Twain's Feast (30 page)

Among them is Tory McPhail. Tory is executive chef at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans’s Garden District; Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse each held the same job, in a restaurant that opened in 1880. Along with Antoine’s, Arnaud’s, and Galatoire’s, Commander’s is one of the grand Creole restaurants—the old guard, in a city that takes its old guard very, very seriously. The reopening of Commander’s after Katrina was one of the great post-storm reliefs, making the national news as a sign of the city’s recovery.

Tory is thus the obvious local favorite. He’s also an enormously friendly and welcoming guy, raised in a small town on the Puget Sound, with an obviously genuine love for Louisiana’s seafood—right down to the humble sheepshead. He loves sheepshead so much, in fact, that when we spoke on the phone, he decided on the spot to prepare it for the cook-off.

“Sheepshead—oh, my goodness, that is just out-of-this-world good,” he said. “It’s fun to catch, too, under trestles or next to pilings, wherever you have some good structure, especially in brackish water. It eats mostly crab, and that’s the scoop on its name—it has these big front teeth it uses to crunch through the shells and make it look kind of like a sheep.” Its diet, he says, is what makes it so delicious. “It’s clean, light, white, flaky meat, with nuances of fresh crab. In fact, if you steam it, flake it off, and serve it just with light salt and pepper, it’s sometimes called poor man’s crabmeat—it even
looks
like jumbo lump crab.”

Sheepshead is getting more popular, but it still isn’t often actively sought out by diners. At Commander’s, though, Tory says, “we buy absolutely as much as we can get—forty pounds, eighty pounds, whatever the Fish House has that day. We print our menu up to five times daily, so we can use what we want, then turn to another fish real quick when we run out. And we have a great relationship with the Fish House—we use about eighty thousand pounds of fish a year, so they’ll really try to help us out with what we need. I’ve had those guys leave their kids’ soccer games when we’re running low on oysters.”

That relationship is why he has sheepshead today to work with at all. Sheepsheads aren’t widely available until they school in the late autumn, right around the time that Pete Gerica starts taking them to pad out the end of the waning white-shrimp harvest. So Tory called Cliff Hall at the New Orleans Fish House, telling him he needed sheepshead for his cook-off entry.

“Wednesday, nothing,” Cliff tells me. “Thursday, nothing. I’m sweating bullets. I call a guy I know spearfishes, tell him I need the fish. I tell him I’ll give him two dollars a pound; he’s saying, ‘Man, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ I’m saying, ‘Look, no problem, two dollars a pound, I just need the fish.’ He calls me Friday noon, telling me Lake Pontchartrain is mud. I say, ‘No, wrong answer. You gotta find clear water.’ Finally he does, right there under the Fort Pike Bridge. He calls me and says he’s got the fish—biggest relief of my week. Tory calls from the airport a half hour later, just in from California. I tell him no problem.” Cliff laughs loudly. “He couldn’t believe the product. I’m thinking, yeah, well, it was swimming about three hours ago. But the prep cooks were asking why all the fish had holes in their heads.”

When Cliff fled the city during Katrina, he and his partners left behind some $2 million worth of fish. In the late summer. Without power. When they came back, they came with hip waders and heavily armed—shotguns, two pistols each—and started clearing out the rot as Black Hawk helicopters roared overhead and the occasional National Guard boat went patrolling by on the flooded street. I can’t get my head around what it must have been like, hauling nearly seven hundred pallets with hand trucks to dumpsters just outside the loading door. And once the fish was in the dumpsters, of course, there were no trucks to haul them away. For
months.
It wasn’t the worst tragedy of Katrina, not by a long shot, but it must have been a complete horror show, and it helps me to understand a little just how totally the city shut down.

