The Pat Conroy Cookbook (9 page)
Read The Pat Conroy Cookbook Online
Authors: Pat Conroy
No, that’s a joke. Her shrimp burgers are wonderful, and if you ever
get on Highway 21, head for the beach to meet Hilda and her family and her workers. It’s one of the nicest places on earth to be.
•
MAKES ABOUT 1½ CUPS
1 cup Homemade Mayonnaise (see below)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
1 shallot, finely minced
1 tablespoon capers, drained and finely chopped
2 teaspoons sweet pickle relish
2 teaspoons dry mustard
Juice of 1 lemon, strained
Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl and stir to mix well. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, preferably overnight. Taste for seasoning before serving.
Homemade Mayonnaise
Let us now praise homemade mayonnaise. In her cooking class, Nathalie Dupree once made all her students make it by hand, ensuring that all of us would honor the labors of French housewives for the rest of our days. But the invention of the blender and the food processor has turned the making of mayonnaise into a matter of seconds. Here is how to do it: Drop an egg into your machine. Turn it on. Beat that sucker for five seconds. Have some vegetable or canola oil ready. Pour it in a slow stream through the feed tube. Soon, chemistry happens and magic occurs before your eyes as the egg and oil unite into something glorious. When the mixture is thick, cut the machine off. Add the juice of half a lemon or two shots of red wine vinegar. That’s mayonnaise. Add a clove of garlic to it. Turn on the machine until the garlic is blended. That’s aioli. Try adding some fresh herbs, and you’ve got herb mayonnaise. Add one-fourth cup Parmesan cheese and a couple of pinches of cayenne, and you have the fanciest, best-tasting salad dressing you’ve ever had.
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MAKES ABOUT 1 CUP
1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons strained fresh lemon juice
¼ cup olive oil
¾ cup vegetable oil
¼ teaspoon sea salt
In the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade, combine egg yolk, mustard, and lemon juice until smooth. Slowly drizzle in olive oil, processing until thoroughly incorporated. Add vegetable oil slowly, processing until the mixture is smooth and thick and completely emulsified. Add the salt, transfer to a storage container, and refrigerate until ready to use.
CORN PUDDING
This is comfort food, pure and simple. I think of this as a great recipe because it is easy to make and can be thrown together in a hurry when uninvited or surprise guests show up at the front door. My stepson Jason Ray, who is a chef, once brought a rock band from Birmingham to our home on Fripp Island. I walked out from my bedroom and found six young men sleeping in various stages of undress. I counted nine tattoos, but those were only the visible ones. We went to Gay’s shrimp dock to buy seven pounds of shrimp. We doubled the recipe for corn pudding. The band was a hungry one, and we remember those young men for their unappeasable appetites, not their tattoos.
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SERVES 6
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
¼ cup sugar
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
½ cup evaporated milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Two 10-ounce boxes frozen white corn, thawed and kernels blotted dry
1. Place a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350°F.
2. Butter a 2-quart casserole and set aside.
3. In a medium saucepan over low heat, melt the butter. Mix together the sugar and flour and stir into the butter. Stir in the milk, eggs, and baking powder.
4. Add the corn and pour into the prepared casserole. Bake until lightly firm, about 45 minutes.
You can also add sautéed green onions, blooming chive blossoms, or a pinch of cayenne pepper
.
COCONUT CAKE
I cannot say “coconut cake” without conjuring the beloved image of my beautiful aunt Helen Harper. Every time I saw her during my boyhood, I would ask her to bake me a coconut cake, and she never let me down, not once. To the Conroy children, the Harper household was a basin of permanence and stability as we rambled from base to base up and down the Southern seacoast. The Conroy family could walk into the Harper house at 945 North Hyer Street in Orlando, Florida, and nothing would have changed since the last time we had visited. The same five buck heads would stare down from the wall of the den, the same
Book of Knowledge
would be on the bookshelf in cousin Russ and Bobby’s room, on the kitchen table the pepper shaker was a rooster and the saltshaker was a hen, the same unused piano stood at attention in the living room, and at seven every evening Aunt Helen would conduct a Bible reading.
