But then there are the lamb shanks with favas and the cobia with beet relish and how can I leave out the Gulf triggerfish or the magic he works with South Carolina quail or his ravioli with sweet potatoes, mustard greens, and country ham? I cannot do justice to Frank if I fail to praise his foie gras with corn bread or his roast leg of lamb with spring vegetable ragout, or the wine list that grows and mellows and deepens in complexity with each passing year. I have even failed to mention the desserts, which are often the weak spot of restaurants with the raw ambition displayed by the Highlands Bar & Grill. But Frank’s desserts are the stuff of both dreams and paradise, and I have heard men say aloud in front of their wives that they would marry the pastry chef as they scooped up clouds of the cinnamon crème anglaise or moaned over the crème brûlée. The waiters are classy and well trained. Frank’s beautiful wife, Pardis, runs the front with elegance and panache. His chef de cuisine is masterful and the cooks know what they are doing. The knife work is deft and Zen-like, and every night the men and women of Frank Stitt’s Highlands Bar & Grill know that they are in the process of making both history and art.
The food world is coming around to my opinion formed so many years ago. Recently, I was in another airplane to Atlanta when I read that Gourmet magazine had named the Highlands Bar & Grill the fifth-best restaurant in the nation. In the same year, Frank won a James Beard award for being the best chef of the Southeast. The inimitable R. W. “Johnny” Apple of the New York Times made one of his baptismal visits to the restaurant and left shouting kudos and benedictions like all the rest of us.
Over a year ago, my wife and I joined Frank and Pardis for a spectacular meal at Alain Ducasse’s restaurant in New York. It was a meal for the ages, and a great joy to watch Frank smell each dish as it arrived steaming from the kitchen, his eyes lighting up with lapidary pleasure as each dish arrived on our table. The restaurant is as formal and plush and forbidding as the Highlands Bar & Grill is welcoming and all-inclusive. The meal was Proustian and fabulous and indescribable, as all the great meals are.
When Sandra and I said farewell to Frank and Pardis Stitt that night and walked toward our hotel with all the clamor and splendor and mystery of the great city swarming about us, we both agreed that Alain Ducasse is a splendid chef, but we also both agreed that he is no Frank Stitt.
The following three recipes came to me directly from Chef Frank Stitt of Birmingham, Alabama.
GRILLED FIGS WITH PROSCIUTTO, WALNUTS, AND LEMON-MINT CREAM This is one of my favorite summer hors d’oeuvres—perfect for passing around at a party still sizzling from the grill. Make this only with absolutely fresh ingredients: perfectly ripe figs, the finest prosciutto, and the freshest walnuts. Richard Olney was the inspiration for this dish. He loved figs more than almost any other fruit and was especially fond of their affinity for cured ham. We first passed this now-late-summer menu standard at an event in the gardens of the Joseph Phelps winery. The salty ham and the just-beginning-to-warm plump fig is one of the sexiest bites ever. • SERVES 4
1 handful fresh spearmint, plus sprigs for garnish
Juice of 1½ lemons
½ cup heavy cream
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
8 ripe Black Mission figs
16 walnut halves
16 very thin slices prosciutto di Parma
4 fig leaves
1. Prepare a hot grill.
2. Finely chop the mint and place in a mortar with the lemon juice. Pound with the pestle and strain into a medium mixing bowl. Add the cream. Season with salt and pepper and stir to incorporate. The acidity of the lemon juice will thicken the cream.
3. Halve the figs and place a walnut half on the cut side of each. Wrap a slice of prosciutto around the fig, only slightly overlapping where the prosciutto ends meet. (The perfect slice of prosciutto has an outer edge with some of the snow-white fat included.)
4. Char the figs on the hot grill for 30 to 45 seconds per side. The figs should just be warmed through and the prosciutto crisp in parts. These contrasting textures make this a wonderful dish. Place 4 figs on each fig leaf and serve with the bowl of mint cream on the side, garnished with mint sprigs.
