleans, initiating the era when you could not meet a redfish that someone had not blackened. In my hometown of Atlanta, the glittering era of Pano & Paul’s had begun, Buckhead began to strut with restaurants bucking for four stars, and I heard a Frenchman say you could get a better Russian meal at Nicolai’s Roof’s downtown location than you could in Moscow. Cuisine was breaking out all over the South, as luxuriant and uncontrollable as kudzu. The man across the aisle from me was about to change the history of his home state of Alabama forever.

“Sir,” I said, watching him scribble in his notebook, “those cookbooks you’re reading, they’re wonderful.”

“I think I just spent the best week of my life working in the kitchens of these four chefs,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can learn in just a week. My name is Frank Stitt, sir.”

“Mine is Pat Conroy” I said. “Are you a chef?”

“Yes, I am, though I’ve never run my own place,” Frank said. “I’m about to open a restaurant.”

“Can I ask where?”

“Birmingham, Alabama,” he said.

“It’s a wasteland for good food,” I said. “I was there a month ago.”

“It won’t be a wasteland anymore,” Frank replied with a confidence that both surprised and delighted me.

“If you’re any good at all,” I remember saying, “you’re going to be a very rich man.”

Frank appraised me with care and then said, “I’m good. I’m very good.”

He said it with a measure of conviction and authority that carried much weight with me. Frank declared it like a man with keenly earned self-knowledge, an awesome respect for the art of cooking, and a firm knowledge of the great gift he was about to bestow on his home state. He spoke with enthusiasm about the chefs who trained him in France, and he was already comfortable speaking in the vocabulary and techniques of Escoffier, Joel Robuchon, and Alain Ducasse. I could not mention a restaurant that he did not have knowledge of. His long apprenticeship was now over and Frank Stitt was coming home to deliver the goods to Alabama.