This story is presented in celebration of Women’s History Month, the theme for which in 2026 is “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future.”

Heather Rose flashes a knowing smile toward her sister, Becky, across a table at Blackbeard’s Grill, their family’s seafood restaurant in Beaufort. “Honey, we’ve got some gooood memories together.”

“Epic memories,” Becky replies.

Those unforgettable moments were often squeezed into late nights between the grueling days when Heather clocked 12-hour kitchen shifts, and Becky, stepping away from the restaurant and neighboring Rose Seafood Market, worked dawn to dusk, moving dirt, hauling rocks and setting shrubs for her own landscaping company.

Their grind never stood a chance against the tide.

“When darks come and the businesses closed, we go get in the truck, go to the boat ramp,” Heather says.

Pushing off for the banks to fish until the sun touched the horizon, the women were overjoyed to be under the stars, even that night when a mud-clogged motor stranded them, exhausted and ravenous, until their parents arrived like a rescue squad with cheese biscuits.

“We just sat there in the boat eating those biscuits. We could barely hold our eyes open,” Heather chuckles, Becky nodding in rhythm. “But we had a boatload of flounders, and we had spent all night talking to each other.”

The sisters’ bond is as deep as their roots on the Carolina coast. It’s a connection forged in the salt of their shared seafood heritage and tested by the daily demands of the family business.

Despite the relentless labor of running both Blackbeard’s and Rose Seafood Market, and the looming shadow of an uncertain commercial fishing industry, Heather and Becky are unwavering. They’ve made it their mission to keep their landmark corner of Beaufort thriving for the next generation.

A legacy without blueprints

Surrounded by black-and-white snapshots of the commercial fishers and boat builders who came before, the women reflect on the proud way of life handed down to them. Today, the sisters lead that legacy: Heather oversees the seafood market, while Becky serves as the chef and proprietor of Blackbeard’s Grill.

Their ties to the coast reach back to the 1700s, Becky says. Ancestors were boat captains in the Northeast before navigating south to Swan Quarter, where a bay bears the Rose name. Some relatives headed to Cape Lookout, establishing the early Rose Town community.

In 1910, their great-great-grandfather, George Rose, moved his family from the cape to Harkers Island. There, later generations established Rose Brothers Boat Works, which became famous for crafting fine wooden yachts and charter boats built entirely by eye without plans or blueprints.

It was in that boatyard that Heather and Becky’s parents, Rodney and Mary, first met.

Rose Seafood Market was born of necessity. Frustrated by low dockside prices, Rodney and Mary founded the business in 1986 to eliminate the middleman. What started as a backyard mom-and-pop grew into a Marshallberg fish house sourcing from 30 local commercial fishers. By 1993, the couple moved to their current Beaufort location, soon after adding a take-out window. Two years later, they opened Blackbeard’s Grill to highlight “Down East” heritage recipes.

Today, the sisters manage day-to-day operations, with their parents’ constant inspiration and presence. The women draw strength from recollections of their father networking with fishermen, setting the standard for relationship building his daughters rely on today.

Dad, who still fishes, pops in — though not often enough, Heather laments, missing her father — to deliver and help process the catch, as well as share insight with customers about the challenges facing commercial fishers.

Years of watching their mother diplomatically negotiate the sale of thousands of pounds of fish weekly to far-flung markets in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, then turning around to masterfully head shrimp, shuck scallops and pack fish, made anything seem possible.

“Growing up and seeing that, I never felt like a woman was out of place in this industry,” Becky says of the male-dominated seafood sector.

The market still sources catches docked by local commercial fishers, including Heather, and carries beloved Rose family recipes, like their Aunt Dora’s shrimp salad. Locals watch Blackbeard’s specials for regional favorites such as scallop fritters and hard crab stew. Offerings depend on what’s fresh next door.

The scale is staggering. “We’re probably going to feed about 60,000 people here (at Blackbeard’s), and just on five nights that we’re open each week, for the year,” Becky says. Between the restaurant and the market’s grab-and-go section, which Becky stocks with crab pies, lasagnas, shrimp salad and more, the sisters are in a state of constant motion.

“We love the connection,” Becky says. “When you go and catch something yourself, do all the work involved in doing that, and then you prepare it and cook it for somebody, and you hand it to them and they eat it…that’s a feeling that can’t be duplicated in any other way.”

‘Don’t fight it, accept it’

Heather remembers happy childhood days clamming and shrimping with her parents and packing seafood at their then-fledgling business. “I was young, full of energy, you know, and always willing and anxious to help.”

Becky, 11 years younger, was just a toddler at the time, trying to stack boxes in her tiny oilskins. As a youngster, she headed shrimp after school at Rose Seafood in Beaufort and told customers, “My daddy caught these.”

“I still have some older ladies that come here and say, ‘Were you that cute little blonde-headed girl that waited on me in the seafood market?’”

Despite those precious memories, both women envisioned paths away from the water. In college, Becky studied marketing, a talent she skillfully applies to the businesses’ engaging social media feeds. Heather worked for 10 years as an officer with the Morehead City Police Department. Throughout their own careers, both sisters kept a foot in the family seafood business.

“I think both of us felt that was our calling,” Becky reflects.

“There was a time when I was younger, I was always trying to run away from it,” Heather adds.

“Well, I think we both knew how hard it was,” Becky says, finishing her sister’s thought.

The pair’s management era began with the COVID-19 pandemic. When the virus’s spread shuttered dining rooms, the Roses, like many restaurateurs, turned to walking takeout orders to vehicles lined up in the parking lot. By then, the market had closed, but with the public’s limited access to grocers and other seafood outlets, the Roses realized that they needed to reopen the store to sustain the community and their own livelihoods.

Heather had already left police work to help her parents at the restaurant, but she was facing burnout even before the pandemic. That’s when Becky stepped in, leaving an unfulfilling job in the wholesale plant industry to help her family keep up.

“It was really hard on me at first, because I hadn’t really been dealing with seafood for a decade,” she remembers. “It was hard to build up to the strength and endurance that it takes to clean 500 pounds of spots a day, to filet 1,000 pounds of flounder, to head 1,000 pounds of shrimp.”