RED SNAPPER WITH CRAWFISH MEUNIÈRE Red snapper has been the reigning queen of Gulf Coast seafood for over seventy-five years and with good reason—the delicate, white, flaky, moist flesh fits almost everyone’s idea of what fish should be. Sautéed red snapper is a wonderful thing unto itself. When you mix plump little buttery craw fish tails with lots of lemon and fresh mint, you’ve created a plate of springtime goodness. Don’t hesitate to substitute crabmeat for the crawfish, if you wish. This recipe calls for a quick sauté of the fish. Then the same pan is used to create the ultimate fish sauce—a meunière. Its origin, the story goes, began with the miller’s wife who would use some of the mill’s flour to dust the fish before cooking. She would then add a bit of shallot and white wine to make a sauce, finishing it by whisking in a little butter, lemon juice, and fresh mint at the last second. The only way we improve upon this age-old formula is to enliven the dish with a little crawfish or crabmeat. One of my favorite restaurant experiences is digging into the speckled trout with crabmeat meunière at Galatoire’s in New Orleans (and at Highlands Bar & Grill). Such meals are some of life’s great moments. If you can’t get your hands on impeccably fresh red snapper, opt for wild striped bass, speckled trout, flounder, or pompano. • SERVES 4
Four 6- to 8-ounce red snapper fillets (or other fresh white fish; see headnote)
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper
½ cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons clarified butter
4 tablespoons (½ stick) plus 1½ teaspoons unsalted butter
2 shallots, finely minced
¾ cup white wine
½ pound crawfish tail meat or jumbo lump crabmeat
Juice of 1 large lemon
1 small bunch fresh mint leaves, chopped at the last moment (to yield 2 tablespoons)
Hot pepper sauce, such as Tabasco or Cholula
1. Check to be sure that all of the bones have been removed from the fish and any little scrappy ends are trimmed so that the fillets are uniform and will cook evenly. Season the fish with salt and pepper on both sides. Dust the fish with the flour and shake off any excess.
2. Heat a large heavy sauté pan over high heat. Add the clarified butter and heat until almost smoking. Place the fillets in the pan, skin side up. Lower the heat to medium and cook until light golden brown and the outer edges begin to turn opaque, about 3 minutes. Turn the fillets and cook until just done, about 3 minutes more, depending on thickness. Remove the fillets to a rack.
3. Pour out any clarified butter remaining in the pan and add the 1½ teaspoons butter along with the shallots. Cook over medium-low heat until the shallots soften, about 1 minute. Add the white wine and crawfish tails and raise the heat to high to reduce the liquid by more than half.
4. When the wine has reduced, begin to whisk in the 4 tablespoons butter quickly, bit by bit, shaking the pan while whisking. Once the butter is incorporated, lower the heat so that the sauce does not boil, or it will separate. Quickly add the lemon juice along with the freshly chopped mint. Season to taste with salt, white pepper, and a dash of hot pepper sauce. Taste and adjust seasonings, then pour the sauce over the snapper and serve immediately on hot plates.
CURED PORK CROSTINI WITH SWEET POTATO BRANDADE A traditional brandade is made of salt cod, potatoes, and garlic bound with olive oil. In the south of France, brandade is often used as a spread on crostini. Here we’re having a little improvisational fun. Instead of cured fish, we use cured pork, and instead of the typical potato, we use local sweet potatoes. You can substitute roasted or grilled pork tenderloin and still have delicious results, but if you have the time, try this cure. • SERVES 8 AS AN APPETIZER
½ cup sugar
½ cup coarse or kosher salt
4 garlic cloves, crushed, plus ½garlic head
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8 whole black peppercorns, crushed
4 whole allspice berries, crushed
1 whole star anise, crushed
1 dried hot chile
1 pound pork tenderloin, trimmed, and silver skin removed
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and quartered
¼ cup slab bacon cut into ½-inch cubes
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 slices baguette, about ¼-inch thick
Fresh cilantro sprigs
1. In a medium saucepan, combine the sugar, salt, crushed garlic, peppercorns, allspice, star anise, chile, and 4 cups water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 15 minutes and then pour the contents into a non-reactive container that is narrow and deep enough to keep the pork tenderloin submerged. Let the brine cool completely in the refrigerator. Once cool, add the pork and let cure overnight or for up to 2 days in the refrigerator.
