Smith - Crabs & oysters

Legend has it that the author Colettes system had become so delicate by the time she died that she could have only oysters and champagne. I hope this happens to me.

I grew up in eastern North Carolina catching crabs, cleaning fish, and shucking oysters. I loved the beach. Still do. Today when I look back, the best memories I have of those times always include something to do with food and the beach. In the summer, my family and I would often go down to the beach after church and spend the day, and even though we only lived thirty minutes from the ocean, we would still take a beach cottage for at least a week sometime in July or August. The ocean and the coast were so much a part of our lives that we never really considered going anywhere else. People from eastern North Carolina are like that. I hope to share some of this vibe with you in the recipes here.

When I was five or six years old, I would go on Sunday afternoon rides with my fathers brother, Alex, and his wife, Hi. These excursions usually included lunch. One of our favorite places was a seafood restaurant in the town of Sea Level in Carteret County. On one such afternoon, I ordered soft-shell crabs. My aunt Hi was sure that I had meant deviled crabs, but I wouldnt change my order. (Deviled crabs are mildly spicy crabmeat baked in the crabs shell. Soft-shell crabs are the whole beast minus the face and the guts, fried crispy, and eaten shell and all.) She ordered deviled crab just in case. When lunch came, she had in fact been right. I had meant deviled, but of course I wouldnt admit it and the rest is history. To this day soft-shell crabs are one of my favorite foods.

Part of my family is Roman Catholic, so Fridays put seafood on the table every week. This was in the days before Vatican II when meat was forbidden to us on that day as a small bit of penance. Fridays were fish days. A strange idea of punishment I thought to myself, but then Ive always been impious.

In New Bern in the 1950s our two rivers were lined with crab factories. These were small crab-packing houses where you could buy crabs and crabmeat. Mostly, though, we caught our own with chicken necks tied on string. All you had to do was slowly coax the crabs near to the surface of the water and scoop them up with a net. They were ridiculously easy to catch. Crabs were essentially free food. We learned to clean and pick them ourselves.

Oysters were more often gifts. My father worked for the post office, and for a time his route was in rural and maritime Pamlico County, which has a long coast of marshes and bays. In those days people gave gifts to the mailman, so besides the pia colada cakes, corn, or homemade sausage, we sometimes received a bushel of oysters. Strangely, oysters will keep out of the water, under wet burlap, in a cool, dark place for a long time. I remember baskets of these in our basement. The health department says never to do this, of course. (See the instructions for storing oysters later in this chapter.)

We learned early to eat them roasted. Backyard oyster roasts were held in good weather. People built permanent pits, not for barbecue, but for oysters. You soon learned to dodge the smoke and not to burn your fingers as you helped yourself. You could of course have raw oysters as well. At oyster parties, my uncle Alex would delight and terrify us at the same time by also eating the tiny crabs that either scurry out of freshly shucked oysters or dont out of roasted ones. These tiny pea crabs were once a commercial product. In the March 20, 1893, edition of the New York Times there is reference to an oyster crab salad.

I have retained the r-month prejudice against eating oysters in warm weather (that is, oysters should be eaten only during months that contain the letter r). Its the way we were raised, I guess, plus by summer they have become too big for my taste. Having said all this, I always eat them when Im in New Orleans whatever the time of year or whatever their size. Its almost always warm there, and a trip to Casamentos is always in season.

This is a southern book by definition, and the South has a long seacoast. Nine of the states of the old Confederacy have shorelines. Add in Maryland (some do, some dont) and there is a lot of ground, or perhaps water, to cover. And so while North Carolina will figure heavily in this work, Ive looked all over the South for things to include. A large part of what Ive discovered has been found in church and community cookbooks. Ive come to feel that these are the true repositories of southern cooking culture. This research has been delightful, and I have learned a great deal more than I would have imagined at the start. I will never forget how to spell Worcestershire, for instance. It is in everything. There are a host of sensible but forgotten techniques that come up again and again in these old books. Several people use a double boiler rather than a skillet to soften peppers and onions before they are incorporated into a dish. Beurre mani, used to thicken or finish sauces, shows up a lot. You rarely see it called for today, although it works like a charm. Sometimes the descriptive language is too good to be true. Take a knob of butter the size of a walnut comes to mind.