The sisters stop to compare scars. “You can look at our hands, and you know,” Becky says.

Heather smiles. “Me and Beck, we look at each other when we’re exhausted and we say, ‘Don’t fight it, accept it. This is your calling.’”

‘These are the really special times’

Demanding work and a powerful desire to make their parents proud fuel the sisters’ mission. They also genuinely like their jobs.

Becky, always a foodie, found that working in horticulture deepened her interest in herbs and cooking, setting her up as a chef who understands both local food culture and how to craft contemporary dishes like crispy crab Rangoon with sweet Thai chili sauce or half-shell oysters roasted with bacon jam, a dollop of goat cheese to finish.

“She literally elevates this kitchen to a different level than it’s ever been,” Heather says of her sister. “She has a lot of pride, and she’s, she’s a perfectionist. She wants it to be right and won’t accept it any other way.”

Heather loves nothing more than fishing, but her wide-ranging experience in and outside the business make her indispensable to both operations, Becky says. Heather’s seafood chowder is an enduring menu staple, and she formulated the various breading recipes used to fry different seafoods.

“The tenacity,” Becky says of Heather, “if she makes up her mind that we’re doing something or she’s doing something, she’s doing it…And she can wire things. She’s very mechanical, and I am totally not…So when we come together, we don’t fight or argue like sisters sometimes do. We really work well together.”

Who will take on the business years from now is a constant worry, especially as North Carolina commercial fishers lose docks to new waterfront development. They also face fierce competition from recreational fishing interests with the capital to fund lobbyists and marketing campaigns that, as the sisters see it, demonize fishing families as destroyers of the very resources they depend on.

“We don’t have family to leave it to,” Heather says. “And that makes me very sad,” Becky adds, “and it’s something I think about every night before I go to bed.”

That uncertainty pulls at them, but it hasn’t slowed their pace. Instead of pulling back, the duo doubles down with new ideas, like Heather’s upcoming seafood boils to go and adding beer and wine sales to the market’s offerings. Becky takes on public education, sharing the story of the state’s seafood heritage through speaking engagements and staging fundraising dinners aimed at preserving the commercial fishing way of life.

Both agree they’d like nothing better than to fire up the boat after work more often and head out for an all-nighter. Meantime, they try to live by the advice Becky often gives Heather.

“You’re going to look back on today, and you’re gonna say, ‘Those were good times,’ even if you’re having a bad day here … We got to make the most out of each day, because these are really special times right now for this business and for our family.” 

From the starvation and struggle of the ill-fated Lost Colony to the house-snatching fury of the latest nor’easter, endurance has always been a primary occupation on North Carolina’s remote Outer Banks. Even today, with soaring bridges and ribbons of asphalt connecting the outside world, a blustery winter day can isolate a soul in relentless gray.

But for locals who call Hatteras Island home, one bite of a savory, golden brown fish cake reminds them why they choose to stay on these unsteady sands.

Sharon Peele Kennedy understood that devotion better than most. A culinary icon known through her cookbook, “What’s for Supper,” and her voice on local radio stations, she was the primary guardian of Outer Banks foodways.

For Kennedy, who passed in January 2024, a plate of fish cakes wasn’t just a meal; it was an essential starting point for stories about the traditional Hatteras way of life she cherished.

To taste a fish cake in the “Banker” style, the name locals use for the ancestral residents of these islands, is to take a bite of history. Born from the resourceful kitchens of coastal families, these aren’t the typical heavily seasoned fried patties. Just as their forebears did at least two centuries ago, cooks here hand-flake fresh, local fish and then gently fold it with mashed potatoes and not much else.

Kennedy’s own recipe was handed down through generations. Her father, Maxton Peele, was a commercial long-haul and pound-net fisherman who cooked “in the traditional island style” of barely seasoning seafood to preserve its delicate flavor, Kennedy wrote in “What’s for Supper.” Her mother, Juanita Peele, was an expert at adding “unexpected touches” to those dishes.

Kennedy started working at Hatteras-area seafood restaurants when she was just 12 and grew up to become a champion for North Carolina’s commercial fishing families.

“This is a very traditional food on these banks,” Kennedy told me while she shaped fish cakes for a 2023 fundraising dinner in Nags Head to benefit NC Catch, a nonprofit promoting North Carolina seafood. 

Usually, leftover fish was “repurposed by mixing it all together … potatoes, onions and fish,” Kennedy said. “A little salt, a little pepper and an egg. And then shape it. That’s it.”

Such simplicity was forged in an era when grocery stores were nonexistent on Hatteras and thrift was the essential lifeline for island families. The first paved road didn’t open until the 1950s, and a boat or ferry was the only access to the island until a bridge opened in 1963. As Kennedy often reminded her audiences, Bankers “used what they had … what grew in the garden.”

Fortunately, fish was plentiful and could be salt-preserved for the larder. Onions and white potatoes – long known as “Irish potatoes” along the North Carolina shore from Virginia to eastern Carteret County – were the other essentials. Both thrived in sandy coastal soil. The humble staples formed the heart of the Banker fish cake.

Those potatoes and onions hint at how fish cakes became a Hatteras Island tradition, though the local recipe’s exact origin and timeline remain a mystery. When English settlers first arrived at Roanoke Island, the British were not yet potato eaters. While Europeans were introduced to the vegetable in the mid-1500s, most did not widely accept it until the 1700s.

While some credit Scandinavian sailors with the invention of potato-based fiskekaker, others point to the coastal traditions of Ireland. There, boiling potatoes in seawater to serve alongside the daily catch was one kind of survival meal, a flavor profile strikingly similar to the fish cake.

Regardless of who first mashed the two together, the concept found a perfect home on the Outer Banks.

For decades, the threat of piracy and the memory of the Lost Colony kept many settlers away from those shores, but by the mid-1600s, potato and onion farming had taken root in the nearby Albemarle region. As piracy dissipated in the early 1700s and more settlers moved to the barrier islands, they brought “Irish potatoes” and onions with them.