2. Place the sweet potatoes and garlic head in a medium saucepan and cover with water by 2 inches. Add a good pinch of salt and bring to a simmer. Cook until very tender, about 30 minutes.
3. While the sweet potatoes are cooking, place the bacon in a sauté pan and cook until crisp, about 8 minutes. Set aside. Drain the sweet potatoes, then purée them through a food mill or ricer. Return the purée to the pan and add the bacon and its rendered fat along with the extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Stir vigorously to combine. Keep the potatoes warm.
4. Preheat the oven to 425° F.
5. Remove the pork from the brine and pat dry. In a heavy, ovenproof sauté pan, heat 1 tablespoon olive oil over high heat and sear the pork on all sides. Place the pan in the preheated oven and cook until medium (internal temperature of 145° F), 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer to a rack to rest.
6. Brush the baguette slices with the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toast in the oven for 5 minutes.
7. Spoon a little sweet potato brandade on top of each crostini, spreading it evenly. Slice the pork thinly and arrange a few slices on top of each crostini. Allow the colorful brandade to show along the edges by folding the pork slices for an attractive presentation. Garnish each crostini with a few sprigs of cilantro and a grind or two of black pepper and serve.
In the lucky life I have had as a writer of books, I will never duplicate the astonishment and surprise I felt when Houghton Mifflin introduced the world to The Prince of Tides at the American Booksellers Association in New Orleans. I had been content with my career, which was modest but successful; that I could be publishing books in this country, with a background like mine, seemed further proof of the deepest American ideal. I had been caught off guard by the explosive reception to the new novel by the booksellers and the gushing, wide-eyed enthusiasm of my publishing company. Several of my friends had read the book and had delivered lukewarm responses. The novelist Michael Mewshaw read it in Rome and suggested I cut it into twelve novels. Nan Talese told me she liked it a lot, but I thought she spoke from her good breeding and editorial politesse. One friend said I was an anti-Semite and another said I hated the South.
It was only when the best reader of my life, Bernie Schein, checked in that I started thinking that I had hit on something big in this novel. “Goddamn,” Bernie said when I answered the phone.
“You like it, Bernie?” I said. “Tell me the truth.”
“Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn.”
“You really like it, Bernie?”
“Goddamn, son. If this ain’t a son of a bitch, I’ll kiss your ass on the pitcher’s mound during this year’s All-Star Game.”
All writers need friends like Bernie Schein and neighbors like the lawyers Knox and Carolyn Dobbins. Since we shared a driveway, we became inseparable friends. They would often stop me as I came out of the office I had over the garage.
“Finished yet?” Knox would ask me every time. For years I shook my head no.
Then in 1985, Carolyn asked me, “Finished yet, Pat?”
And I said, “I just wrote the last sentence.”
Carolyn squealed, then ran toward me, and I danced her around the yard. When they finished reading the book, they invited me over to the house for a celebratory drink. They toasted me and predicted great success for the book.
“We both think it’s going to be the main selection of the Book of the Month Club,” Carolyn said.
“No, it’ll never get that. I’ll be lucky to be an alternate,” I said.
Knox said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not a member of the Book of the Month Club and we are. It’s going to be a main selection. It’s a lock.”
“Why do you think so?” I asked.
“Because it’s about everything in the world,” Carolyn said. When The Prince of Tides was named the main selection of the Book of the Month Club, I invited Knox and Carolyn to be my special guests at the luncheon the Book of the Month Club had in my honor. I wanted to thank them for their generosity, their openness, and their amazing powers to see into a future that I didn’t see.
