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Authors: Pat Conroy
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cooking.
3. Line a baking sheet with brown paper bags (cut the bags open to a single thickness and use the clean inner surface).
4. In a medium cast-iron skillet over moderately high heat, place bacon drippings and enough peanut oil to rise about ¼ inch above the bottom of the pan. When the fat is hot but not smoking (it will shimmer slightly), place the fillets in the skillet two at a time (overcrowding will prevent browning) and fry until a crisp, golden crust is formed, about 2 minutes per side. Learning how to adjust the heat so that the fat is hot enough to crisp bread crumbs on contact (and keep the fillets from being greasy) takes practice.
5. Using a spatula, carefully remove fillets and drain on brown paper bags to blot excess oil. Transfer to plates and serve immediately with lemon wedges and tartar sauce.
TARTAR SAUCE I think of the highway that runs along the North Carolina coast then passes invisibly into South Carolina, following the same incursion of the Atlantic that washes up against the southern coast. It runs from Morehead City, North Carolina, down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I call it the tartar sauce corridor. It is lined with the kind of seafood restaurants where you can smell fried fish ten milesinland. They are gaudy, decorated with seagulls and buoys and shrimp nets, mobbed in the summertime and deserted and locked up in February, but all of them were born to fry things up. One is sure to be identified as an outsider or a weirdo by asking a waitress for a broiled seafood platter. These seafood restaurants are palaces of grease and monuments to the revolutionary idea that fried food tastes better than any other kind.
My lifelong affair with tartar sauce began with a plate of fried shrimp eaten in a restaurant in Morehead City when I was six years old. Tartar sauce can lift a simple fried catfish to the realms of ecstasy, turn a fried oyster into an emperor’s feast, or ennoble a fried shrimp into knighthood.
Six miles from my house on Fripp Island sits the best fried food restaurant in my part of the world, and I love its tartar sauce. It is called the Shrimp Shack, and its founder and owner is the inimitable Hilda Gay Upton, who was voted Best Personality in Beaufort High School’s 1959 graduating class. When my daughter Megan lived in Italy for her junior year abroad, she would write and confess that she would suffer “Shrimp Shack Attacks,” even though she was eating the finest cuisine in the world. None of my family can pass the Shrimp Shack after a long absence from Fripp without stopping for one of the world-class shrimp burgers, which are one of the joys of my life.
Of course this is the place where I would share with the world the culinary secrets of making a perfect shrimp burger, but I am unable to do so because the perfidious and wily Hilda Gay Upton has refused to part with the secret recipe for her shrimp burger. I have pleaded, begged, cajoled, and all those other verbs where you really try to get something but suffer constant frustration. This has gone on for years. I’ve told Hilda about this cookbook, that I would praise her open-air restaurant to the skies and make hers a household name for those who prize fried and fattening foods. Hilda, an obstinate Low Country woman, whose husband is a shrimper, refuses even to tell me if there is shrimp in her “secret recipe.”
Not long ago, I was returning on a flight from New York, where I had dined at Le Bernardin, Daniel’s, and the Four Seasons. It is on airplanes that I read all the food magazines like
Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine
, and
Cooking Light
, and on this occasion a magazine I was unfamiliar with called
Saveur
. While reading
Saveur
with great pleasure, I was startled to come across an article about Hilda and the Shrimp Shack. There was a photograph of Hilda, whom I have known for thirty years, and I was mildly surprised to see a middle-aged black woman named Neecie Simmons who had cooked at the
3. Line a baking sheet with brown paper bags (cut the bags open to a single thickness and use the clean inner surface).
4. In a medium cast-iron skillet over moderately high heat, place bacon drippings and enough peanut oil to rise about ¼ inch above the bottom of the pan. When the fat is hot but not smoking (it will shimmer slightly), place the fillets in the skillet two at a time (overcrowding will prevent browning) and fry until a crisp, golden crust is formed, about 2 minutes per side. Learning how to adjust the heat so that the fat is hot enough to crisp bread crumbs on contact (and keep the fillets from being greasy) takes practice.
5. Using a spatula, carefully remove fillets and drain on brown paper bags to blot excess oil. Transfer to plates and serve immediately with lemon wedges and tartar sauce.
TARTAR SAUCE I think of the highway that runs along the North Carolina coast then passes invisibly into South Carolina, following the same incursion of the Atlantic that washes up against the southern coast. It runs from Morehead City, North Carolina, down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I call it the tartar sauce corridor. It is lined with the kind of seafood restaurants where you can smell fried fish ten milesinland. They are gaudy, decorated with seagulls and buoys and shrimp nets, mobbed in the summertime and deserted and locked up in February, but all of them were born to fry things up. One is sure to be identified as an outsider or a weirdo by asking a waitress for a broiled seafood platter. These seafood restaurants are palaces of grease and monuments to the revolutionary idea that fried food tastes better than any other kind.
My lifelong affair with tartar sauce began with a plate of fried shrimp eaten in a restaurant in Morehead City when I was six years old. Tartar sauce can lift a simple fried catfish to the realms of ecstasy, turn a fried oyster into an emperor’s feast, or ennoble a fried shrimp into knighthood.
Six miles from my house on Fripp Island sits the best fried food restaurant in my part of the world, and I love its tartar sauce. It is called the Shrimp Shack, and its founder and owner is the inimitable Hilda Gay Upton, who was voted Best Personality in Beaufort High School’s 1959 graduating class. When my daughter Megan lived in Italy for her junior year abroad, she would write and confess that she would suffer “Shrimp Shack Attacks,” even though she was eating the finest cuisine in the world. None of my family can pass the Shrimp Shack after a long absence from Fripp without stopping for one of the world-class shrimp burgers, which are one of the joys of my life.
Of course this is the place where I would share with the world the culinary secrets of making a perfect shrimp burger, but I am unable to do so because the perfidious and wily Hilda Gay Upton has refused to part with the secret recipe for her shrimp burger. I have pleaded, begged, cajoled, and all those other verbs where you really try to get something but suffer constant frustration. This has gone on for years. I’ve told Hilda about this cookbook, that I would praise her open-air restaurant to the skies and make hers a household name for those who prize fried and fattening foods. Hilda, an obstinate Low Country woman, whose husband is a shrimper, refuses even to tell me if there is shrimp in her “secret recipe.”
Not long ago, I was returning on a flight from New York, where I had dined at Le Bernardin, Daniel’s, and the Four Seasons. It is on airplanes that I read all the food magazines like
Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine
, and
Cooking Light
, and on this occasion a magazine I was unfamiliar with called
Saveur
. While reading
Saveur
with great pleasure, I was startled to come across an article about Hilda and the Shrimp Shack. There was a photograph of Hilda, whom I have known for thirty years, and I was mildly surprised to see a middle-aged black woman named Neecie Simmons who had cooked at the
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