Alexander Key
The way of the Hush-Puppy
    With infinite pains and a dash of pure genius, Gulf Coast folks blend the riches of the sea into dishes right out of this world

    The most particular gourmets I have known were thin men with sharp noses and, of them all, the most outstanding have been Southerners. Such were my father and his brothers. They would travel miles to find a better sirup or a richer ham; always the sirup was chosen in the field before the cane was cut, and always it was the runty acre on the yellow soil, for the juice of the large cane of the bottoms was inferior after the boiling. The ham was selected on the hoof; never a large ham, or a fat one, for too much fat would ruin the lean, nor would it cure so well in the smoking. And always, too, that ham must finish its growth in a peanut field, and be smoked over a hickory fire.
    To this day I prefer a hickory-cured peanut ham to any other, and I like my sirup from the runty acre. One thing more my father bequeathed to me, and it changed all my life. In his youth my father had eaten of the lotus, and every spring thereafter he made a pilgrimage for another taste.
    Hitching two horses to a great canvas-covered wagon – the standard mode of travel in the Florida of yesterday – he would pile family and equipment aboard, and take the jungle road that followed the Suwannee River to the Gulf. Out of the border darknesses of that road palms towered nearly a hundred feet, and long moss veiled it in an eerie twilight; even the laziest hunter could have filled the wagon with the game that flew overhead or watched us from the shadows. But my father never raised his gun. In a wilderness Eden where game was more than plentiful, his table every winter was kept amply supplied by his innumerable friends with the choicest cuts of venison, the fattest of the wild Suwannee gobblers, the plumpest quail. I remember those quail, browned to a turn in the richest, thickest gravy, prepared as only a family Negress with love in her heart can prepare them – but by spring I, too, had had enough of such fare. Like my father, I watched breathlessly for the sea.
    I listened and sniffed for it, and when I caught the first sharp tang of it, I knew we had left one world and entered another. The South lay behind us. My father, literally, had traveled out of Eden and entered Paradise. Ahead were marsh and gleaming dunes, and little emerald islands of palm and cedar and mangrove – the banked mangroves dipping their million fingers in a sea of unbelievable color, for it ran in every shade from a dazzling green to purple and amber. If it was early in the spring, the geese and ducks would thunder in the dawns and blacken the marshes: if it was late, the great sea turtles would be crawling in the night to lay their hundred eggs in the sand; but always there were fish. Mullet flashing in the shallows, to be caught only with a cast net. Great schools of mackerel purpling the deeper stretches; stone crabs and giant crawfish along the coral – and oysters, oysters everywhere. Oysters on the reefs, the bars, the driftwood logs, and growing in clusters on the mangrove fingers – sea fruit to be had for the picking at low tide.

    Gourmets of the Gulf
    My father liked to wade out and pluck and eat them on the spot, a matter requiring some skill with an oyster knife. You can have your oysters scalloped, creamed, panned, or washed and reshelled in a silver dish and smothered à la Rockefeller, but never will they compare with those luscious bivalves picked fresh from the bars, opened immediately and eaten sans sauce or seasoning. A cracker, if you wish, but nothing else, for they have been soaking alt their lives in the world’s best flavoring – salt sea water. Much cf this drains away a few hours after picking, and the rest is thoroughly washed out with fresh water before an oyster goes to market.
    I was too small to do my own opening, or shucking, in those days, and since I was to see but little of the Gulf in following years, I was a long time learning the trick.
    It took me longer still to learn the art of heaving a cast net for mullet, and how to fillet those mullet and fry them Gulf style with hush-puppies, a concoction as interesting us its name. And the coastal gumbos, the chowders, the snapper steaks, the turtle-egg omelets, the savory stews of sea-flavored oysters and onions, and such magic dishes as white soup and lime pie – all these had to wait. But my father had given me a taste of the lotus, so it was written that I should return and settle permanently with the Gulf at my doorstep.
