The Poor Mouth

Beaches: Bergman’s Seventh Seal

[Note: This column first appeared on The Huffington Post.]

It was a dark and stormy night. I’d just spent close to six hours in traffic, at least some of which had been caused by an escaped kitten scampering around on I-95 outside Providence. My reward, on arriving in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, for the tenth annual Wellfleet Oyster Festival, was an old fashioned glass brimming with ice, Gosling’s ginger beer, and Myer’s Dark Rum.

For all the pedants out there, lurching zombie-like toward the comments section, I’m aware that the Dark ’n’ Stormy (a trademark of Gosling’s) is properly made with Gosling’s Black Seal in a highball glass. I was in no position to care, and the following night I reprised my devil-may-care flouting of the rules by mixing a Dark ’n’ Stormy with the delicious, chocolatey Kraken Black Spiced Rum.

The Kraken depicted on its bewitching, double-handled jug is a giant octopus, but the word also refers to a giant squid—in fact, to any colossal sea monster. Tennyson gave the Kraken life in this sonnet, which speaks of its “[u]nnumber’d and enormous polypi” and reassures us that, for the time being, “[t]he Kraken sleepeth.” It sounds rather like Cthulhu, the half-bat, half-octopus aquatic megafauna dreamed up by Providence’s favorite son, H. P. Lovecraft.

I had nautical horror on the brain all weekend. What goes with seafood, rum, and howling, wind-lashed nights blacker than a lobster’s armpits? Keeping it literal, we have classics like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1956), Jaws (1975), and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009). The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has tentacles in slippery abundance. How about John Carpenter’s seaside classic The Fog (1980) or James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989)? The Lovecraft fanatic might prefer Dagon (2001) or the silent short The Call of Cthulhu (2005).

At the risk of sounding unforgivably pretentious, I recommend you prepare a batch of Clams Casino or Oysters Rockefeller, whip up a pitcher of Dark ’n’ Stormies, and watch Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). It isn’t a horror movie, though it does feature the bubonic plague, Death in a wetsuit, and the line “A skull is more interesting than a naked woman.” Still, its beautiful beaches give Turks and Caicos a run for their money, and its striking, high-contrast imagery is Halloween to the core. (Commenters: Were Antonius Block [Max von Sydow] and Jöns [Gunnar Björnstrand] by any chance the basis for these two?)

Maybe I’m just squeamish about sea monsters. In the front matter of Moby-Dick, William Paley’s Natural Theology is quoted: “The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale’s heart.”

I like my seafood a bit more manageable than that. Wellfleet oysters, crassostrea virginica, are substantial, briny but not overwhelmingly so, and do not shoot geysers of blood when you bite into them. They also make for the finest oyster stew I’ve ever eaten—which, apart from all this, and staggering quantities of raw oysters on the half-shell, is the best feature of the Festival.

I’ve tried unsuccessfully to determine how the stew is made—the stew-masters are secretive, and will cop to nothing but the use of “a little salt and pepper”—but I can say confidently that the trick is not skimping on butter, cream . . . or oysters. Eight dollars will get you more and fatter oysters in a cup of Wellfleet stew than twice that would get you in any restaurant, unless my brine-addled mind was playing tricks on me. You can fill any remaining stomach volume with sausage, roasted sweet corn dusted with sea salt and Old Bay, fried dough, and clam cakes. And remember, never eat an oyster with a funky smell, or chances are you’ll find yourself sprawled on the beach, bargaining with Death—and it won’t involve a friendly game of chess. 

The Murders in the Roux Morgue: Fulci’s The Beyond

[Note: This column first appeared on The Huffington Post.]

Last week, to inaugurate my Halloween movie-and-food series, I presented Huffington Post readers with as unappetizing a combination as I could think of: Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria and Beef Heart alla Soffritto. Today we return to the world of orrore Italiano—horror gory enough to make a Borgia wince—with Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981). I must admit, when I picked Fulci’s flick for this week’s lesson, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. My friend Neil, with whom I’ve been attending horror conventions for years, had a Beyond poster tacked up in his bedroom in high school, so I assumed I’d seen the movie and forgotten it. I was mistaken. You don’t forget The Beyond without some very expensive therapy.

I had seen Fulci’s Zombie (1979), famous for its surprisingly convincing zombie versus shark fight scene, and considered pairing it with citrus-marinated mako steak. I wish I had; it would have meant I could skip The Beyond. Unfortunately, like a zombie, I’m always thinking with my stomach, and I had a hankering for some bayou cuisine.