All the ingredients were finally lined up for an Outer Banks fish cake. While Kennedy’s cookbook also offered variations made with rice or hush puppy batter, the basic recipe many Hatteras locals use has remained unchanged: a modest, resourceful marriage of the garden and the sea.

As Kennedy shaped fish cakes for that NC Catch dinner at Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café in Nags Head, her son Jeffery Kennedy stepped in to grab a full tray. He gently laid the plump fish cakes into a deep fryer behind his mother. The pair’s easy cadence made it clear that this was not the first time the family had cooked fish cakes together.

Sizzling in oil, the fish cakes sent up a mouthwatering aroma. As Jeffery lifted the golden-brown disks from the fryer, his mother advised that any leftover fish would do – drum, bluefish, speckled trout, mackerel, whatever was available – whether baked, broiled or boiled. Throughout the process, she repeated how easy fish cakes were to prepare, offering not a hint of how utterly delicious they would be.

“Show her Jeffery,” Kennedy told her son. He picked up one of the hot patties and split it open with his hands. Inside, flaked white fish mingled with mashed potatoes, sending up a delectable fragrance. Meaty and substantial, the cake somehow maintained a pillowy texture that contrasted beautifully with its crisp exterior. One bite and I wished I could stay on the Outer Banks forever.

Fish Cakes

4 cups of cooked fish

3 cups of mashed potatoes

1 small onion diced or 1/3 cup chopped green onions

2 eggs, beaten

Salt and pepper

Flake fish in a bowl with mashed potatoes, add onions and beaten eggs, season to taste. Shape into small patties. Fry in about ¼-inch (deep) medium hot oil, until nice and brown.

Source: “What’s for Supper” by Sharon Peele Kennedy

Note: Because cooks often rely on leftover fish for fish cakes, the patties are traditionally enjoyed for breakfast. Try them in place of English muffins, use fried eggs instead of poached on top and skip the bacon for a delicious “eggs Benedict.”

Sinking your teeth into a buttery, old-fashioned sweet potato biscuit is a legendary experience quickly fading into North Carolina culinary obscurity despite an almost unbelievable pedigree.

Sweet potato biscuits were reportedly served at the opening of the First Continental Congress in 1774. One hundred and forty-eight years later, the great African American botanist George Washington Carver championed this Southern delight as a crucial way farmers could diversify their crop usage.

That significant history is now mostly memorialized in memory. East Carolina University alumni long past their college days join locals in pining for the version once served at the late Venter’s Grill in Greenville. Shuttered Sweet Potatoes Restaurant in Winston-Salem was celebrated for a recipe that today endures only in cofounder Stephanie Tyson’s “Well Shut My Mouth” cookbook.

With North Carolina foodways vanishing as quickly as residential sprawl eats up the state’s farmland, sweet potato biscuits are becoming rare finds on menus and in the repertoire of home cooks. But in Camden, it stands as a delicious reminder of why such a simple thing is worth saving.

Beyond nostalgia

On a foggy morning in the tiny, coastal community, dogs bound excitedly through endless farm fields. Ruritan Club signs announcing a Brunswick stew sale dominate political H-stakes stuck along the roadside.

Inside a crossroads restaurant marked by an age-tangled oak tree, the caramelly aroma of roasting sweet potatoes fills the kitchen as chef Katherine “Kat” Silverwood’s wooden rolling pin squeaks across a cold-hard block of pastel-orange dough.

“We found that sweet potato biscuits actually act better if you make the dough day before,” she says. “It’s best to let it chill for at least a few hours.”

Silverwood knows what she’s talking about. Her Taylor’s Oak Restaurant produces hundreds of sweet potato biscuits each year, especially around Christmastime when fastidious locals, like many North Carolinians, relish fried country ham on their sweet potato biscuits.

 “You feed a bunch of old farmers, you better be making something from scratch,” Silverwood said.

That kind of cooking is what the chef grew up on in Camden. Vegetables fresh from her parents’ garden and baking with Grandma launched her interest in cooking as a child.

She never encountered sweet potato biscuits until around age 9 or 10. Her sister was dating and ultimately married a farmer. His mother made sweet potato biscuits. Silverwood was smitten at first bite. Within a year or so, she was baking her own.

“It’s like that perfect balance of the sweet and the savory,” she said.

As much as Silverwood loved cooking, she didn’t envision it as a worthwhile career. Instead, she joined the military and worked in construction but always had a kitchen side gig. Along the way, she honed her sweet potato biscuit recipe, testing tips from fellow chefs, like folding the dough during rolling to achieve flaky layers.

Eventually, Silverwood accepted her calling, taking a full-time chef position and dreaming of one day opening a restaurant. Her position left time for a night job. She asked the grandfather of a childhood friend if he needed a hand at the family’s new venture, Taylor’s Oak Restaurant. The spot held a special place in Silverwood’s own heritage. Her maternal aunt married into the Taylor family. The couple helped raise Silverwood’s mother after she lost her parents.

“They were only open one day a week. So, I asked if they would like some help, maybe get open for breakfast in the mornings. And that’s how I started here,” she says. “I wrote the recipe for sweet potato biscuits.”

When Silverwood had the opportunity to purchase the business a few years after starting at Taylor’s in 2018, the chapters of her sweet potato story culminated.

“As soon as we decided we were going to open up for dinner, I was like, ‘We got to have mini sweet potato biscuits go on the tables … that’s our signature,’” Silverwood says.

The perfect bite

Throughout telling her story, Silverwood shares many pointers for preparing and eating sweet potato biscuits. Besides chilling the dough before rolling, the Taylor’s team pinches cold butter into flour by hand, just like Silverwood was taught as a kid. They roast whole, skin-on sweet potatoes. Boiling would introduce too much moisture. Before mashing, they drain all liquid from the vegetable. Bags of the puree are frozen so that biscuits can be made quickly.

