3. To cook the ribs: Remove from the marinade, dry thoroughly with paper towels, and set aside. Strain the vegetables from the marinade, reserving both. In a small heavy saucepan over moderate heat, clarify the marinade by bringing it to a boil and skimming the surface of all impurities. Reserve.
4. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place rack in middle of oven.
5. Sprinkle the ribs with salt and pepper and dredge in flour. In a large heavy frying pan over moderately high heat, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil until hot but not smoking. Working in small batches, sear ribs on all sides to form a crust, about 5 minutes total. (This is a messy but necessary step that will greatly add to the flavor of the finished dish.) As the ribs brown, remove them to a large roasting pan. Add more olive oil to the pan and repeat.
6. When all the ribs are browned, add the remaining olive oil, vegetables, and garlic and cook, stirring frequently to loosen any browned bits stuck on the bottom of the pan, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the reserved marinade and pour the mixture over the ribs. (If there is not enough wine to come halfway up the sides of the ribs, add warm beef or chicken stock.) Cover tightly with foil. Place in oven until meat is tender and falls away from the bone, about 2½hours. Cool ribs to room temperature before refrigerating overnight.
7. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
8. Remove all congealed fat from surface of the ribs and marinade. Place the ribs in a roasting pan, cover with foil, and place in the oven.
9. In a small saucepan, heat the marinade. Strain and discard solids. Continue to simmer marinade until slightly thickened, 5 to 8 minutes. Keep the sauce warm.
10. When the ribs are heated through, transfer to a serving plate and top with the warm sauce.
HOT POTATO SALAD WITH VINEGAR On the market street ruede Seine, near my hotel in Paris, during the winter months a dapper man with a beret made a version of hot potato salad with vinegar dressing. He tried to tell me what Paris was like during the war, and he still did not seem to like Germans very well. He sold cooked artichokes and mushrooms à la grecque and an onion soup that was wonderfully complex. The vinegar he used on the potatoes was homemade, the recipe handed down through generations of his family. I asked for it, but he snorted and refused and said it was a family secret. One unstated theme of this cook book is that no one ever shares a recipe with me. • SERVES 4
3 thick slices smoky bacon, coarsely chopped
2 shallots, finely chopped
1½ pounds Red Bliss potatoes (as uniform and as small as possible), scrubbed but not peeled
Olive oil
Best-quality white wine vinegar
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
1. In a small skillet over moderate heat, cook the bacon until it begins to render some of its fat, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the shallots and cook until the bacon is crisp and the shallots are browned. Remove from the heat and set aside.
2. Steam the potatoes in a vegetable steamer until just tender, about 20 minutes. Drain in a colander and cut in half (or into quarters, depending on size). Place the potatoes in a large mixing bowl, drizzle with olive oil, and toss. Repeat with vinegar. The potatoes should be coated but not drenched. (There are no exact proportions of olive oil and vinegar for this salad; it all depends on how absorbent the potatoes are.)
3. Let the potatoes sit for 15 minutes to drink in the dressing. If the potatoes need more vinegar, add it now. (They will probably not need more oil.) Add the bacon and shallot mixture, then salt and pepper to taste.
4. Sprinkle the parsley and chives over the potatoes and toss gently. Serve while still warm.
CHOCOLATE CRÊPES When I first got to Atlanta in the early seventies, there existed a trendy little restaurant called the Magic Pan, which specialized in the preparation of crêpe dishes. I even went through my own crêpe period later on in the decade, specializing for a time in a seafood crêpe that contained morsels of crab, shrimp, and scallops. Suzanne makes her crêpes with ease. I have always been one of those cooks who overwatches the batter, then worries it in the pan when it should just be cooking. • SERVES ABOUT 8
FOR THE CRÊPES
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus additional
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
Pinch of salt
1 cup whole milk
¾ cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon hazelnut liqueur (optional)
FOR THE FILLING
9½ to 10 ounces bittersweet chocolate (such as Scharffen Berger)
Confectioners’ sugar for sprinkling
1. To prepare the crepe batter: Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs, sugar, and salt together. Add the milk to the melted butter and pour half the milk and butter into the eggs. Sift in the flour and whisk, then add the remaining milk and butter. Whisk in the hazelnut liqueur, if using. When the mixture is smooth, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour or overnight to let the gluten expand. Bring to room temperature before using.
