The Pat Conroy Cookbook (4 page)

BAKED FISH DAUFUSKIE
Nathalie baked this recipe for me in her condo in Atlanta soon after I graduated from her cooking school class. She named the dish after Daufuskie Island, where I had once taught eighteen black children in the first year of teacher integration in South Carolina. The children would often bring me gifts of deviled crab, boiled shrimp, or roasted fish their mothers sent wrapped in aluminum foil. That was the year I learned of the glory of fresh fish. “That fish was swimming yesterday evening, Mr. Conroy” Sallie Ann Robinson told me after giving me a piece of sea bass her mother had baked. Thirty-three years later, that same Sallie Ann Robinson would write her own cook book,
Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way
, which was published in 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press.     
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SERVES 4

WHITE CHOCOLATE-PISTACHIO COOKIES             •
MAKES 50

W
hen I first began cooking, I had no idea that it would lead me to a forking path of minor literature that would provide me with as much reading joy as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because I began with the astringent, no-nonsense Monsieur Escoffier, who seemed to know all things about all foods and did not suffer fools easily, it took me a long time to ease out of his authoritative embrace. In the kitchen, Escoffier is every bit as intimidating as Marcel Proust is at the writing table. What surprised me was how much pure delight I took in reading recipes I could never even think about fixing myself.

I began collecting cookbooks in a modest, desultory way. But cooking is an insidious addiction and it was many years before I realized I needed to enroll in a twelve-step program to control my passion for the ownership of cookbooks. I suffered a heart-stopping pang of pure envy when I first gazed at Nathalie Dupree’s awesome cookbook collection, which sat in proud, soldierly rows in her kitchen. In Nathalie’s library of food, the recipes of the entire world seemed to be jockeying for position. You could cook anything if you just owned enough of those secret-bearing texts. The sauces and salsas and sugos of the world awaited my inspection
and edification if I was bold enough to purchase a serious number of these bright, ebullient books.

My beginnings were modest. After Escoffier, I started by gathering small collections of Junior League and church cookbooks from around the South. They pleased me greatly because they were such accurate reflections of their cities and towns, as authentic as fingerprints. For me, they were also compendiums of acquired wisdom and experience that offered shortcuts that I could not learn in a lifetime. One of my first purchases was a book whose title I loved,
Talk About Good!
, published by the Service League of Lafayette, Louisiana. It marked the first time I was exposed to the very usable and useful tips that experienced cooks share with one another.

A cookbook gathered by the residents of my own Fripp Island is literally chock-full of these invaluable hints that seem part folk wisdom and part residue of the observant eye all cooks develop over the course of a lifetime spent at the stove. Though I don’t know why I love the authority and pungency of these kitchen aids, love them I do. Fripp Islanders supply these snappy advisories:

You would not learn such things from the cookbooks of Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck, or Daniel Boulud, and this is not meant to be a critique of these inimitable chefs. These compilations of tips are a form of generosity
and I cherish them particularly because of their anonymity. In all the small-time cookbooks I own, these clues to make your time in the kitchen richer and more efficient are never signed by their authors. They are simply proffered, bouquets tossed out to the strangers who would follow after them.

Another pleasure of the small-town or small-organization cookbook is the recipe author’s personal commentary on the dish at hand. It can be as simple as “One way to a man’s heart,” or “The longer you keep it, the better it gets.” But I look for the secret writers and dreamers who describe the special merits of their favorite snacks or meals. One such is the helpful Mrs. Arnold Rankin, who placed her recipe for Hot Sherry Cheese Dip in
Cotton Country
, a book put out by the Decatur Junior Service League in Alabama. She gives her recipe these sterling accolades: “a working girl’s best friend, a bit of magic for the busy mother, a modern miracle for the I-hate-to-cook lady. There are few things this good that are really instant. This is!” That exclamation point made me a lifetime admirer of the perky Mrs. Rankin.

