Sargent Ben - The catch: sea-to-table recipes, stories & secrets

Copyright 2013 by Ben Sargent
Photographs copyright 2013 by Gabriela Herman

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

All photographs are by Gabriela Herman with the exception of (by Cody Raisig).

Cooking Channel photographs () are provided courtesy of Cooking Channel, LLC. 2012 Cooking Channel, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sargent, Ben, 1977
The catch : sea-to-table recipes, stories & secrets / Ben Sargent with Peter Kaminsky ; photographs by Gabriela Herman.
pages cm
1. Cooking (Seafood)2. Sargent, Ben, 1977Travel.
I. Kaminsky, Peter. II. Title.
TX747.S285 2013
641.692dc23 2012050245

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-98553-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-98552-1

Cover design by Dirty Bandits
Cover photographs by Gabriela Herman

v3.1

This book is dedicated to my mom, who always made our kitchen a warm and cozy place. As a single mom for a long time, she was a real good sport about cooking the fish I brought home as a kid. She was a huge inspiration as she lived with breast cancer for such a long time.

This book is for her in so many ways.

In kindergarten, my love of eating fish earned me a trip to the principals office. I wasnt sure why I had been called in or why my mom was there. Do you realize your son has been eating live minnows on class trips? the principal asked. My parents thought it was great that I (a) knew how to catch them and (b) knew how to eat them! My mom didnt look fazed. She turned to the principal. Yeah, he does that all the time. And Im afraid we actually taught him how to do that.

In my early years, one of my favorite places was my grandfathers bait and tackle store, the Goose Hummock Shop, on Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod. We had a family summer house and there was a wing with a bedroom that became mine during the fishing season. I loved the musty, briny, seaweed smell. The decor was a lobster shell, a blowfish, and family sketches and seascapes that my grandmother drew when she wasnt fishing and hunting.

My grandfather wasnt a chef, but he understood cooking, like how to make a really nice broth or a proper chowdah. After a full day of fishing, my grandfather, Pup, would always dig a few clams on the way back to the house. Then hed rip through a flounder in one cut, like one of the mates on the charter boats. Hed miss some meat that way, but we caught enough fish back then that it didnt matter. The heads and bones and tails went into the stockpot and became the soul of the chowder.

My grandfather wasnt a chef, but he understood cooking, like how to make a really nice broth or a proper chowdah.

His chowders were perfect. Often, he would do a New England clam chowder. One giant quahogthe local name for a large hard-shell clamthen cream, potatoes, dill, and butter. He also did a seafood chowder, where hed throw in razor clams, steamers, quahogs, conch, striper, and potatoes. Anything caught that day went in the chowder. His cooking inspired me. Now when I find an authentic New England clam chowder, Ill say, Yep, this is how Pup made it. Thats the highest compliment I can give. Not too thick, and brimming with flavor.

Pups chowders were the best, but my true love of cooking came from my mom. She was a natural cook who didnt worry all that much about following recipes. When I picture her, I see her behind the stove in an apron and ski boots, ordering my poor stepdad, Paul, around the kitchen. I get my love of heavy cream and butter from my mom. She could go through an entire box of breadsticks dipping each bite into a stick of butter. Modern health warnings were not at the top of my moms list of worries; she would eat raw hamburger meat right out of the package. She made the kitchen the center of our home, and she had an obsession with Italian food. Even though she was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants from Germany, I didnt see a German or Jewish dish come out of her kitchen, aside from the occasional brisket or potato pancake. Everything else was Italian and all of it was amazing.

If Pup gave me my love of fishing and Mom passed on her sense of food, my true appreciation of the sea came from my dad, Bill Sargent. He is a naturalist in the great New England tradition. He notices every little thing in naturefrom an ant crossing the path, to the Indian shells on the side of the bank, or a crab eating a minnow. On any given afternoon, he would give me a history lesson, taking me back a few million years just by pointing out the rocks, eroding bluffs, and a horseshoe crab scooting along the shallows. His endless notes about horseshoe crabs and salt marshes only begin to tell the tale of his fascination with sea life.

If Pup gave me my love of fishing and Mom passed on her sense of food, my true appreciation of the sea came from my dad, Bill Sargent.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I got my surfing practice on Cape Cod. We surfers look for hurricanes. I dont mean that we go out in eighty-mile-an-hour winds. But when a hurricane forms farther south in the Atlantic, it sets up big waves, which make for great surfing by the time they hit the Cape. My friends and I constantly listened to the radio for updates, trying to figure out when the swell would arrive. No sooner did we get news of waves than wed grab our boards and paddle out. Often wed take a real beating, but it was worth it! We were hopeful. So hopeful that I took the Internet handle Hurricane Hopeful. A few years later, when I moved to Brooklyn and opened a chowder bar, I called it Hurricane Hopeful. But this was before we knew about Katrina and Sandy.