The signs of Katrina are everywhere—rumpled pavement, lawns with three-foot-high grass, even the new wood in the walls of an Irish pub. But when I visited the New Orleans Fish House, I had to take Cliff’s word for how bad it got. Everything there was clean, fast, fresh, and cold. Knives flashed, gutting out fish; water splashed over cutting tables; hoses sprayed the fish clean. Cutters washed down their boards after every fish—and there were a
lot
of fish. Black drum fillets piled up; cutters broke down red snapper, mahi-mahi, pompano, and flounder. I shivered; it was New Orleans in July, but it seemed a minor wonder that the floor wasn’t a skating rink—I thought, inevitably, of Twain’s polar regions at the edge of the tropics. A man introducing himself as George W., who said that sheepshead is the best eating fish in the house, was filleting skipjack; the flesh was red as beef, fresh as though hauled from the Gulf a minute before. In the New Orleans Fish House, the cliché that a cook is only as good as his ingredients rang true. The fish there demanded respect.

The Fish House works on what seems an almost impossibly tight schedule. “Our clients have until nine A.M. to get their orders in,” Cliff says. “That’s for an eleven-o’clock delivery. They call at nine, we’ve got two hours to pull anything from the freezer they need, then sort, cut, and pack the fresh product. I don’t know any other city that has that kind of timing—usually it’s something like call by four o’clock the day before. And, man, our customers’ll let us know it if we’re five minutes late. We just can’t ever be wrong.” What sets Louisiana apart, Cliff says, what makes it so addicted to perfectly fresh fish, is its marriage of land and water. “Alabama, Florida, and them, they’ve all turned their wetlands over to mostly recreational use, beaches and such. But as long as our wetlands last, we’ve still got a perfect breeding ground out there.”

The cook-off starts are staggered to allow the judges to taste over the course of two hours; many of the cooks are already hard at work. It’s wonderful, especially if you imagine eating each dish in a chef’s own restaurant, close to the fish’s source: there’s Alaskan king salmon with low-bush cranberries, an Illinois fish stew with walleye, a curried striped bass from New Jersey served with crab-filled modak dumplings, and Mississippi shrimp and grits. John Varanese from Kentucky, Lord love him, cooks the ancient and seldom-eaten paddlefish. As a promotional event, it’s devilishly effective; if this were a restaurant, I’d live in it.

I’m an unabashed fan of
Deadliest Catch,
the documentary series about the Alaskan king and opilio crab fisheries. The fishermen will work for forty hours straight in freezing, murderous seas; when I watch it, I eat popcorn, then sleep really well. So it’s a minor thrill that one of the cook-off’s emcees is Sig Hansen, captain of the
Northwestern,
who on the show appears to be both incredibly competent and an awful boss. Now, in his role as emcee, Sig’s instincts kick in; he says literally nothing that would be out of place on the crab boat. “Gotta work fast here,” he’ll say. “They’re under the gun, so they gotta work fast. But they gotta do it
right.
Doing it fast and getting it all wrong just won’t do ’em any good.” He chides the chefs to do it right, asks them if they know what they’re doing, tells them to watch their fingers. But you have to be a smart guy to run a fishing boat, and when it comes to promoting sustainable seafood, he’s calmer and more comfortable. “Wild American seafood draws a premium price, sure,” he says. “But it’s a premium product. Some wild-caught fish is just more flavorful. Salmon, farmed salmon—well, it’s okay. But wild fish, that’s the real thing. Nothing in the world like it.”

Tory’s workspace is covered with vegetables and spices. There’s sea salt and kosher salt and salt he smoked for twelve hours, infusing it with hickory. There are four kinds of corn—red, white, yellow, and baby. There’s bacon fat, which bodes well. There are shallots and jalapeños and tomatoes and milk, thyme and cayenne and a Cajun spice blend. There are gigantic shrimp—for a moment I wonder if Jonathan, a line cook at Commander’s and today Tory’s assistant, raided the Maine cooler for lobster—and lump crab. And, of course, there are the sheepshead fillets: visibly firm, less than a day from the water, their dark red blood lines glistening.

In a nod to the recession, Tory fills the two minutes before starting by talking to Sig about how economical sheepshead can be; you should be able to cook what he’s about to for less than the price of a burger. If you can find it wholesale, the fish can be about $4.50 a pound. But his mind is already on the contest—he’s starting to flush. He confesses to getting butterflies. At last he picks up a knife.