    It was a little startling to find that it hadn’t changed; to discover again that, immediately upon reaching tidewater, the South really ends and another world begins. A slow, easy, timeless world where no one is ever in a hurry, where it is always reasonable to put off until tomorrow anything irksome today: and where, if a man closes his office in midmorning because the sea trout are running, he is using the plain common sense God gave him. Along the Gulf I have seldom seen men bolt their food as they do inland: by such treatment one refutes the importance of food and admits that toil and speed are the ends of existence. Heaven forbid!
    To most Gulf men a good meal is the ultimate, a matter worth hours gathering the makings and all of an evening preparing and gourmandizing it. So the man who cannot cook at least one dish well is a creature to be regarded with suspicion. Gulf men are good cooks, and certainly the most particular cooks of sea food in the world. And they have evolved some of the strangest dishes. A State-of-Mainer would stand aghast at one of their chowders, not only for what they put into it, but for the unbelievable effect it has on you afterward. A hard-headed Hoosier, I’m sure, would never allow himself to believe the miracle of white soup. As for the hush-puppy but there we are nosing into the very fundamentals of coastal cookery.
    The distant smell of ham frying on a frosty morning can always stop me in my tracks, but the most devastating scent of my youth was that of mullet sizzling over an aromatic fire of pitch pine. The coast from Cedar Keys to Pensacola has known that scent for generations, and whenever you catch a whiff of it you can be sure the skillet companion of the mullet is that corn-meal delicacy with the extraordinary name. It began in ante-bellum days, so they say, as something extra with the fish – something for hushing the hunger cries of puppies and pickaninnies.
    Hush-puppies. As for the mere ingredients, there seemed to be nothing difficult about tossing them together and letting heat do the rest. But I reckoned without art. Upon my recounting those first dismal results to my cousin, he promised to show me how, and also to furnish the fish.
    He arrived without any fish, but I was ready for him. I had market mullet on ice.
    “How long have you had them?” he asked.
    “Just got them last evening."
    He recoiled. He seemed revolted. He is a big man, Gulf bred and tough, hut like many of his breed he thinks that any fish that has been stiffening with rigor mortis overnight is unfit for human consumption. “I think I’d better get some fresh ones,” he said politely.
    From his car he took a circular net with a fourteen-foot spread, kicked off his shoes and waded down the beach. At the first flash of fins he gave a sideward heave; the heavy net with its hundred-odd weights left his hands, sailed far ahead of him and opened perfectly, every weight touching the water at the same instant. It seemed so easy, so effortless, and – since two casts caught all the fish we could eat – entirely unsportsmanlike. Until I tried it. After five years that tangling puzzle of cord and lead will sometimes spread for me, though reluctantly, and with it I have caught just seven fish. A mullet is as fast as a mountain trout, and he shuns a hook. You have to net him.
    I learned something else when I tried to help clean my cousin’s catch. “No,” he said, still with that gentle politeness with which the Southerner enlightens the utterly ignorant. “We don’t slit a fish up the belly. Do it this way.” And he quickly filleted every one by laying it on its side and making two long cuts down the back, so that the plump sides fell away in a single boneless piece.
    “Now,” he said. “A paper sack.”
    Into it went a double handful of corn meal, highly seasoned with salt and pepper; and following it the mullet. A shake of the sack, and every fish was ready for the stove. I had a half inch of cooking oil in a big deep frying pan, but he poured in more until it contained a good four inches. “You’ve got to have something for ’em to swim in,” he said. “And it’s got to be hot.”
    While it was heating, he sifted three cups of meal and seasoned it with a teaspoon each of baking powder and salt, and two of sugar. A dash of pepper, a large onion diced very fine, an egg, and two tablespoons of olive oil completed the hush-puppy makings. He mixed it with just enough milk to form a stiff batter, then rolled it all into little cones the length of his thumb and a little thicker. When the oil was smoking hot, he dropped the fish and cones in together.
