Pat Conroy - Pat Conroy Cookbook

T he subject of food is nearly a sacred one to me. It never surprises me when I read stories about the ancients sacrificing animals and bringing plates of fruit and the produce of their fields to appease the anger of their restless gods. My passion for eating springs from a childhood not deprived of food, but deprived of good food. My mother thought cooking was a kind of slave labor that involved women having too many children. She looked upon food as a sure way to keep her family alive, and it did not occur to her until late in life that one could approach a kitchen with the same intensity as an artist nearing a canvas. To Peg Conroy, the kitchen was a place of labor, not a field of fantasy and play.

Though I grew up living along the Eastern seaboard, my mother never served fresh fish at her dinner table, even if I had caught and cleaned them myself. Since we were a Roman Catholic family (the oddest thing, by far, a human being could aspire to in the South before the Hare Krishnas turned up at the Atlanta airport), we were under a religious injunction not to eat meat on Friday. Anytime I would come into the house with a string of fish, my mother would hold her nose and say, Get those smelly things out of my house this minute, young man.

My mother could not have been more upset if I had brought roadkill newly scraped off a highway into her kitchen. Perhaps Peg Conroy carried some bad experience with a fish into her adult life, like a bone lodged in her throat. Wherever her aversion to fish began, she solved the Friday problem by serving frozen fish sticks to her large, rowdy family for the approximately five hundred Fridays of my childhood. My youngest brothers thought that fish were rectangular in shape for the longest time. My brother Mike still prefers a fish stick to a salmon steak.

I did not taste fresh shrimp until I got to Beaufort, South Carolina, late in high school, yet I lived around inlets and rivers teeming with schools of shrimp swarming in their measureless fecundity. Each fresh tide brought shoals of white shrimp boiling into the creeks a hundred yards from the house where my mother heated up their frozen cousins.

But even my mother could not grow up in the South without accruing several specialties that she could render with casual mastery. She made corn bread that could not be improved upon. I can still smell her apple and peach pies cooling on the windowsills of our house on Spencer Avenue in New Bern, North Carolina. Her lemon bisque made her famous in whatever neighborhood we settled in during my much-traveled boyhood. Those she made by rote, out of a sense of duty. She took little joy from those mouthwatering recipes she had brought to her marriage. It saddens me that my mother never achieved any satisfaction from the kitchen, where she spent so much of her time dreaming of being elsewhere. I loved her grits and biscuits, and her fried chicken was so wonderful that I have spent much of my life searching for that piece of fried chicken which will provide the soul-stirring satisfaction of my mothers recipe.

But let it be said, my mother was not a gifted cook and never aspired to be one. She collected some recipes because, I think, she heard that was one of the things young wives did during the era in which she grew up. The table she set never contained surprises or those moments of ecstasy when some experiment she had wrought in her oven was brought to the table in triumph. My mother looked upon food as a necessity, not a realm of art.

When I wrote my book The Prince of Tides, I made the shrimpers wife, Lila Wingo, one of those Southern cooks who went to the kitchen with her passionate nature ablaze. By then, I thought about cooking the way I thought about writing. I had come to cooking by accident, and it was one of the strangest events in my life when I found myself before a stove with three daughters wandering around me fully expecting that I would feed them before I put them to bed.

When my first wife, the fetching Barbara Bolling, entered Emory University Law School, she pointed to the kitchen and told me from that day on I would be responsible for cooking the evening meal for the family. This seemed fair enough to me, but it contained the seeds of both disaster and high comedy. My mother had not taught her oldest son how to cook an egg, much less a full-bodied meal that would not cause rickets or beriberi among my feisty daughters. I have absolutely no recollection of how I kept myself alive from the time I graduated from The Citadel until 1969, when Barbara and I married. Certainly, I carry no memory of standing over a stove cooking something perfectly wonderful for dinner. Mostly I remember heating up things.

But with my first dinner in view, I drove to the Old New York Bookshop in midtown Atlanta to ask my friend Cliff Graubart for help. There was no book in the world that Cliff could not find for me and his spirit was generous and open-minded.

I need a cookbook, Cliff, I said when I entered his store.

Why? Cliff asked.

Im in charge of feeding my family the evening meal from now on, I answered. Barbara starts law school next week.

Im going to miss Barbara, Cliff said. Starving to death is a tough way to die. And I cant sit by and let you kill your kids.

Cliff pretended to dial three numbers on his phone, then said to an imaginary speaker: Hello, nine-one-one, Id like to report an incident of child abuse out on Briarcliff Road.

Very funny, I said. You know of a good cookbook?

Cliff thought for a moment and said, I hear Escoffiers is good.

I walked out of Cliffs store with a copy of Auguste Escoffiers cook-book in my hand. It is not a manual I would encourage the first-time cook to turn to, but its purchase was a life-changing event. For a single year I used only recipes from Escoffiers great text. My family and friends raved about my cooking talents, and a passionate amateur was born in that kitchen on Briar cliff Road. I made the thrilling discovery that if I could read and follow directions, I could cook. If I discovered a fabulous recipe, I could prepare a terrific and praiseworthy dish. I could feed people well, and they would love me for it and sing my praises to friends and neighbors. Because of Emory Law School, I discovered an avocation as an amateur cook of some distinction, and I find that fact miraculous. The love of cooking is a portable, moving pleasure that I take with me into every house or country I enter. When other cooks ask me who taught me how to cook, I always say, without irony, Auguste Escoffier was my first instructor. He was the hospitable maitre d who led me by the arm and introduced me to the limitless world of cuisine. Because of him, I was a French cook before I was an American one.