Just enough sugar goes into the dough to enhance the sweet potato flavor. That’s different from recipes like the one Venters’ chefs used all those years ago in Greenville. Silverwood’s biscuits are flaky and savory; Venters’ were soft, sweet and pillowy with pronounced notes of warm spices like cinnamon. The recipe for Sweet Potatoes Restaurant’s version falls somewhere in between.

“Everyone has their own different ‘you got to do it this way, you got to do it that way,’” Silverwood says, declining to share the family recipe that inspired her way.

Carver’s formula, among the earliest, verifiable printed recipes, leans soft and savory. Although the biscuits served at the First Continental Congress have been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, no original recipe has been found. Any biscuit recipe Jefferson favored was likely developed in kitchens run by enslaved Africans. This is also true for the sweet and salty combination of fried country ham sandwiched between a sweet potato biscuit.

Silverwood prefers less salty city ham rather than country ham. A slice of New Jersey’s Taylor pork roll (no relation) is even better, she reveals. Sausage plus a little mustard is tasty, too, as was the sandwich she offered with pimento cheese and spicy fried chicken.

Still, most Taylor’s Oak Restaurant customers ask for country ham. It’s easy to understand why when Silverwood finally splits open a hot sweet potato biscuit and lays on sizzling country ham directly from the griddle.

The hot ham melds with the biscuit’s interior, creating an almost creamy texture and old-fashioned flavor that fills your mind with memories of home, family and holiday anticipation. Suddenly, you’re wrapped in thoughts of icy mornings, coffee boiling on an old stove and the simple life you wonder why anyone would leave behind.

“I’ve had a couple people almost bring me to tears because they said ‘That’s just how my grandma used to make it taste,” Silverwood says, “‘exactly like that.’”

With each humble bite, the sweet potato biscuit becomes more than a meal; it is a profound, lasting link between generations. It is the legacy of a waning recipe that fatefully defined one woman’s life and continues, every day in Camden, to feed the soul of an entire community.

Sweet Potato Biscuits

Take:

½ cupful mashed sweet potatoes

½ teaspoon salt

1 cupful flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

2 tablespoons butter or lard

Milk sufficient to make a soft dough.

Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together several times; add these to the potatoes, mixing in with a knife.

Now work the fat into the mixture lightly; add the milk; work quickly and lightly until a soft dough is formed; turn out on a floured board; pat and roll out lightly until about one-half inch thick; cut into biscuits; place on buttered or greased pans and bake 12 or 15 minutes in a quick oven.

Source: “How the Farmer Can Save His Sweet Potatoes and Ways of Preparing Them for the Table” by George Washington Carver (Tuskegee Institute Press 1937).

Serving Southerners true pound cake is a serious culinary dare.

This is not just dessert; it’s a traditional masterpiece. Get it wrong, and you’ll be met with the polite-but-deadly judgment: “Well now, isn’t that interesting.”

Here’s the secret, though: Switching in mock pound cake is what many Southerners do and without a lick of shame. Yes, the true version is the holy grail, tangled up in family history and strong opinions. But the substitute is a welcome compromise that could save you from anxiously staring down the oven, praying for success.

In fact, experts have weighed in: N.C. State Fair baking judges and blue-ribbon winners argue that mock pound cake is every bit as traditional, challenging and delicious as its “true” counterpart.

“It’s only a sin when someone tries to call it a true pound cake,” says longtime judge David Schoening.

How it all started

True pound cake’s pedigree certainly contributes to its exalted status. The first printed recipe, dating to 1747, immediately established the cake’s reputation as a demanding bake. It called for a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of sugar and 12 eggs (six of the whites whipped separately).

The baker’s challenge was to beat the ingredients literally by hand, in a single direction, or with a wooden spoon for a full, excruciating hour before baking the cake in a “quick” oven — a temperature often judged simply by how long the cook could hold a hand inside.

Bakers initially depended on the air they painstakingly beat into pound cake batter to achieve rise — no doubt with fingers crossed while the dessert baked. Exactly when the term “mock” pound cake emerged down South is unclear, but a turning point came around 1881.

In her influential book, “What Miss Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” one of the first published African American chefs, Abby Fisher of South Carolina, offered pound cake recipes calling for “the best yeast powder.” This addition was surely a relief, finally giving bakers formal permission to use a backup leavener.

Around the same time, commercial baking powder became widely available. Pound cake was finally approachable, and it seemed clear what qualified as mock pound cake — or was it?

Exactly what is true mock pound cake?

The debate over the definition of mock pound cake continues to this day. Take Ivy Hilliard of Wilmington, for instance. She won the 2024 N.C. State Fair blue ribbon for true pound cake, yet she grew up on both versions, recipes she believes date back generations within her family.

The story of her pound cake lineage begins with her maternal grandmother, Maggie Massey, whose family settled in North Carolina in the 1740s. Massey baked the finest mock and true cakes (her recipe is the one that secured Hilliard’s 2024 win). Later, Ivy’s mother, Polly Hilliard, was known for her mock pound cake, especially a scrumptious chocolate adaptation.

Flavor variation is one of the licenses granted to mock pound cake bakers. While true pound cake is typically limited to one flavoring — caraway seeds in that first printed recipe, later rose water, vanilla or lemon — mock pound cake has virtually no limits. N.C. State Fair entries have included praline, coconut lemon and Hilliard’s own margarita pound cake made with tequila.

What qualifies as mock pound cake varies as much as the flavors. State fair guidelines specify that true pound cake contains only butter (or margarine, which traditionalists reject), sugar, eggs and flour. “Mock pound cake can include baking powder, baking soda and milk but cannot include boxed cake mix,” the rules state.

Interestingly, Hilliard, like her mother, uses vegetable oil and milk but skips the leavener entirely. Her mock pound cake relies on beating the eggs well for lift — a method that is hardly a guarantee or shortcut.

“It’s like a three-hour process,” Hilliard says of preparing her mother’s mock pound cake. First, all ingredients must be brought to room temperature, and “you’ve always got to sift the flour. You can’t skip it,” she insists. The cake, like the true version, bakes for more than an hour with no peeking allowed.

The payoff is worth the effort, Hilliard says: “When it was my birthday, I would always ask for the mock pound.”