In the same charming cookbook, the admirable Mrs. William A. Sims composed this metaphysical advertisement for her Sweet and Sour Meatballs recipe: “The men at your party will gather like bees at a hive around your chafing dish of meatballs.” The aristocratic and confident Mrs. Barrett Shelton Sr. touted her Stuffed Country Ham with this riff from her culinary trumpet: “To call this merely ‘Stuffed Ham’ is an injustice. ‘Spectacular’ is the only word to describe this ham: spectacular in appearance and taste. Trouble—perhaps—but for a buffet dinner or cocktail party mainliner, nothing could do more for your reputation as a good cook or hostess.” Have you ever seen three sentences more confidently rendered by a hand so fine and sure—the disdainful dashes surrounding that intimidating “perhaps” and that bold, two-eyed colon stopping you in midstream for emphasis. A small history of the South could be composed just by studying the cadences and assuredness of position in Mrs. Barrett Shelton Sr.’s place in Decatur society. It would be paradisiacal for me to pass down a Decatur street and have the imperious
Mrs. Shelton whisper to a group of lunching friends, “Mr. Conroy’s new in town, but I think he has the makings of a cocktail party mainliner.”

Marian Hornsby Bowditch, the unforgettable mother of the unforgettable John Bowditch, a classmate of mine at The Citadel, wrote one of the most remarkable cookbooks I have in my possession. The entire book is written in Mrs. Bowditch’s own handwriting. The recipes are free-ranging, eclectic, and brilliant. She wrote the book and dedicated it to her “four traveling gourmet sons who have called me collect from all parts of the country for recipes.” It is a book of consummate genius. Every recipe seems complete and perfect unto itself—you cannot think of a single ingredient to add or subtract. The recipes were years in the composing and I have no doubt that Mrs. Bowditch is one of the finest chefs in this country. Her cookbook,
From the Kitchen at Hornsby House in Yorktown, Virginia
, is as much a treasure in its own way as
Charleston Receipts
or the early James Beard. As willful and opinionated as Escoffier himself, Mrs. Bowditch dispenses advice and precise instructions. Does she have tips? This larger-than-life woman brims over with personality, and conversation is an art form with her. Mrs. Bowditch tells you:

These secrets of the trade are what I love best about those modest books that spring from the collective unconscious of churches, schools, clubs, and homes. They are bound economically and most of them are clasped together with plastic ringlets that give them the look and feel of an amateur’s obsession. When I wanted to write this homage to this unpraised genre I pulled, at random,
Come and Get It!
, a cookbook put out by the Junior Welfare League of Talladega, Alabama;
Bayou Cuisine
, published by St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Indianola, Mississippi;
and a dozen others. All are unpretentious, helpful, calming to the soul, and causing great joy to the human palate.

The only book I did not own that I quoted from was
Cotton Country
, the one from which I cheerfully quoted the ladies of Decatur, Alabama, extolling the virtues of their own recipes. A young woman named Margaret Holly who did research for me during the writing of
Beach Music
is from Decatur. I called to see if she knew those ladies I was quoting with such relish. Margaret not only knew them, she knew them exceedingly well and told me the inside scoop on the three women I had quoted. Then Margaret shocked me by proving once again that the world is closing in on itself, and that the South is the smallest geographic entity on earth.

“Pat, it’s nice that you think those ladies wrote the witty little commentaries, but none of them can write that well.”

“Who wrote them?”

“My mother wrote every one of them,” Margaret said. “No, she had trouble with the cookies and someone else had to do those.”

In the front of the book, I looked up the cookbook committee who compiled the book. At the bottom of the page I saw this notation: “Recipe Commentary—Mrs. William E. Shinn, Jr., the mother of Margaret Holly.” It is one of the simple pleasures of my life that I read these unknown cookbooks, but there are certain times—like this one—when they offer me a glimpse into the magical, the purely enchanted.

COCKTAIL PECANS
It is a lucky yard that hosts a pecan tree. There are several things better than a pecan pie, but not many. There are several things better than roasted, salted, and buttered pecans, but not by much. In my youth I would irritate my mother by pronouncing this as
pee-can
, which she considered redneck, and she would correct me with
puh-cahn
, which she thought more genteel.     
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MAKES
1
POUND