3. To make the crêpes: Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a nonstick sauté pan over medium-high heat. Ladle about 2 tablespoons of batter into the hot sauté pan and quickly tilt the pan so the batter spreads evenly. When little bubbles appear on the surface and the edges begin to brown, about 1 minute, lift the edge of the crêpe with a spatula and flip. Cook for another 30 seconds (the second side will not brown as much as the first side).
4. Invert the sauté pan over a plate to remove the crêpe. Continue cooking the crêpes, adding more butter as needed. Stack the crêpes between paper towels or wax paper and keep warm.
5. To make the filling: In a double boiler over hot but not boiling water, melt the chocolate just until soft enough to stir. The consistency of the melted chocolate should be thick, not runny.
6. To assemble: Spread the warm crêpes with a generous tablespoon of warm chocolate. Roll, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar, and serve.
CRÈME BRÛLÉE In the first celebrity cook-off I ever took part in, I wowed the audience with my version of the French classic dessert crème brûlée. For the uninitiated, crème brûlée simply tastes better than most other foods, and it can make you fat much faster than other foods. But it is elegant, classy, and silken and should be saved for those occasions that require a touch of grandeur. I finished second among the celebrities that night. My crème brûlée found itself overmatched by a shrimp course entered by a pretty woman named Shirley Franklin. She called her dish Shrimp Niger, and it was wonderful. Today, Shirley Franklin is the mayor of Atlanta. • SERVES 4 TO 6
2½ cups heavy cream
1 vanilla bean
6 egg yolks
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup packed light brown sugar
1. Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 325°F.
2. Pour the heavy cream into a large saucepan and set aside. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds from inside the pod into the cream. Add the pod.
3. Over moderate heat, bring the cream and vanilla mixture to a low boil. Remove from the heat, cover, and let the mixture steep for 15 minutes. Remove the vanilla pod.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks and granulated sugar until pale yellow. Slowly whisk the egg mixture into the cream.
5. Pour into four to six shallow broiler-proof custard dishes. Set the dishes in a shallow roasting pan and pour boiling water into the pan to come halfway up the sides of the dishes.
6. Bake until the custard is set, about 30 minutes. (The tops will still look jiggly)
7. Remove the dishes from roasting pan and cool on a rack to room temperature.
8. Preheat the broiler.
9. Press the brown sugar through a fine-mesh strainer onto the custards in an even layer. Wipe excess sugar from rims.
10. Broil about 5 inches from the heat source
until the sugar liquefies, then starts to bubble and caramelize. This can take from 1 to 3 minutes. Rotate the pan to ensure even browning and be extremely careful not to burn the tops.
11. Remove the custard dishes and cool on a rack to room temperature. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving.
When my daughter Megan called from California to let me know that she and her boyfriend were going to get married, I said that I thought it was time that I learned Terry’s last name. Megan paused, then I heard her ask her fiancé: “Terry, what’s your last name again?” Returning to the phone, Megan said to me, “Giguire. Yeah, that’s it. Giguire.”
A young woman who was always full of surprises and astonishments, Megan then told me that she wanted a traditional Southern wedding like the ones she had read about in Southern Living magazine. I cautioned Megan that there was not a single thing traditional about her madcap and widely traveled life, and that I had never read one article in Southern Living that made me conjure up the image of my pretty daughter. But she insisted that it be both Southern and traditional, and that she wanted the ceremony to take place in Beaufort, South Carolina. She had chosen Beaufort because she knew what the town meant to me, and because she had spent every summer on the beaches of Fripp Island. Also, it was her birthplace as well as one of the prettiest towns on the planet to get married in.
“I plan to be a gorgeous bride, Dad,” she said. “Just want you to get used to the idea.”
“You’ve been gorgeous since the day you were born, kid,” I said.