Louisiana has long been a favorite gothic setting. The Last Exorcism and the wildly popular True Blood are fine recent examples of the bayou’s persistent appeal. Perhaps you’ve read, or watched, Interview with a Vampire. Perhaps you’ve blown a few bucks on a New Orleans ghost tour or a “monkey and cock” voodoo fetish; perhaps you’ve been relieved of your wallet by a charming local in Saint Louis Cemetery #1. 

All this belongs to the Big Cheesy, as far as Fulci is concerned. Instead of giving us vampires or voodoo, he goes straight to the source: The Beyond’s setting, the dilapidated, plantation-style Seven Doors Hotel, sits on one of the seven gates to hell. This is established in a sepia-toned opening sequence—in 1927, everything was sepia-toned—in which a painter named Schweick is crucified in the hotel by a mob convinced that he’s a “warlock.” 

Decades later, Europe is inspired to record an unforgettable rock classic, and the hotel is inherited by a young woman named Liza (Catriona MacColl), who hopes to renovate and reopen it. So it’s a lot like the 1986 Tom Hanks classic The Money Pit, except with gouged-out eyes (a Fulci specialty), morgue mayhem, hungry tarantulas, crucifixions, demons, zombies, and a pretty spooky matte painting of hell. Oh, and a blind woman gets mauled by her own guide dog. Your typical screwball comedy.

What’s for dinner? The truth is, unless you’re a serious gore aficionado, you don’t want to visit The Beyond. Stick with Sookie or Lestat or, I don’t know, Easy Rider. But you do want to try The New Best Recipe’s fantastic Creole-style shrimp and sausage gumbo. I made the easiest version, the one without okra or filé; I also had to substitute spicy Italian sausage for andouille. First, get a pound and a half of small to medium shrimp. Bring the shells, and four and a half cups of water, to a boil over medium-high heat. Turn down to medium-low and simmer twenty minutes, then remove the shells and add a cup of clam juice and three and a half cups of ice water. That’s your stock—now set it aside.

Next, the roux. In a Dutch oven, heat a half-cup of vegetable oil over medium-high heat, to about 200°. Turn the heat to medium and stir in a half-cup of flour very, very slowly over the course of twenty minutes. Don’t stop for any reason! If you suspect your glorious liquid mahogany is burning, take it off the heat for a bit, but keep that wooden spoon moving. 

Add the “holy trinity” (Creole for mirepoix), in this case two finely chopped onions, one diced bell pepper, and one diced stalk of celery. Add six cloves pressed garlic, as well as cayenne, salt, and pepper to your liking (I think the Best Recipe skimps on cayenne). Keep stirring for ten minutes, and don’t worry, it’s supposed to be a thick, stubborn paste. Drizzle in one quart of stock while stirring hard, and then dump in the rest. Add a couple bay leaves, simmer and skim for thirty minutes; add as much sausage as you please, simmer for thirty minutes; add shrimp, cook five minutes; serve over rice, with a Sazerac, an Abita, or a foaming goblet of Tabasco sauce.

Atlantic Excrabaganza

[Note: This column first appeared on The Huffington Post.]

People collect all sorts of crap: matchbooks, stamps, campaign buttons, shot glasses, G.I. Joes, telegraph line insulators, taxidermy, Hummels, Klingon weaponry, even gently used underwear. I collect U.S. states. I’ve dreamed of having my own road show; it’d be called “Food Gas Longing,” and I’d sign off every episode “with Slim Jim wishes and Gatorade dreams.” Since I don’t have any sponsors, it’s been slow going, but in April I logged my forty-third state—South Carolina.

Every state I’ve seen has been by car. Traveling to Charleston and Edisto Island from Connecticut (one of the nine states I’ve called home, for readers tempted to picture me in madras shorts and a Vineyard Vines ascot) meant passing through old favorites, most notably Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina.

Along this route I can recommend, for starters, Sambo’s Tavern (283 Front St; 302-674-9724) in Leipsic, Delaware. About Sambo’s, which I didn’t visit on this outing, my friend John B— wrote, “Pictures of every NASCAR driver of the early 1990s ring the dining room. . . . [T]he crabs make it. High quality, fresh, local crabs. We got our dozen for $35 and had a fun afternoon banging them with mallets and washing down the brine with lager.” (Yuengling, in these parts.) Sambo's was my introduction to crab croquet. I can report that a basket of salt-encrusted blue crabs is a meal like no other. In heaven, these will be the bar snack, mark my words.