    As simple as that. The fish browned before my eyes, the cones turned a rich golden hue, and he was forking them out within seconds of having put them in. Golden hush-puppies ringing a platter of mullet – just common Gulf fare, and I’ll take it every time. If there is a comparably good and easy way to cook a fish, it is to rub it with butter or olive oil and broil it – though it comes a poor second because you can’t broil a hush-puppy with it.
    But never forget, it must be made with Southern meal. When I first ventured North in my teens I was confounded by that crumbly and nigh unpalatable article that passes for corn bread. The miller is to blame, not the cook. Really good corn bread, of which the hush-puppy is the precocious offspring, can be made only with the well-sifted water-ground meal of the South, which is soft and flaky. It has always been a puzzle to me why Northern millers persist in their ill treatment of com, unless they are remembering survivors’ tales of Andersonville and Libby, where the only food was unsifted meal – the husk of which never inconvenienced the cast-iron stomachs of the Southerners.
    If I am ever shipwrecked and cast adrift in an open boat without food, I hope it happens only after I’ve done my duty by a bowl of Gulf Coast chowder. It didn’t seem rich the first time I ate it; it was just good and souI-satisfying, and I wanted more, and more, and more. So did everyone else. When I rolled away from the table I had a feeling of buoyant complacency that was still with me the next morning. It stayed with me all that day. I felt chipper as a lark and capable of prodigious labors, but I wasn’t interested in food. My taste buds had been subtly anesthetized. They remained anesthetized until late the second day. Just to be sure that all this was not some fabulous imagining, I asked Colonel McLeod, who had made that chowder for me in my own kitchen, if such satiety was the normal state of things.
    The colonel, a mild-mannered gentleman whose voice can flay the hide from a contrary witness in a murder trial, seemed surprised. “Why,” he said, “chowder is the old duck hunter’s stand-by. To be any good, it has to keep a man going indefinitely. In past years a crowd of us would run down the coast in a yacht, towing the duck boats behind. We’d anchor, and the little boats would put out through the marshes. It’s wild country, you know; often a man would get lost, or bad weather would make it impossible for him to reach the big boat for several days. So we always filled up on chowder before we left."
    The colonel invariably made that chowder, for it is conceded by experts that he is the best hand at it on the coast. The fish used is whatever can be caught on the spot; red snapper or black grouper being preferred, though not even an eel is frowned upon. For my chowder the colonel used a six-pound redfish.
    While the fish was being filleted and sliced in three-inch strips about an inch wide, the colonel diced two pieces of bacon very fine, browned it in a Dutch oven, and added a cup and a half of chopped onion and a clove of minced garlic. “For garlic haters,” he said, “always add the garlic anyhow. They never know the difference.” Stirring it till the onions were brown, he poured in three small cans of tomato purée and three cups of hot water. Five medium-sized potatoes, diced in half-inch cubes, followed the purée into the pot. Next went a medium can of extra-small peas.
    “From this point on,” said the colonel, “you have to know your fish. Snapper or grouper take longer to cook; flounder or mullet soften easily and should be added only when the potatoes are nearly done. Redfish goes in when the potatoes are half done.” Still stirring it slowly, he tested the potatoes, then dropped in the chunks of fish. Following it went five tablespoons of catchup, the juice of a whole lemon, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, and finally a tablespoon of butter. All the while he continued his slow stirring, adding a little extra hot water whenever it became too thick, and pinching in salt and pepper till it suited his taste.
    No, it isn’t like down-East chowder. The Gulf article has all the color and flavor of the tropics, and a certain magic besides. If you don’t believe it, try it yourself!
    I have no desire to tax further anyone’s credulity by making seemingly unbelievable claims for another Gulf dish, but white soup is not strictly a Gulf product. Sponge fishermen were making that soup, or something very much like it, a thousand years ago on the Aegean. Greek spongers brought it to Florida in the middle of the last century; and that there is something a bit miraculous in it is attested by its spread to the galleys of all other Gulf fishing vessels from Key West to Port Isabel. Delicate, aromatic and altogether delicious, it is almost invariably the first, thing served when a vessel reaches the banks.