Not as easy as you think

Despite the work involved with preparing mock pound cake, the category draws significantly more fair entries than the true pound cake class — 42 competitors versus 18 in 2025. State fair exhibit manager Debbie O’Brien confirms the conventional wisdom: “That’s the way usually everyone goes because it’s easier.”

Like Hilliard, the 2025 N.C. State Fair mock pound cake champion, Willie Pope of Raleigh, takes extra time, shunning leavener, because that’s how his mother made mock pound cake. He has evaluated recipes with and without leaveners but noticed slight difference in the final taste or texture. So, he continues to “just beat the stew out of the egg whites,” a method that finally earned him his first blue ribbon after about 15 years of entering the competition.

For Pope, it all comes down to nostalgia: “It goes back to what you grew up with,” he says. “This recipe that we always make is one that my mother used to make…And part of her joking was always that for us to get an inheritance, somebody had had to win the state fair contest.”

The final determination of which is better, true or mock pound cake, comes down to personal taste. Hilliard thinks mock versions are moist and velvety inside and out thanks to additions like milk, sour cream or even cream cheese. True pound cake, she says, serves an irresistible golden, crackly crust.

Pope and his family have always loved mock pound cake so much that he’s never bothered with a side-by-side comparison to see if their secret recipe stands up to the true version.

Ultimately, the discussion is less about ingredients and more about what’s in a cook’s heart. As Schoening says, “Mock pound cakes are a true Southern tradition because they’re all about love.”

Maggie Massey’s Mock Pound Cake

Crisco shortening

Flour

2 sticks of butter, at room temperature

3 cups sugar

½ cup Crisco oil

1 cup whole milk

6 eggs

3 cups sifted, all-purpose Red Band flour and ½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon lemon flavoring (see cook’s note)

Cook’s note: This is Ivy Hilliard grandmother’s original recipe. Hilliard’s mother’s chocolate version originally incorporated a full can of Hersey’s Chocolate Syrup. When the company stopped making the canned syrup, the family made their own syrup from scratch and added 14 ounces to this recipe at the end of the creaming process. To make the syrup, blend 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of cocoa and 1½ cups water and a dash of vanilla extract in a saucepot. Bring the mixture to a boil and then let it simmer for about 15 minutes. “And you will have the best chocolate syrup you’ve ever eaten,” Hilliard says.

Cake procedure: Grease a Bundt plan well with Crisco shortening and then dust the pan with flour. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

Cream the butter. Add the sugar and cream well. Add the Crisco oil and cream well. Add the milk and cream well (if using chocolate syrup, add here and cream well). The mixture should be fluffy. Alternately add flour and eggs, beating well after each addition. Add lemon flavor and mix well.

Bake for 1½ hours. Do not open the oven door until the cake has been cooking at least 1 hour or the cake may fall. Test near center. If cake is done, tester will come out clean.

Source: Ivy Hilliard

True Pound Cake

Lard

Sifted flour

2 cups butter, at room temperature

3½ cups sugar

10 large eggs, at room temperature

4 cups sifted all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Cook’s note: This is Hilliard’s grandmother’s recipe, the one that helped Hilliard win the N.C. State Fair pound cake blue ribbon in 2024. Hilliard says, “This cake is too large for a standard Bundt pan. Do not fill the pan closer than 2 inches from the top. If you have excess batter due to a smaller cake pan use excess batter for an extra loaf cake.”

Cake procedure: Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease a Bundt pan with lard and then dust the pan with sifted flour.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Alternately add eggs and flour, beating on low speed after every addition to ensure ingredients are well blended. Add vanilla extract last.

Pour the batter in the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Note: Bake times can vary due to ovens. Check at 1 hour and 15 minutes to monitor doneness. You will need a long cake tester to test doneness as this is a deep cake. If test comes out clean, cake is done. When you remove the cake from oven, let the cake sit for 10 minutes in the pan before you turn it out.

Source: Ivy Hilliard

Note from the author: This is the first photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here.

I want to begin this series by looking at a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton in the years just before the Second World War.

The oldest of the photographs was taken in 1937. Others were taken in 1938 and in the autumn of 1941, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. One other was taken in 1942.

The first group of photographs focuses on the harvest workers, mostly the threshers, but also the diggers. A second group looks at the work of cleaning, grading and bagging the peanuts at a plant and warehouse in Edenton.

An ancient crop native to South America, peanuts spread across much of the world through the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. Farmers in West Africa were among those who came to grow them.

Most historians and ethnobotanists believe that peanuts came to North America, especially to Virginia and North Carolina, via West Africa and the slave trade in the 18th century. By most accounts, they were long considered a crop mainly for feeding hogs and for feeding the enslaved Africans that were forced to raise crops on the region’s plantations.

According to a 2019 article in the journal Peanut Science, southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina were especially important in the crop’s early development in North America in large part because of the slave trade.

In the southeastern part of the North Carolina coast, the Wilmington area was also an important center of peanut farming in the the 18th century. Again, wholly reliant on slave labor.

By 1860, the majority of the peanuts in the U.S. were grown on North Carolina’s coastal plain, though they were rarely grown as a commercial crop.

Little is known about how enslaved people utilized peanuts as a food, though it is assumed that some of the traditional peanut dishes of the Gullah Geechee peoples date to the slavery era. A good description of peanut farming’s early history in the Wilmington vicinity can be found at the website for Poplar Grove Plantation, a historic site built around what used to be a slave labor camp in Pender County.

A number of factors contributed to making peanuts into a successful commercial crop in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Those factors included the adoption of peanuts as an easy-to-carry, nonperishable, high protein food by Civil War soldiers; the groundbreaking research that George Washington Carver did on new food uses for peanuts at Tuskegee Institute; and the collapse of cotton prices and the rise of the boll weevil in the 1920s, which led many southern farmers to search for alternative crops.

Another important factor in the growth of peanuts and peanut farming was the development of popular new peanut products.

Modern peanut butter was invented sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, though there is some disagreement over where it was first made and who first invented it.