“Were you there at my birth, Dad?” Megan asked.
“I asked to be. But it was the South. The early seventies. Dr. Keyserling called me a sick sexual pervert and banished me to the waiting room,” I told her.
When Megan Elizabeth Conroy was born on November 5, 1970, the moment the masked nurse lifted her up to the window for the first inspection by the proud dad, I was floored by the outpouring of love for the newborn child that both dazzled and overwhelmed me. Love flooded through me like a great, ceaseless river that I could not control. I remember thanking God that Megan was not a boy, for I carried an irrational yet unshakable belief from my childhood that I would treat a son in the same awful way my father had treated me. I also thought, My God, Megan’s got my nose. No one on earth will want to marry a girl with my nose. But I pulled myself together and studied her more closely. Megan is beautiful. I amended my thoughts. Even with my nose.
I have never met a soul who did not fall in love with Megan Conroy after being with her for five minutes. There may be such people on earth, but you would not want to know them.
In great joy Barbara and I brought Megan home to Hancock Street on the Point, where my family and neighbors awaited our return. The dining room table overflowed with food brought by our neighbors. My mother called me aside and said I needed to have a good straight talk with Jessica and Melissa, the two daughters I had adopted after I married Barbara. Their father, West Jones, was a Marine Corps fighter pilot who was killed while giving close air support for the ground troops in Vietnam. When I adopted them, I vowed that they would never feel like second-class citizens in my house. If they did, I would not be worth a nickel as a father or a man.
“Pat, the girls are worried you won’t love them as much now that Megan’s been born,” my mother said. “It’s natural. You just need to reassure them.”
I found the girls on the couch in the living room. They ran to me, and I took them up in my arms. Jessica was coming up on five years old, and “the Woo” was two and a half.
“Peg said you two need to talk to me,” I said.
The two girls looked at each other, and the Woo nodded for Jessica to speak.
“Do you like Megan more than us?” Jessica asked, up front.
“Nah,” I said. “Have you seen her? She cries all the time. Poops in her britches. It’s awful. I don’t know how we’re going to survive this one.”
“But she’s your real child,” Jessica continued. “And me and the Woo aren’t.”
“No, girls. I got a piece of paper saying that you’re my real kids. And I had to pay a lot of money to get those adoption papers.”
“You love us that much?” the Woo asked. “More than Megan?”
“More,” I said. “I love you a lot more.”
“Why?” both girls asked.
“Because I’ve known both of you a lot longer,” I said. “Megan’s a pain in the butt. She can’t even talk. Can you believe that? And she’s so dumb, she doesn’t even know I’m her daddy.”
“She’s just a baby,” Jessica said, defending her sister’s honor.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” I told her. “We’ve got to make Megan as nice and smart as you two girls.”
In truth, as I look back, I had brought Megan home to a house in great and mortal peril. A month before her birth, I had been fired from my teaching job on Daufuskie Island for “gross neglect of duty, conduct unbecoming a professional educator, AWOL, and insubordination.” I had found it difficult to gain other teaching jobs with those words glistening on my résumé. In Savannah, Georgia, a deputy superintendent of education was interviewing me for a job when the phone rang. It was the superintendent who fired me getting his two bits in on my qualifications as an educator. The man hung up the phone and said, “Dr. Trammell said you were the worst teacher he’s encountered in a thirty-year career in education. You’re exactly the kind of teacher we don’t want here in Savannah. Our kids deserve better than you.”
In the first six months of Megan’s life, I would be writing The Water Is Wide, shivering with rage at the injustice of my firing. At the time we brought our first child into our home, I had endangered my family, destroyed my reputation, and stumbled awkwardly into my life’s work. I began writing sentences that had some weight and gravitas and could stand on their own like beaten egg whites. Something in Megan’s birth brought a roundedness and contentment I had never felt. I remember lofting a prayer that she grow into proud womanhood and not inherit a single one of my itchy, disharmonious traits. Naturally, because of the way the world works, Megan grew into the loveliest of women, but she’s so much like me that my sarcastic tribe of brothers and sisters have labeled poor Megan “Pat with boobs.”