In Virginia, I spent the night on Chincoteague Island, renowned for its population of wild ponies, immortalized by Marguerite Henry in Misty of Chincoteague (1947), Sea Star, Orphan of Chincoteague (1949), and others. I can’t vouch for Ms. Henry’s oeuvre, with which I’m unfamiliar; Publishers Weekly had hard words for the “grating overuse of exclamation points” in her “disappointing” novel Brown Sunshine of Sawdust Valley (1998). I can promise that the sight of raggedy, ruminative feral ponies in the adjacent Assateague Island State Park is nothing short of magical.

Chincoteague is underwhelming in the off-season. Most restaurants are closed, and one’s inner animal-rights fanatic may be awakened by the sight of ponies penned up on commercial property—presumably for those vacationers more intrigued by soft-serve and souvenirs than a patient foray into the state park. But there’s serviceable seafood, and I suspect it only gets better in the summertime. Try Bill’s Seafood Restaurant (4040 Main St; 757-336-5831), an unpretentious spot (“honey, there’s nothing wrong with the butter—it’s cheese spread”) which boasts a classic oyster stew with Virginia ham, and a generous shellfish “tower,” which will be removed from its display stand as soon as you’ve had a moment to admire it. The stone crab claws and raw oysters are fat and fresh.

When leaving Chincoteague, one should be vigilant for peanut stands. Boiled peanuts (or “balt peanuts,” as they’re called in Tennessee) are exactly what they sound like: raw peanuts boiled in salt water. They’re sold self-serve in Ziploc along some of the less-trafficked byways. A welcome alternative to Slim Jims.

I’ll mention Wilmington, North Carolina’s Firebelly Lounge (265 North Front St; 910-763-0141) in passing, because I don’t remember what I ate there—not the frog legs, which a waiter warned me were a novelty food that tastes just like . . . etc. Firebelly is of interest primarily because it offers generous portions (of whatever I ate) and because Steve Buscemi was stabbed there while filming something with Vince Vaughn. Just don’t leave Wilmington without marveling at its well-stocked Serpentarium, where no one will prevent you from taunting a King Cobra until it tries to bite you through the glass.

The highlight of this route is the SeeWee Restaurant in Awendaw, South Carolina (4808 U.S. 17; 843-928-3609‎), technically inside the Francis Marion State Park. SeeWee is no secret, having been promoted by Jane and Michael Stern of Roadfood fame, but it deserves all the enthusiastic publicity it can get. Be sure to get fried oysters, fried shrimp, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, macaroni and cheese, butter beans, collard greens, hush puppies, Nehi grape soda, banana pudding, and, best of all, she-crab soup. The soup comes with a NyQuil cup of sherry, to mix in to one’s taste.

Summer is soft-shell crab season, as many readers are doubtless aware. I scored only one soft crab, in Charleston, at the Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar (205 East Bay St; 843-853-8600). This may be a tourist magnet—though not on the order of the Myrtle-worthy Noisy Oyster or A.W. Shuck’s—but if it is, that’s fine by me, because what am I if not a professional tourist? I ordered a deep-fried crab with a succotash of bacon and corn, and the second thing I did upon returning home, after preparing an alligator steak bought on Edisto Island, was buy five soft-shell blue crabs and go to town on them.

A quick guide to eating this summery delicacy:

• A soft-shell crab is one that’s molting. If you live on the Atlantic Coast, the soft-shell crabs you’ll find at your local fish market are blue crabs. It’s best to buy these live, but it can be hard to tell if they are, as they’ll come out of a fridge, barely moving (if at all), and will not snap at you like a lobster. As long as they’ve been refrigerated, it doesn’t matter if they’re essentially dead. They should be cleaned as close to dinnertime as possible.

• Cleaning a soft-shell crab is faith-shaking. You’ll need to shear the crab’s face off with scissors. Don’t be alarmed by its bloodcurdling scream . . . no, really, it’s probably dead, and even if it’s not, it won’t run around like a chicken does when you cut its head off. It’s definitely incapable of running around. You’ll need to strip its gills, the feathery things under the shell that look like you wouldn’t want to eat them. You’ll also need to yank off the “apron,” the panel on the ass-end of the crab’s underbelly.