    Papa George, a well-known cook on many a Gulf schooner, has served a lot of it. One dawn not many months ago he was aboard the schooner Neva, hove to over the coral of the middle ground. It had been a bad night; and to make it worse the Neva’s crew of youngsters were groaning in the scuppers after taking on too much ballast ashore. One glance at the state of things, and Papa George hung water on to boil and hurried to the rail with a snapper line.
    To appreciate fully Papa George’s problem you must remember that, by midmorning, it was his duty to have every man on his feet and busy at the rails. All this on a little heaving fishing smack with a two-by-four galley and a one-burner stove, a crew that would far rather be dead than alive, and the soup stock swimming a hundred and twenty feet below.
    But such matters seldom trouble a deep-water Greek. In a little while Papa George had caught a black grouper, cleaned it, sliced it and had it boiling in a pot with several cups of ricelike noodles known as minestro. There followed a certain legerdemain with eggs and milk and lemons. Finally he was sliding bowls of a creamy, aromatic soup upon the hatch.

    Miracle Soup
    The crew shrank from it. You shrink from anything remotely resembling food when your head is throbbing with a violent hang-over and when you are writhing with mal de mer. Papa George had to force them to taste it. “Mucha good,” he urged. “You eat; no be seek.”
    They ate. They ate it all, and liked it. And before the day had warmed they were up and laughing at the rails and hauling fish over the sides, nor was there a sign of a hang-over. That, I think, is in the nature of a miracle, yet it is an old story on the Gulf.
    Some cooks make it with rice, but this is wanton disregard of tradition. The fish, Papa George explained to me, is not so important. “No have grouper, use snapper, any kind feesh. No have feesh, use cheeken. Ah, mucha good ashore with cheeken! Boil half gallon water in pot, put in feesh an’ cup an’ half minestro; season, add li’s garlic, two clove chop fine. While she cook, you beatum up eggs an’ milk an’ lemon juice. Four eggs, two lemons, can o’ milk. Fresh milk no good – take ’im from can, beeg can. Now you beatum hard, givum mucha hell on spoon. Twenty minute, mebbe more, you beat.
    “When feesh an’ minestro done, you takum pot off stove, let water calm. Now you pour in other stuff – but takum easy, stir pot slow. You no wanna cook de egg, see? You wanna blend ’im in pretty, nize an’ smooth. Then you smell, taste – yum-yum! Mucha good! You try!”
    No matter how jaded my appetite may turn with time. I’ll always be able to raise a mouth-watering hunger, and be nine years old again, merely by glancing out of the window at the thin blue line of an island on the horizon. The palm-shaded cottage that once hugged a high dune there, before its mishap with a hurricane, was the summer gathering place of a host of cousins and uncles and aunts, who would come to spend weeks living immoderately on shrimp and fish and turtle eggs and all the other sea things that could be picked or caught in the vicinity. A wide veranda ran entirely around the building; there was a kitchen at one corner where two family blacks always seemed to be busy – and well they had to be, with that hungry ménage – and on the shady side was a long, long table that daily groaned under more assorted sea food than I have ever seen heaped on a table since. By prearrangement a trawler would stop at the landing every morning to leave a bucket or two of shrimp, as well as vegetables and ice from the mainland, but everything else we gathered ourselves.
    While the oldsters picked oysters or netted mullet in the shallow inlets of the island’s lee, we small fry dug coquinas at the surf’s edge, or searched for loggerheads’ nests in the sand. Coquinas, often but incorrectly called periwinkles, are little rainbow-colored clams the size of one’s fingernail. Every creaming comber turns them up by the thousand on a good beach, but they are such speedy diggers that they can vanish even as you reach for them. We defeated them with a wire screen and a shovel, with which it was no trick to wash a gallon out of the sand in short order. They were boiled in the shell, and the clear broth simply strained out and seasoned. The quest for turtle eggs, especially if at night, was a spine-tingling big-game hunt. Days, we had merely to look for the loggerhead’s track, and then use a sharpened stick to probe the sand in the disturbed area where the nest was hidden. Nights, we watched the phosphorescent surf for Madame Loggerhead herself.