Another important development in the growing popularity of peanuts occurred in 1906, when two Italian immigrants, Amadeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi, both innovators in the roast peanut trade, established a partnership that led to the creation of the Planters Nut and Chocolate Co., which is still famous for its “Mr. Peanut” logo and mascot today.

When Obici and Peruzzi located their first plant in Suffolk, Virginia, 50 miles north of Edenton, in 1913, they guaranteed an almost endless demand for peanuts in the northeast corner of North Carolina, and other peanut processing companies followed.

Peanut candies were also growing popular in those first decades of the 20th century. The peanut-laden Baby Ruth candy bar first appeared in 1923, the no less peanutty Mr. Goodbar in 1925, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in 1928, Snickers in 1930, and Payday in 1932.

Cracker Jacks were a bit older — they were first developed in 1898 — but the popularity of Cracker Jacks and roasted peanuts soared with the popularity of baseball in the early 20th century.

All of which is to say, the demand for peanuts skyrocketed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout that time, the center of the peanut farming and peanut processing industry continued to be southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina.

When these photographs were taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the peanut belt in North Carolina ran from the counties on the north side of Albemarle Sound, including Chowan County, where Edenton is, west through Bertie, Martin, Northampton, and Halifax counties.

In those years, Enfield, a small town in Halifax County, was considered the state’s busiest peanut market.

In the photographs below, you will find something of a guide to this part of life and work in Eastern North Carolina’s history.

The photographs give us a glimpse at the people who worked in the peanut fields, and a look into a peanut mill in Edenton.

They introduce us to the kind of work that thousands upon thousands of mainly African American field workers did for much of the 20th century.

But as you will see, the stories behind the photographs also introduce us to people whom I never would have expected to meet in the peanut fields of Eastern North Carolina, including even Bahamian migrant laborers and Italian POWs from North Africa.

Note: I have arranged the photo-essays in my “Working Lives” series in chronological order to the extent possible. I’m beginning with these scenes from the peanut fields in Edenton because the earliest photograph among them is dated 1937. The last in the series will feature pickle factory workers in Faison and Mt. Olive in 1947.

So let’s get started with our first photograph, taken in the midst of threshing season on a peanut farm near Edenton.

-1-

In our first photograph, a broad view of threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton is spread out before us. We can see a field that seems to go on forever, threshers at work, several mules, piles of peanut hay, the dust rising up off a mechanical peanut picker, and a pile of burlap bags heavy with peanuts.

Threshing was hard work, but the hardest work had already been done some weeks earlier, when scores of field workers had dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground and set them out on stakes to cure.

Like beans and peas, peanuts are a legume, technically not a nut, but they are exceptional among the legumes because their pods develop beneath the ground.

To harvest the peanuts in this field, laborers, probably all of them African American, dug up the the whole plant: vine, pods and all. It was a grueling job accomplished with mules, plows, and a great deal of sweat.

After digging the vines out of the ground, the field workers shook the dirt loose from the plants before setting them out to cure. A task that, in my experience, is harder than it sounds and which nobody remembers fondly.

In a field this size, hundreds of field laborers would likely have done the digging, shaking and staking.

Firsthand accounts of peanut field workers’ labors are rare, but on July 5, 1983, the Wilmington Star-News ran an interview with an African American woman who dug peanuts on a large farm around the time that these photographs were taken.

The interview featured Ms. Carrie Simmons Ballard, who was born at Poplar Grove in Pender County in 1905.

The reporter wrote:

“As a child, she ‘put in many hours picking peanuts on The Big Lot’ where her great-grandmother was the main house servant for the Foy family. Her grandmother and mother also worked for the family. ‘They grew some cotton too, but the main farm product was peanuts,’ she said.

“‘I never did much cotton picking, but I sure did my share in the peanut fields…..’”

Ms. Ballard went on to say, “The thing that stands out most in my mind was how hard we worked for so little. It seemed like we had to work so hard for just some food and barely something to wear.”

-2-

In this photograph, we see what is apparently the same Edenton peanut farm, but three years earlier. In the foreground, we get an especially good look at the “shocks” that were typical of peanut farming in that day.

As field workers dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground, they would place stakes in the ground and build up stacks of vines and pods around the stakes so that the pods could cure before threshing. Those mounds of peanut vines were called “shocks.”

Farmers typically left the shocks in the field and let the peanuts cure for five or six weeks before threshing began. To this day, some old-timers brook no doubt that peanuts cured in shocks are more flavorful than those cured in windrows, the more modern way.

-3-

This is another photograph of threshing time at the farm near Edenton.

In this case, we can see workers operating a mechanical thresher, usually called a picker, in the center of the photograph. However, I was really drawn to this photograph because it highlights the peanut shocks stretched out in the field behind the threshers.

A field full of peanut shocks was a sight to see, reflecting endless hours of toil. In the largest fields, such as this one, they always remind me of the scenes in “Anna Karenina” of threshing time in the Russian countryside.

-4-

After the peanuts had cured, farm workers pulled up the stakes and raked up the hay, as it was called, being careful to stay clear of the snakes and rats that were notoriously fond of them.

Horses or mules would then cart the hay to a stationary mechanical picker that operated in the field.

The 1940s was a moment in history when tractors and mules often worked side by side in Eastern North Carolina’s fields.

Even as late as 1940, only about 4% of the state’s farmers owned tractors. Even a large, comparatively prosperous farmer, as the owner of his field must have been, was unlikely to have more than the one tractor, which, as we will see, this farmer was using to power his mechanical picker.

The end of the Age of Mules was nigh, but it had not yet arrived on the eve of the Second World War.

-5-

Here we see workers unloading hay next to the mechanical picker in our peanut field outside Edenton.

On the right, we can see a pile of stakes that have already been stripped of their vines. On the left, a man is stitching up a burlap bag of peanuts that have just come out of the picker.

-6-

By the time this photograph was taken, at least larger peanut farmers were using pickers such as this one that were powered by long belts attached to the back axel of a farm truck or, in this case, a tractor.

