Provencal Prawns & Crab Meat Norfolk
My perch in Maine. Cool and rainy outside.
My daughter, Luca, foraging for sea plants and oysters in County Clare, Ireland this week.
Look at this glorious specimen! And, yup, she ate it in one slurp like a pro. She’s definitely John Shelton Reed’s granddaughter!
This is just Mom at her absolute best. I sent this photo to my sister this morning to which she replied, “who’s the nerd in the back?”. (It’s her.) This is Mom telling some sort of story in our old kitchen on Mallette St. with our family friend Peter Lee, the former Bishop of Virginia. I think I must have taken this photo. That idea brings me great pleasure. I want to have been in this room, in this situation, just soaking up Mom.
I sent this to my dad and sister on Tuesday, which would have been Mom and Dad’s 59th anniversary.
One of my early intros to seafood. Dad took me fishing with a cane pole. I’m not so sure about it.
I’m writing from a gray, cool perch in Maine while Texas burns. I’m grateful to be out of there. Last summer my husband and I kind of impulsively bought a house in Rockland, Maine. (Ill advised real estate ventures are what we do best. Well, usually.) We worked on the house like crazy to get it ready to rent for the fall but for various reasons it didn’t work out. So, we went back to Texas at the end of the summer and agreed to figure it out later. I then came up in November to turn the heat on low for the winter only to find out that our 1920s oil heater would most likely burn the house down if left on long term. (This is what happens when Texans buy in Maine.) So, I gave up, drained the pipes, and crossed my fingers hoping our house would survive the season. It did. Fortunately, it’s a very well built house from 1926, eerily similar in some ways to the Mallette St. house I grew up in in Chapel Hill. The baseboard proportions and staircases are exactly the same. So now we’re back up here and finally dealing with the heater. We have guys coming in and out, looking at our pipes and throwing out numbers. This is all kind of oddly reminiscent of my childhood with Mom and Dad constantly negotiating the big old oil heater in our furnace room, determining what temperature would be acceptable but not break the bank.
I just looked out the window and saw a seagull flying. I took the time to watch it. I’ve been so busy recently with my daughter graduating, getting her ready to go off on a big trip, and traveling, myself, that I rarely take the time to do such a thing. But, you know what? I put down my phone and watched the damn bird. And immediately started singing, “If I a bird could be, swiftly I’d fly to thee, in eager crest (not sure that’s the word?). But, if I cannot be, but, if I cannot be, here I will rest.” This song and melody came to me completely out of the blue. Fully formed. I googled the lyrics and couldn’t find anything about it. I have a vague recollection that it’s Christina Rossetti or someone like that. I called my sister and sang it to her, she knew it immediately but didn’t know its origin. She said, “sounds Episcopalian”, which made me laugh. It’s like when she made me these eggs with a bunch of kale and vegetables in them a few years ago and said, “these may be too Oberlin for you”. (If you know, you know.) She asked if the song was sung in the round? Perhaps. She thinks she remembers us singing it in the car. She ended the conversation with “Mom would know”. Well, yeah.
We’re still doing a bunch of work on our Maine house. I just spent three days painting the attic, which I used to lovingly refer to as the “murder attic”, a deep jewel blue. I’m thinking hookah lounge minus the hookah. It’s gorgeous but a total pain in the ass. Yesterday I listened to Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things. I liked her book Untamed and was initially enthusiastic about the idea of her doing a podcast, but a few episodes in she lost me for some reason. A friend recommended the episode with the poet Andrea Gibson and I figured since I was trapped in an attic I would give it a go. I’m glad I did. Andrea has terminal cancer and talks very candidly about that and how she is living out the rest of her life. She said for days after her diagnosis she walked around with her head hung low. She realized it was because she couldn’t look up to see all of the beautiful things she loved. It was just too overwhelming. Her diagnosis highlighted her absolute love for this world, not in a fearful way but in an appreciative way. I think that happened with Mom. When she was dying she was bombarded with messages from friends. She regretted that she wasn’t able to reply to everyone. So instead she released a statement saying “I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually, but I am thinking of all of you. I feel I am held in a vast embrace of love and grace. Love, Dale”. Now that’s the feeling we can all hope for when we’re dying. Or, hell, when we’re living, too. Andrea Gibson talks about her relationship with the afterlife. She had a beloved grandmother who she still feels in contact with. I realize this is a polarizing topic but I choose to believe, and I pretty constantly feel my mother riding along with me. Someone told Andrea that the dead are even MORE with you after they’re gone. She hilariously keeps threatening her partner that she’s going to be EVEN MORE around after she dies. I’ll personally take all of Mom that I can get.