• Bread the crab in a mixture of egg, flour, cornmeal, and special seasoning—a little salt and cayenne pepper, or Cajun spice. Fry it in oil or butter, about four minutes on each side. For a Gullah-style sandwich, serve the crab on a roll with lettuce, tomato, black pepper, and seasoned mayo.

And check out Max Watman’s grilled soft-shell crab post and recipes.

Village of the Damned Tasty

HAT YOU’RE LOOKING at there is not only the best lobster roll I’ve ever eaten—which may not mean much coming from one so given to hyperbole—but also, if memory serves, a pan-Connecticut prize winner. I think. There was something about that on the menu. Anyway, I’m not big on fact checking, so just take my word for it: This even beats the world-famous one they serve at Abbott’s Lobster-in-the-Rough in Noank. You can find it at the excellent but rather unprepossessing Marnick’s in Stratford.

A hot lobster roll in Connecticut generally means whole pieces, as opposed to lobster salad, but what sets this one apart is its almost alchemical admixture of melted butter and salt, the way it both glazes the claws and soaks into the toasted bun, though not so much as to spoil its crunchiness. Sliced beets were a perfect accompaniment to this, tasty but plain enough to cleanse the palate after each bite of lobster meat.

The mashed potatoes are to make you full enough not to break down and order a second lobster roll, which are reasonably priced but not, on the Poor Mouth’s budget, cheap. Oh yeah, and they make a pretty sick Monte Cristo as well.

The best thing about Marnick’s is that after making an abject glutton of yourself, you can walk off some of the calories at what is surely one of the most unusual beaches on earth. Pleasure Beach, which lies partly in Stratford and partly in Bridgeport, was cut off to automobile traffic when arsonists burned its bridge down in 1996. It can still be accessed on foot by walking along the spit of land visible in the Google Map linked above. 

The spit is, according to Wikipedia, “a protected refuge for endangered birds (piping plover, osprey) and plants (prickly pear cactus, southern sea lavender).” Okay, birds, great, whatever, but now for the awesome part. When the bridge burned, the city could no longer provide emergency services to the island. So instead of fixing the bridge, they just evicted everyone from what is basically a small town’s worth of cottages.  And then they let nature take its course, in the Hobbesian sense. Welcome to a postapocalyptic fearscape—with simply gorgeous sunsets!

Pretty much every house is in this condition, or worse. Keep your eyes peeled for squirrels, cats, white-tailed rabbits, creepy broken toys, bottles, syringes, and white power graffiti. You may find yourself speaking in horror movie dialogue: “I’m not sure we’d better go in there.” “Did you hear that?” “I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.”

Guess what? You are being watched—by Stratford Police webcams. You know, in case you were thinking of extra breaking some windowpanes.

OysterFest Redux

FTER UNDERGOING EXTENSIVE PAST-LIFE, or rather past-month, regression therapy, my associate Cricket (the names have not been changed) was able to remember how to make oyster stew. Sort of. For the brave souls who would like to try this at home, and who have a cauldron handy, I give you her ‘recipe’: “I have watched them a couple of times. They throw a big glob of butter into the hot skillet, where it sizzles . . .”

“Then they start throwing in the condiments from the tray—lots of chopped garlic, tomatoes, the green herb mixture—what else? Did you get a picture of that tray?” I did. Here it is. Chopped green onions—but what the hell is that mixture that looks like fermented grass clippings?

“After sautéing for a couple of minutes, they open a quart of oysters and pour them into the pan. They shake that around for a minute or two and then pour in a bunch of cream. When that is hot, they add it to the big cauldron at the end of the line. . . . Now, somehow potatoes show up in this concoction, which raises the question of the big pot—did they start out with chowder base? Or just potatoes? Is the guy at the end adding already-cooked potatoes? This is something we will have to investigate next year.”

Dagon Come and Me Wan’ Go Home

OWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT. Some call him the true master of the horror story. Others call him a misunderstood genius. Still others (me, I mean) call him a corpse-like weirdo whose writing sounds like Satan hired William F. Buckley Jr. to write publicity copy for Hell. Consider this sentence from “The Call of Cthulhu”: “The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.” He’s talking about the giant bat-winged, squid-faced cephalopod Cthulhu. Cthulhu is not, it turns out, all that hard to describe.