    Whenever we caught one of these immense turtles in the water we would risk life and limb to ride it, two of us clinging shrieking to the shell while the monster struck out wildly through the breakers. But if we discovered one panting over her nest, which we did frequently, we had such little regard for modesty that we would hold a straw hat to catch the eggs as they emerged. She would never move till the last one dropped, then irascibly she would flip a shower of sand in our faces and head for the surf.
    Years afterward I used to wonder if the Olympian flavors of turtle-egg omelet, coquina broth, boiled shrimp and the other dishes of that long table were Olympian in retrospect only. But they were not. Even the oyster stews had an extra quality of deliciousness that I had begun to believe was imaginary until I returned to the coast and discovered the secret. Those island stews were made of unwashed oysters that had been put in the pot only after a small amount of chopped onion had been browned in butter. Their original salt-water flavoring made all the difference in the world. Coquina broth was an epicurean delight that I had no trouble introducing to the rest of my family, but like most inlanders they rebelled at the first sight of turtle eggs, and regretted later that they had not taken more than a small handful from the nest.
    Being round, soft-shelled, and resembling ping-pong balls, they are far from one’s idea of orthodox eggs, nor can they be utilized in the traditional manner. The whites, which take longer to cook, must always be carefully separated from the yolks. Only the yolks go into an omelet. They are sweetened slightly, seasoned and beaten with thick cream or canned milk, and cooked in butter. The resulting omelet, contrary to popular belief, tastes not of fish but has a rich wild flavor that no stranger can identify.
    My fondest recollection of that island table was its centerpiece, which never varied from one day to the next.
    It was a great bowl of pink, freshly boiled shrimp. Boiled in the shell and served immediately while hot. Everyone helped himself with his fingers and shelled his own. It was like eating nuts – only better.

    Shrimp Fit for a King
    The total of shrimp recipes would fill a sizable tome; and many of them begin with these words: “Take freshly boiled shrimp—” Indeed! With out exception the culinary Cagliostros who devise those countless printed recipes ignore the shrimp in its best and finest form, nor do they even tell how a shrimp should be boiled. It is assumed that the creature must be dropped in hot water a few minutes, perhaps to soften it and rid it of its shrimpy taste, and that before it is fit for human consumption it must be fried, minced or thoroughly mixed with something else to disguise it.
    Gulf cooks have many excellent ways of serving shrimp, but most of those dishes, however commendable, are made of leftovers after the family has dined to repletion from a great steaming bowl of boiled ones. Throughout the Gulf Coast, boiled shrimp are as staple as baked beans in Boston. For three pounds of shrimp, use a large kettle with a gallon of water, which must be boiling with six tablespoons of salt before the shrimp are put into it. After adding the shrimp, pour in a half cup of vinegar. It is impossible to time them; just watch them carefully, and after they turn pink let them boil long enough to shrink well from the backs of the shells. Serve them instantly while hot, and make each guest do his own peeling. Just furnish extra bowls for the shells, plenty of catchup and crackers – and beer for lubrication.
    I was selecting my last mess of shrimp from the deck of a friend’s trawler, when I saw something on the hatch that made me forget everything else. He held it up for my admiring eyes. “Golly,” he said. “Ain’t it pretty?”
    Truly, it was beautiful. My mouth watered. But it was not the kind of thing you can buy, or reasonably ask for, even from a man who would give you the shirt from his back. For a few seconds we were both silent in epicurean contemplation. Finally he ran his tongue over his lips.
    “My missus,” he said, “she’s been awantin’ one ever since the season opened. Next trip, if I can catch n couple more in the trawl—”
    He laid it back on the hatch. It was a young, tender, spotted octopus.
    Ah, me! Perhaps next time!

    1942
    (Saturday Evening Post, vol. 214, issue 49, June 6)

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