But it was the city of New Orleans where I felt the chambers of my fate click into high gear. Everything about that weekend in the spring of 1986 seemed magnetized, lustrous, and fine. In The Prince of Tides I had let my passionate love of story loose from the cage after a long imprisonment; it became possible after I read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Those two marvelous books freed something inside me and made me take note of my own work and realize I was holding back and keeping a tight rein on my imagination because of cowardice and a deep fear of the judgment of critics and other writers. The first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude dazzled me, and I said out loud to myself, “I don’t know how to write. I couldn’t write a sentence this complex if I had to.” So I pressed myself to get better by growing bolder and more ambitious. I had tired of life among the parakeets, and I was eager to test the hot thermal currents from which the great condors with their immense wingspans surveyed their vast domains. But with all this bold talk and inflated thinking, I was not sure the world was ready for a book that contained the capture of an albino porpoise, a giant rapist who would be killed by a Bengal tiger, and the moving of an entire town to make way for a nuclear power plant. In Atlanta, at a party in Ansley Park before I left for New Orleans, a friend of mine who had read the book yelled at me from across the room, “Hey, Conroy! Who else writes about the birth of a child, only it’s not just a child—it’s twins? And it’s during a hurricane and the river is flooding and the father has just been shot down in Germany and is going to be saved by a German Catholic priest? Have you ever thought about just writing a normal novel?”
No, come to think of it, I never had, but my friend’s send-up of The Prince of Tides still strikes me as accurate and hilarious. I was nervous about going to New Orleans and witnessing the novel’s reception among the booksellers of America. But here is what is never disappointing in New Orleans: the wonderful food cooked by some of the most imaginative chefs in the world.
On Friday night, my elegant editor, Nan Talese, picked up my wife and me in a limousine to take us to dinner at a new hot restaurant in the New Orleans suburbs. Writers of the world, it is a good sign when your editor arrives in a limo to take you anywhere. It is a telling sign when she starts booking you into rooms with minibars. By the time we reached the restaurant, I was disoriented and had no idea about where in Louisiana I was. But the restaurant had smells coming out of the kitchen that were heavenly, so it boded well for the evening.
We were seated at a table beautifully set with bone-white china, good cutlery, and a tablecloth you could have performed inpatient surgery on. There were candelabras and chandeliers, and the waiters were well-groomed and well-schooled. The women at the table—I have never seen this done in another restaurant—were provided with small, raised, and inlaid pillows on which to rest their p
retty but weary feet. I heard a feminist writer at another table say, “What the hell is this bullshit?”
My two British publishers were already at the table, Mark Barty King, who is known in publishing circles as the handsomest man in the world, and Paul Sherer, the head of the London division of Doubleday Royce Bemis, the Houghton Mifflin rep from Atlanta and my good friend, had brought one of his booksellers from Emory University, a pretty woman named Cassie Fahey All of us studied the menu with sublime happiness as people at tables nearby raved about the quality of the food. When the appetizers arrived, they were hot to the touch and ambrosia to the taste buds. We began sharing one another’s appetizers, plates moving across the table with crab in puff pastry that tasted as though blue crabs had actually been born in the pastry, never needing the armor of their cartilage. There were mussels in a cream and wine sauce that were the best I had ever eaten, as well as an artichoke heart wrapped in aspic.
When the main course arrived, I tasted quail roasted with pancetta and fried oysters nestling in a bed of hollandaise, and a lamb shank that seemed to have been braised in red wine, but there were hints of garlic and peppers and even, I thought, a touch of rich coffee to top off the bouquet. I lingered over my grouper, which for me has always been the tastiest fish that the Atlantic Ocean seems capable of producing. The chef had steamed the grouper in paper, flavoring it with olive oil, garlic, ginger, and wine, and once again, I think, I tasted the pungent salty afterbite of soy sauce. The table toasted the success of The Prince of Tides, and I toasted right back and felt like a million bucks as the waiter began to bring out desserts. The crème brûlée and cheesecakes and sorbets, the decadent cakes and sinful pies I tasted that night as the sharing of plates continued were magnificent. I think it would have ranked as a perfect meal, except for its unfortunate finale.