Even a few years earlier, horses or mules would have done the job.

-7-

This photograph provides a closer look at the farm’s mechanical peanut picker, a machine that was designed to break up the hay, remove the peanuts from the vines, and shake out debris and dust. It was a technology that had just come into widespread use in the previous two decades.

An unschooled African American farmer and inventor named Benjamin Hicks, in Southampton County, Virginia, filed what is believed to be the first patent for a mechanical peanut picker in 1901.

By all accounts, Hicks cobbled his ingenious machine together with a blacksmith’s anvil, tool box, and carpenter’s tools.

At least two makers of farm equipment modeled their peanut pickers on Hicks’ design, one of them without his consent.

To learn more about that patent dispute and about Benjamin Hicks, see Anna Zeide’s recent article in the journal Agricultural History, “The Dignity of Invention: Race, Intellectual Property, and Peanut Agriculture, 1900-1920.”

-8-

In this photograph, we see one of the many young field workers that labored in this farm’s fields during the peanut harvest.

The mechanical thresher separated out the peanuts, emptying them into galvanized tin tubs. This worker is carrying the nuts to other field hands who will bag them, stitch the bag shut, and load the bags onto a truck.

At that time, the average wage for agricultural workers on the East Coast of the U.S. was $1.20 a day.

As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress had enacted important child labor reforms during the Great Depression. Those laws specifically exempted children who worked on farms.

By one estimate, half a million children were working in America’s fields in 1938.

-9-

In this photograph, we see another young field worker emptying a pail of peanuts into a burlap bag, while another, older man stitches a bag shut and makes it ready for shipment.

-10-

The farm workers next loaded the bags of peanuts onto a truck that would carry them into one of the two peanut processing plants in Edenton.

Note the sea of peanut shocks in the distance. They seem to go on forever.

On the upper left, we can see the dust rising up from the mechanical picker as it separates the vines and peanuts.

-11-

Once the peanuts had been separated, laborers carted away the peanut hay usually for use as livestock feed.

Farmers valued peanut hay as an especially good feed for hogs.

-12-

I am not exactly sure what is happening in this scene, but I suspect that we are looking at a small hay baler or a presser that flattened and compacted the vines after they passed through the picker. Farmers sometimes used such machines to  make it easier to store the hay for use as livestock fodder.

-13-

A large part of the peanuts harvested on that north side of the Albemarle Sound ended up here, at the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant in Edenton. Located on a bay that is on the north side of Albemarle Sound, Edenton is the county seat of Chowan County, and at that time had a population of just under 4,000 citizens.

At the time these photographs were taken, Edenton was home to two peanut processing plants, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co.

By 1935, according to the Greensboro News & Record on Aug. 16, 1935, the two companies were handling a total of some 25,000,000 pounds of peanuts a year.

The plant’s workers shelled, cleaned and bagged peanuts for farmers near Edenton and the rest of Chowan County, as well as peanuts harvested from farms in surrounding counties.

According to a number of accounts, you could tell when the plant was operating from some distance because a haze of smoke blanketed North Edenton when the plant was fueling its boilers with discarded peanut shells.

-14-

Here we see a great pile of peanuts waiting to be cleaned and graded at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

These workers are stacking freshly arrived, 100-pound bags of peanuts, still in the shell, in the company’s warehouse.

-15-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s hands lifting a bag of unshelled peanuts at the company’s warehouse.

He may be adding the bag to the stockpile or he may be taking the bag off the pile and loading it onto the handcart on the right so that he can carry it into the mill’s shelling and cleaning rooms.

-16-

This gentleman is emptying bags of peanuts so that they can be placed on conveyor belts for cleaning and grading.

Like many of the other photographs of peanut farming and peanut processing in the state-managed collection, this photograph was taken in 1941, quite likely just a few weeks or even days before Pearl Harbor.

Long before that time though, U.S. war planners had begun planning how to adjust the nation’s crop production to compensate for expected wartime disruptions in the agricultural supply chain.

They did so with an eye both toward meeting the country’s domestic food needs and toward fulfilling the country’s Lend-Lease Act agreements with Great Britain and other allied countries.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the war cut off 68% of the nation’s supply of imported vegetable oils within a year of this photograph.

That was an issue of concern to American consumers, but in some cases it was also a concern for the U.S. military.

Just to cite one example, the bulk of the palm oil used in the United States to produce nitroglycerine for military uses had come from the Philippines prior to the beginning of World War II.

However, that supply of palm oil was completely cut off when Japan occupied the the Philippines in May 1942.

Looking for substitutes for imported oils, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Monthly Review July 31, 1942, noted, “a widespread program was launched, calling for increases in production of lard, tallow, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, soy beans, and other fats and oils.”

The article goes on to say, “Farmers in the South. . .  are taking an important part in this program by expanding the production of peanuts.”

At the time this photograph was taken, military planners had just announced a federal program to expand the country’s peanut acreage by 83 percent, roughly half of which would be set aside for use as oil.

Later in the war, the government would push to raise the country’s peanuts acreage by another 50%, all of which left peanut farmers and the workers at the Albemarle Peanut Co. with little time to rest.

As part of the wartime effort to increase peanut production, the USDA even arranged to rent mechanical pickers and threshers to farmers at a low fee in order help them increase peanut acreage.

-17-

Here we see young women removing flawed or shriveled peanuts from a conveyor belt at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-18-

This is a view of some of the chain belts that powered the conveyors at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-19-

During the Great Depression, times were hard in Edenton, as they were throughout most of the North Carolina coast.

Somewhere between a quarter and a half of the town’s citizens were on some kind of public relief. Unemployment rose above 25%. Few could afford doctors or medicines. In many homes, mothers and fathers struggled to keep food on the table. Many cut back, trying to get by on one meal a day.

Far too many grew far too acquainted with hunger and malnutrition.

Against that background, the success of the two local peanut plants — no matter how hard the work, no matter how poorly it paid — was one of the few bright spots in Edenton’s business scene.

In the words of the Raleigh News & Observer Jan. 19, 1933,  the two plants were “a great help to the destitute condition of many Edenton families.”