The other chefs began working slowly, some in an almost showoffishly leisurely way—there’s been a pause after the starting three count that I don’t think the several announcers are happy about. But at
“Three . . . two . . . one . . . Go!”
Tory plunges in, snatching up an onion and, in the best possible sense, annihilating it. Just to Tory’s left, Jonathan strips ears of corn with long, sure strokes of his knife.

I’m a dedicated home cook, but I’ve never worked in a restaurant; my only exposure to watching a skilled chef work at high speed is from
Iron Chef,
or
Top Chef,
or some other show about chefs. But any sports fan knows that television can diminish and dull the skills on display. Watching Tory in the act makes me realize that the same is true for cooking. Even after absorbing hundreds of cooking shows, seeing him dissect a tomato—and cutting it concasse, a fine dice without skin or seeds—is frankly intimidating. I think of playing an instrument, speaking a language, of other things that need tens of thousands of hours of practice: life seems short.

Jonathan roasts tomatoes with a handheld torch. Tory seasons the fish, sprinkling a dozen spices liberally over the fillets. Then he drenches them with fresh bacon fat, which strikes me as awesome. He’s working hard, sweating even before he starts working the grill, going red as steam bathes his face and neck. The crowd is six deep, pressed right up to the rope line; I didn’t expect how much these particular Louisianans at least would want the win. When the crisp, brown fillets come off, Tory pours over
more
bacon fat; this, I feel, falls somewhere between genius and cheating.

Tory grills the shrimpzilla as lump crab simmers in champagne butter. Then he assembles the plates. There’s a bed of mixed corn and sliced Creole tomatoes, then a mighty grilled shrimp, then a sheepshead fillet, and then another shrimp. Tory surrounds the tilting tower with lump crabmeat; he finishes the plate with greens, basil oil, and more cream. The combination is somehow both businesslike and literally fantastic, like a carnival mask hoisted on a pitchfork.

At the judges’ table, Jonathan holds up a partially filleted sheepshead as Tory offers a mini-lecture, pointing out that sheepshead is economical, underused, and sustainable (the latter point one he cares about a good deal; he refuses to serve bluefin tuna and other threatened stocks at Commander’s). The big challenge when cooking it, he points out, is dealing with the low yield. It’s rare that more than 40 percent of the weight is usable meat (which may be, I suspect, why it’s often steamed and flaked off—it’s much easier to get the meat off that way than by filleting the bony fish raw).

While the judges confer, Tory hands out tastes in small paper cups. He called it “poor man’s crab,” and, in fact, I can’t distinguish between crab and sheepshead; I couldn’t even swear in court that there’s sheepshead in there. It’s all like lump crabmeat, fresh and sweet and bathed in a creamy pepper sauce, and it’s exactly as good as it sounds—good enough that offering small tastes in paper cups verges on callous. I consider bribing Jonathan in a bid for a full plate.

There are a lot of serious chefs at the cook-off; they’re cooking the best their states have to offer. But Tory wins.

Though Twain’s return to the Mississippi began as a joyful reminiscence, seeing so many changes often left him despondent. But the thing that brought him to tears was the most seemingly humble: the mud of Hannibal, Missouri. “Alas!” he wrote. “Everything was changed in Hannibal—but when I reached third or fourth [streets] the tears burst forth, for I recognized the mud.
It,
at least, was the same—the same old mud.” By the trip’s end, he seemed near true depression, writing to Livy, “That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery & wrinkled, the fire is gone out in its eyes, & the spring from its step. It will be dust and ashes when I come again.”

Twain remembered an ever-changing river, a kaleidoscope of muddy water. Now it ran flat as though between walls. Now his home was Hartford.

 

 

 

 

 

T
WAIN WAS NEVER ONE FOR SELF-RESTRAINT, especially in his fantasies—his ideal breakfast of porterhouse steak, biscuits, and coffee was to be delivered by “an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land.” So when faced with “roast chicken, as tasteless as paper” in European hotels, his imagination went large; he thought of “a vast roast turkey, stretched out on the broad of his back, with his heels in the air and the rich juices oozing from his fat sides.” But this, even he had to admit, was asking a lot, and he ended resignedly: “I might as well stop there, for they would not know how to cook him. They can’t even cook a chicken respectably; and as for carving it, they do that with a hatchet.”