One thing I hope Mom is experiencing is her granddaughter’s big high school graduation trip to Ireland and Portugal. My daughter, Luca, took off last week for a grand adventure with her friend Avery. I just got a text that Luca is on the train from County Clare to Cork. While in County Clare she stayed with our friends Kelly and Robb. Now, I don’t really know them well enough to impose on them as much as we did, but they generously took our kiddos in and the experience seems to be one of the highlights of their trip. I know Kelly and Robb from Texas. Kelly Klaasmeyer was the art critic for the indie paper, The Houston Press. Robb Walsh was the food critic. How’s that for a meet cute? It sounds like a Meg Ryan movie. I knew Kelly through the Houston art scene, mainly because she was friends with my good buddy, Ed Cooper. Interestingly, my parents knew Robb, not me. Robb was involved with Southern Foodways, an organization of chefs and food writers who Mom and Dad were tight with for a long time. Robb wrote the book (literally THE BOOK) on Texas barbecue, Legends of Texas Barbecue. Mom and Dad credit it with influencing their North Carolina barbecue book, Holy Smoke. Robb’s areas of expertise spread beyond barbecue to Tex Mex (he is a partner in Houston’s El Real restaurant, which is literally steps away from my old apartment in Montrose) as well as oysters (Robb wrote a book intriguingly titled Sex, Death & Oysters). Once when I visited Mom and Dad at the creole cottage they rented on Burgundy Street in New Orleans, Mom told me about a party they had recently had. It started with just a few friends over for drinks and then in walked Robb Walsh with a bucket full of fresh oysters. They didn’t even know he was in town. With this improvement, the party turned up to eleven! Now Kelly and Robb live on an oyster bay in County Clare in Ireland. I was thrilled when I received photos of my kid looking happy as a clam (see what I did there? barf) foraging for sea plants and oysters. What a COOL local experience. I sent these pics to Dad, an oyster lover, and he replied with “that’s my granddaughter!”.
I have always loved the Seamus Heaney poem, “Postscript”, which I very drunkenly and earnestly read aloud to a bunch of IRISH POETS (oh, Jesus!) when I did an artist residency in Ireland in 2018, just a month before Mom’s death. Here it is:
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
__________
I feel like this is the stuff that Andrea Gibson couldn’t look in the eye. This is the gorgeous stuff of the living.
Between Maine and Ireland I have a lot of seafood in my life right now. Mom hated seafood for the most part. ha ha. So, her recipes are pretty limited in that category. I found a very brief Crab Norfolk recipe in her files that sounded interesting as well as a more traditional French recipe for prawns. No oyster recipes at all, but Dad is known to make some killer charbroiled ones similar to our beloved Felix’s in New Orleans.
PS July 11 would have been Mom and Dad’s 59th anniversary.
CRAB MEAT NORFOLK
A favorite dish in our house is what used to be called crab meat Norfolk: slices of Smithfield ham, arranged in individual ramekins (the kind often used for crème brûlée), topped with premium jumbo lump backfin crab meat, dotted with butter and run under the broiler. Surf and turf, sweet with salty.
(Super vague but you get the point.)
PROVENCAL PRAWNS
Cognac and white wine give this sauce an exquisite flavour. It is very good served with rice. Use raw king prawns, either with the shells still on or ready-peeled. If you buy frozen prawns with their heads off, you may need double the weight.
serves 4
1.3 pounds raw king prawns, shell on, or .75 pounds peeled ones
1 onion, chopped
2 tbsps extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 1/2 cups tomatoes, skinned and chopped
1 tsp sugar
1 fresh red chili, finely chopped
3 Tbsp Cognac
2/3 cup dry white wine
2 sprigs of fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
3 Tbsp fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
salt
To peel prawns, twist off their heads and pull off the 'legs'. Then break open the shell along the belly and peel it off (leave the tail on, if liked, for more attractive presentation). If you see a dark thread along the back, make a fine slit with a sharp knife and pull it out.
Fry the onion in the olive oil in a large frying pan, stirring occasionally, until it begins to color.
Add the garlic and, when the aroma rises, add all the remaining ingredients except the prawns and parsley.
Simmer, uncovered, for about 20 minutes, until the sauce is reduced and aromatic.
Add the prawns and cook over a medium heat for 1-2 minutes, turning them over, until they turn pink.
Serve hot, garnished with the parsley.
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