On my tenth birthday, Aunt Helen made me a coconut cake and made me part of the process by having me break open a coconut with a hatchet. She invited Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Joe down from Jacksonville, and they brought the three Gillespie cousins. (Cousin Johnny had not been born yet.) It would mark the only time in my life that family members other than my own would attend one of my birthday parties. It was a joyous day, and I got to cut the cake because, as Aunt Helen said, “It’s Pat’s day.” The coconut cake was perfect, always perfect.
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SERVES 8
FOR THE RUM SYRUP
⅓ cup sugar
¼ cup coconut or plain rum
FOR THE TOASTED COCONUT
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut (available at health food stores)
FOR THE CAKE
2 cups cake flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 cup sugar
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
2 large eggs
1 cup canned coconut milk (Goya brand if possible, Leche de Coco), well shaken
½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (1 large lemon)
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
FOR THE FROSTING
2 cups chilled heavy cream
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup untoasted unsweetened shredded coconut
1. To make the syrup: In a small saucepan, combine the sugar, ⅓ cup water, and the rum and heat over medium until the mixture comes to a slow boil. Continue boiling for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside until the cake is baked. (The syrup can be made one day in advance. Refrigerate until needed and reheat until almost boiling to use.)
2. To toast the coconut: Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spread the coconut on a baking sheet and toast until edges turn a light brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Toasted yet still pale shredded coconut will add another layer of flavor and a slight crunch to the frosting. Check it carefully during the toasting; coconut can burn quickly. Total toasting time should not exceed 4 minutes. Remove immediately and transfer to another (not hot) baking sheet to cool. Reserve.
3. To make the cake: Butter and flour a 9-inch round cake pan.
4. In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and sugar. Stir in the coconut.
5. In another bowl, whisk the eggs and add the coconut milk and melted butter until the mixture is smooth. Stir in lemon zest and vanilla.
6. Using a wooden spoon, mix the egg mixture into the flour until just blended.
7. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan. Bake at 350°F until cake is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 55 to 60 minutes.
8. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for about 20 minutes. Invert the pan and release the cake onto a clean work surface or a cake stand. When the cake is cool, cut horizontally into two equal layers, using a serrated knife and pressing down lightly on the top of the cake as you cut. Transfer each half, cut side up, to an individual plate and prick holes in several places on the surface. Rewarm the rum syrup and brush the syrup over the cut surfaces of the cakes.
9. To make the frosting: Whip the heavy cream and sugar together until the cream is almost firm. (Do not overwhip.) Fold the untoasted coconut into the whipped cream.
10. Frost the bottom layer of cake with one-third of the coconut cream. Place the second layer on top of the coconut cream, and frost top and sides of cake with the remaining cream. Sprinkle the top and sides with toasted coconut.
A
t Beaufort High I took one course that I had to keep secret from my father at all costs. Gene Norris had talked the only writer in Beaufort County Ann Morse, into teaching a high school class in creative writing. Mrs. Morse wrote under the name of Ann Head and admitted to me once that she never would be a distinguished writer. “But I have a few things I want to say” she said. Her list of novels included
Fair with Rain
and
Always in August
, and her first mystery
Everybody Adored Cara
, was in galleys when we first met in a room off the library at Beaufort High. On first sight, Mrs. Morse projected a steely withholding and icy reserve that would have been off-putting to me except for the thrilling fact that she was the first novelist I’d ever met in the flesh. She looked like a woman who would not tolerate a preposition at the end of a sentence or the anarchy of a dangling participle.
“Mr. Norris has told me nice things about you, Mr. Conroy” Mrs. Morse said. “He thinks you might become a writer someday.”
“How do you do it, ma’am?” I asked.
“Simple. You write. You just write. Beginning, middle, end. That’s it,” she said. “I made some suggestions to improve your poems and writing assignments. Mr. Norris says you got a little drunk on Thomas Wolfe last year.”
“I loved him, Mrs. Morse. I couldn’t help it.”
“Alas and alack,” she said. “If possible, don’t imitate him in everything you write, Pat.”
“I’ll try, Mrs. Morse,” I promised.
“Please do,” she said. “I would like to find out what
your
voice sounds like, Pat. I had the class come into the library to read the screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. Have you ever heard of him?”