Whenever I pull The Water Is Wide from the shelf and read the jumpy sentences of the iridescent, wet-behind-the-ears kid I was back then, to me the book still feels Megan-shaped, even Megan-induced. I was trying to force myself into a career that could support a comely child, her mother, and her frisky sisters. Bearing down, I completed the book in three months, and Megan’s infant cries were the background music of that book. I had produced a “Beaufort girl” with my first daughter, the first Conroy ever to be a native of this small town I had thrown my arms around as a fifteen-year-old boy.
Like all children, Megan was a baby, then suddenly I blinked my eyes, and she had transformed herself into a toddler wearing tiger pajamas. While I planted a camellia bush in the side yard, turned around, Megan was walking into first grade. I bought a new fountain pen to write The Great Santini, and then watched as Megan blew out ten candles on her birthday cake. Time began to speed up, and I heard something behind me—Megan was walking across the high school stage to receive her diploma from Paul Bianchi. A letter came from Barbra Streisand that she wanted to make a movie of The Prince of Tides; a phone rang in the background, and it was Megan telling me she had fallen in love with a boy named Terry Giguire. I spun around in the new terror of aging, wondering who had stolen my life from me and where they had taken it. I looked in the mirror and saw a fifty-four-year-old stranger staring back at me.
In 1995, the year that Beach Music came out, I was in a bookstore signing stock with the help of a handsome, cheerful young man who was asking me questions about how I went about turning myself into a writer. I gave him the usual thumbnail sketch about my career, then asked him where he was from.
“Boulder, Colorado,” he said.
“No kidding? My daughter went to
the University of Colorado,” I told him, as he passed me copy after copy of Beach Music.
“What was her name? It’s a huge place, but maybe I ran into her,” he said.
“Her name is Megan Conroy” I said, and the young man gasped aloud as he stepped back from me.
“Hey, pal?” I asked. “Why are you gasping when you hear my daughter’s name spoken aloud?”
“Mr. Conroy,” he said in total admiration, “your daughter Megan was the biggest party animal in the history of the University of Colorado.”
“Thanks, kid. I think,” I said, then asked him: “Wasn’t the University of Colorado voted the best party school in America by Playboy magazine?”
The kid lit up again and said, “Yes, sir. Four years in a row. The same four years that Megan Conroy was there.”
That night I called Megan and told her the story.
“Who was that guy, Dad?” she asked. “What was his name?”
“I forget his name, but I’ll never forget his story,” I said. “What exactly does it mean, Megan?”
“It means, Dad,” Megan said without a trace of defensiveness, “that I love to have a good time … just like my daddy.”
To his everlasting credit, my son-in-law, Terry Giguire, tells my family that he loves that story more than any I tell about my legendary daughter.
The problem with giving Megan an old-fashioned Southern wedding was that Barbara and I did not raise Megan to be an old-fashioned Southern girl. We raised all our girls to be bright, sassy, liberated, and the life of every party they walked into, anywhere in the world. But if my girl wants something, I can do Southern with the best of them. I called my cooking partner, Suzanne Pollak, and told her about Megan’s wedding plans. With the extraordinary generosity of spirit that marks her every waking hour, Suzanne offered the use of her house and gardens. She lives in a matchless Southern house with a garden that smells like the inside of a perfume bottle in the spring. My sister Kathy Harvey put in a call to Butch Polk, one of the best football players ever to come out of Beaufort High School, and he promised to put on a Southern barbecue that Terry’s California family would talk about the rest of their lives. For the reception, we hired the great Beaufort caterer Steve Brown to fix Southern dishes like crab cakes and shrimp gumbo and dozens of others. Megan bought a wedding dress that had a classic Southern look, and set her father back—let’s see—I don’t quite remember the price and have been criticized in my life for my powers of exaggeration, so let me be conservative about the actual cost, but it was somewhere near a billion dollars or so. All the engines of smalltown Beaufort life were set into motion to give my daughter Megan the traditional Southern wedding she desired.