The Pat Conroy Cookbook (6 page)

My father bought one of the first television sets ever to appear on Spencer Avenue, and Carol and I would watch mesmerized for hours. I did not realize we were eyewitnesses to the early days of television because I was cocooned in a child’s vision of time and had been on the planet a mere six years. Carol and I were watching the Cisco Kid and Pancho one afternoon when our parents came up behind us, and my mother said, “Would y’all like to see the Cisco Kid and Pancho tomorrow?”

“Sure,” we both said.

Our parents drove us downtown to the main business street of New Bern, where we joined hundreds of parents and children who were herded into the movie theater to see those Western heroes on tour. I now know that poor Cisco and Pancho must’ve been on the tour from hell if they were in New Bern, but I thought it was a splendid and magical thing when I was a first grader. At the end of a screening of their film, the two Mexican cowboys made their way onstage with their gaudy costumes and outlandish hats. They drew tickets out of a hat for door prizes, and they called out my ticket number. Dad lifted me out of my seat, and I walked appalled with every eye in the theater affixed on me. I approached the two giant men on the stage, and they shook hands with me.

“Are you a good little boy?” Cisco asked me.

I have no memory of this, but my mother said I brought down the house by replying, “Si, Ceesco.”

The next month, my mother walked by her two children in front of the television, and she reports that I said, “Mama, next week I’d like to meet Superman and the Lone Ranger and Tonto.”

The country of first grade blends with the newfoundland of second grade, but I had to change neither teachers nor towns as Sister Maurice graduated to the second grade with me and my class, and the saltwater town of New Bern stayed the same. Each night of our childhood my mother would read books and poetry to Carol and me. I fell in love with my mother’s lovely, softly accented voice. Whatever she read, Carol and I fell in love with. Though both of us bear unhealable scars from that childhood, I think both of us are writers because of it. This was the year my mother read
The Diary of Anne Frank
to her two children. As a young boy I was caught up in the immediacy and brightness of Anne Frank’s unmistakable voice. I studied photographs of Anne Frank and noted how pretty she was and how she looked exactly as I expected her to look—fresh and knowing and, this was important to me, smarter than the adults around her. I fell in love with Anne Frank and have never fallen out of love with her.

But my mother did not prepare her children for the abruptness of the diary’s ending. Anne’s voice went silent after the Nazis invaded her family’s attic hideaway, a place I visit every time I find myself in the watery, cross-stitched city of Amsterdam.

“What happened to Anne, Mama?” I asked.

“Why’d she stop writing?” Carol asked.

And my Georgia-born mother, who did not go to college and was born into the deepest Southern poverty, began telling us about the coming of the Nazi beast, the cattle cars, the gas chambers, and the murder of six million Jews, including babies and children and the lovely Anne Frank.

I will always love and honor my mother when I think of the words she spoke to us next. “Carol Ann and Pat, listen to me. I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.” And Peg Conroy repeated, “I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.”

And I will always adore the spirit of my sister Carol, who asked me to
walk next door to Mrs. Orringer’s house on Spencer Avenue in the marvelous town of New Bern. Mrs. Orringer came to the door, dressed in grand flamboyance.

“Yes, children? What is it?”

My sister Carol looked up into Mrs. Orringer’s eyes and said with a child’s simplicity and ardor, “Mrs. Orringer, don’t worry about anything.”

“What are you talking about, child?”

“We will hide you,” Carol said.

“What?” Mrs. Orringer said.

“We will hide you,” Carol repeated.

She marched us into her living room and made us sit on her sofa as she called my mother next door for an explanation. We heard our mother’s voice describing the reading of Anne Frank. When she got to the part about hiding Jews, Mrs. Orringer surprised us by laying the phone down in its cradle and bursting into tears. She covered us with kisses and stuffed us with chocolates from Switzerland. Before going to The Citadel, I moved twenty-three times in my nomadic, troubled boyhood, but I never had a neighbor who loved my sister and me with the passion of the generous-hearted Mrs. Orringer.

Because I was so happy there, I have never been back to New Bern, not once in my life.

GOOSEBERRY PIE
My lifelong love of pies got an upgrade when I used to take my children to spend part of the summer with my sister Carol on the North Shore of Lake Superior. My sister told me it was beautiful at the North Shore, but she did not tell me it was a spectacular landscape with rivers pouring out of the Mesabi range that were wild and tumbling and so pure you could drink the water fresh in your cupped hands. The Temperance River was one of the most beautiful bodies of water in which I have ever swum. I let it take me out into Lake Superior because I was curious when the famous cold water of Superior would overwhelm the warm-watered river—I found the exact spot and was lucky to get back to the shore alive. A local fisherman told me, after I asked him why his boat lacked a life preserver, that Lake Superior killed you after fifteen minutes’ submersion in its icy waters, so they had no need for life preservers on the lake.

But what my girls and I take from that summer is our love of the pies made by Minnesota women. Restaurants stretch from Duluth to the Canadian border, and every one we entered boasted homemade pies that loom large in our collective memory of those wonderful summers. It was in Minnesota that I first tasted a gooseberry pie. It is easy to make and will put you on a fast track to heaven.

The method for rolling and shaping the pie crust is the same for each recipe in this chapter.     
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SERVES 8

FOUR RED FRUITS PIE             •
SERVES 8

PEACH PIE
Whenever I think of South Carolina peaches, I think of Dori Sanders, the novelist and cookbook author, who still sells peaches on the highway by her family farm in York County. Dori tells me that the peaches of York County are the finest-tasting in the world. I have not seen any conclusive proof that she is wrong, but I have tasted enough York County peaches to think she might be right. A ripe peach is a thing perfect unto itself, and the fruit is a tree’s way of expressing devotion to sunshine. In their season, I gorge myself with fresh peaches, which always make me happy that I found South Carolina when I was a boy, or that it found me.

This peach pie is gilding the lily—the only natural way I know for peaches to taste any better than straight out of the orchard.

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SERVES 8