“The Call of Cthulhu” has never been made into a major motion picture, but a Lovecraft novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, was adapted into a monstrously (haw haw) crappy Spanish movie called Dagon in 2001. Dagon is about a fishing village that sells its soul, so to speak, to an evil sea-god in exchange for lots of fish and golden ingots. Again, Dagon sucks. Do not watch it. Rent a real movie like La Dolce Vita for a change and try this sophisticated and cosmopolitan Mario Batali recipe for stuffed and grilled mini-Dagons.

I was happy to learn that squid is cheap as hell—eight calamari, about a pound of squid, cost just seven bucks at Pagano’s Seafood in Norwalk. The squidmongers were friendly, courteous, and professional. They’d damn well better be—like a WalMart security camera, Dagon is always watching his minions.

This recipe reveals why recipes are often of little use to truly incompetent novice cooks. Mario says: “Remove the tentacles and clean the calamari, leaving the bodies whole.” What actually needs to happen, in Lovecraftian terms: “First, decapitate the Thing with an eldritch cleaver engraved with eldritch glyphs (like the Wüsthof logo). With thumb and forefinger, probe the briny, abysmal recesses of its mucilaginous form, relieving it of its pulpy polyps; its quill-like, translucent spine; its ink as Stygian as a thousand dead stars.” Then you peel it and wash it. Nasty. Not to mention, uh, eldritch.

Prepare the stuffing thusly: “Heat the olive oil in a 10- to 12-inch sauté pan until smoking. Add the garlic and sun-dried tomatoes and sauté until light golden brown, about 30 seconds. Add the bread crumbs and continue cooking until well mixed. Allow to cool then stir in the thyme, scallions and parsley.” Stuff ’em. Grill for about ten minutes, add to the pasta of your choice, and . . . pray for a swift death. Cthulhu fhtagn!

The Road to Wellfleet

ELLFLEET, MASSACHUSETTS, located near the tip of Cape Cod, is the namesake of a particularly fine specimen of oyster, and the home of an annual festival celebrating the same. According to the website of the Wellfleet OysterFest, “Wellfleet oysters have been considered some of the world’s best for generations. The Wellfleet oyster is an eastern oyster, crassostrea virginica by species, the same kind of oyster that grows in Long Island Sound, as far south as the Chesapeake Bay, and up into Canada’s Maritime Provinces in the north.”

Not being a WASP, or all that much of a beach person, I’d never heard of Wellfleet until recently; my knowledge of Cape Cod was limited to a handful of Teddy Kennedy obituaries and a night spent in Hyannis during a blizzard last year. The good news is that I was introduced to Wellfleet by two friends who needed to fill an unexpected vacancy in the cottage they’d rented for the oyster festival. I cleared my desperately busy schedule, bought a New England-style blue and yellow raincoat, and struck out for the only place whiter than Plymouth Rock.

A few posts from now I intend to address the fact that the main themes of this blog—poverty, hardship, and whining—are often nowhere to be found in the actual foods and activities depicted herein. In the present case, I’ll just have to say that I have some very generous friends and leave it at that. I have those friends to thank for this oyster stew, one of the most alarmingly satisfying cups of food I’ve ever eaten. The line for this stuff extended literally down the length of Wellfleet’s main street.

My intention was to take as many photos as possible of the cooks’ preparations, that we might be able to reproduce the stew when we got home. Alas, their hands moved pretty fast, and I was hopelessly distracted from my task by the smells their cauldrons were kicking up.

I’m not sure if this guy is the celebrated “Chopper,” whose name adorns that truncated sign, or one of his colleagues, but in any case I suspect he is a world-class shucker. He’s so grizzled that he even smokes his cigarette in that grizzled-dude way. He could probably open a gross of oysters with his driver’s license before you even got the knife drawer open.

There were also clams—and nautical kitsch—in abundance.

This man was a talented shucker of quahogs. Unfortunately, he also happened to be wearing New England Patriots-themed dreadlocks and is obviously a Red Sox fan. All I’m saying is, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if he got his hands caught in some kind of machinery.

More oysters. Smell that brine, y’all.

Once more, with cocktail sauce. I’m not a huge fan of Sam Adams, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Mussels—to round out the Holy Trinity of bivalves.

This last photograph was taken at Wellfleet’s imaginatively named Bookstore & Restaurant. I’m in no position to attest to the overall quality of the restaurant, though the clams (and franks) were just fine, but the bookstore is incredible. A wealth of old postcards, magazines, mystery novels, and so on will make you feel like you’re in the attic of the weirdest grandma in history. Do not visit Wellfleet without dropping a few bucks at this joint.