Between them, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co. employed some 150 to 200 workers in season and the peanut industry overall was one of the town’s largest employers.

In this photograph, one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers is sewing up burlap bags of peanuts to prepare them for shipment.

-20-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers carting bags of peanuts out to the plant’s loading dock.

Looking back now, the transformation of Eastern North Carolina’s economy that occurred in the scant few years between the earliest photograph in this group– during the Great Depression in 1937– and the last, on the eve of World War II, was almost breathtaking.

As the nation prepared for war, massive federal investments in the construction of military installations, defense industries, and shipyards especially on the North Carolina coast– and a tremendous infusion of federal dollars into supporting agriculture– proved to be a life-changing moment for countless families and for the future of the region.

During the Great Depression, incredibly high unemployment and the collapse of crop prices had been devastating for Eastern North Carolina.

That all changed during the war. By 1943, the War Department had actually declared the whole region to be a “labor shortage zone,” a designation that meant that the federal government should not target the area for other military projects out of concern that there might not be an adequate supply of civilian labor to build or support them.

Even as early as 1941, when many of these photographs were taken, a general shortage of rural labor was being felt throughout Eastern North Carolina, and the federal government’s push for increasing peanut acreage was one of many special challenges.

To address that wartime labor shortage– and regrettably, also to resist demands from African American workers to raise wages and improve working conditions– peanut farmers in northeastern North Carolina often turned to migrant farm workers and to German and Italian POWs.

In 1943, for example, the War Manpower Commission recommended that 1,500 POWs be sent to northeastern North Carolina for the peanut harvest. Five hundred Italian POWs were assigned just to the peanut harvest in Bertie, Hertford, and Martin counties.

That same year, a temporary camp for Italian POWS was erected at a baseball field in Tarboro, in Edgecombe County, just to supply labor for the local peanut harvest.

An article in the Durham Herald-Sun indicated that the Italian POWs at the Tarboro camp were mainly from Sicily and from Italy’s colonies in North Africa – so they may have included men from what are now Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and/or Somalia.

The next year, 1944, state records indicated that POWs alone harvested a total of 9,141 acres of peanuts in Eastern North Carolina. Asheville Citizen Times, Feb. 22, 1945.

For most of the war, the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, also directed migrant laborers to the region’s peanut fields.

In the fall of 1943, the FSA even opened a special government-run migrant labor camp in Enfield, in Halifax County, to house 400-500 peanut harvest workers.

Even as late as the fall of 1945, after the war was over, state and federal manpower agencies diverted hundreds of Bahamian laborers to northeastern North Carolina’s peanut fields.

That year the short-lived Naval Air Station in Edenton also temporarily housed POWs. They were only there during the peanut harvest, then returned to a POW camp in Ahoskie. Salisbury Post, Sept. 4, 1945.

-21-

These may be bags of unshelled peanuts waiting to be carried into the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant or they may be bags of processed peanuts waiting to be trucked out or shipped out by railroad.

In that day, a large percentage of the South’s peanut crop as a whole was bound for oil mills and peanut butter factories. Some of the peanuts that came through the Albemarle Peanut Co. no doubt had the same destination.

That said, compared to peanut varieties grown elsewhere, there was an especially high demand for the “Virginia style” peanut variety that was most commonly grown in Tidewater Virginia and in northeastern North Carolina for use as “cocktail peanuts” and for roasting.

In those last days before the war, there was really no telling where these peanuts were bound. Some of them may even have ended up on foreign battlefields, either in the packs of American soldiers or those of soldiers from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or one of our other allies.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend a special thanks to the USDA’s James Davis III for helping me to interpret the scenes in these photographs. A third-generation peanut farmer in Palmyra, N.C., Mr. Davis was North Carolina’s “Small Farmer of the Year” in 2002 and is now a chief program officer at the USDA’s office in Raleigh.

Mr. Davis told me that some of his knowledge of peanut farming came from his farming days, some from his studies at N.C. A&T, and some from his long years as a county farm agent and director of the USDA’s office in Halifax County, N.C.

Above all, he told me, his most important teachers were his father and grandfather, the latter of whom grew up sharecropping in Edgecombe County, N.C., and ended up buying and operating his own farm in Palmyra just after the Second World War.

I am very grateful for his assistance, and I hope very much that I did justice to his lessons.

Thank you too to Professor Katherine Charron at N.C. State University and the Grant family in Tillery for introducing me to Mr. Davis.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

Every summer, the women of Ocean City Beach organized crabbing trips to Topsail Island’s north end. On a waxing moon, when the tide was exactly right, moms and their kids skimmed the saltwater shallows hunting blue crabs, as many as they could carry. The fat jimmies and sooks were the promise of delectable family recipes: rich gumbo, savory crab casseroles and delicate crab-stuffed eggs.

“My mom would always say that on a growing moon, you get more crab meat than on a wasting moon,” Kenneth Chestnut says. “I didn’t believe it, but I became a believer.”

Chestnut’s faith arrived one unforgettable day. The tide had just begun to turn, creating tranquil waters that are a guaranteed feast for hungry blue crabs. Suddenly, the marsh teemed with them, and harvest baskets quickly overflowed.

“It was almost biblical,” Chestnut marvels. Faced with this unexpected bounty, the women had to think fast. How would they get such a haul home?

“They told us boys take off our jeans — we had on swimming trunks underneath — tie up the bottoms of them and fill them with crabs,” Chestnut says, chuckling at the memory.

Back at Ocean City Beach, everyone went to work steaming the mountains of crabs. Pickers meticulously avoided damaging the fragile back shells. Those were always set aside to dry in the sun for use in one of the most beloved dishes: deviled crabs.

Chestnut’s mother, Caronell, took her version to Michelin-star level. She began by sautéing minced onions and celery in rich butter before adding flour and milk to create a luxurious bechamel sauce. After gently folding in sweet crab meat and chopped, hard-boiled eggs, Caronell Chestnut mounded the exquisite mixture into the sun-bleached shells. She finished each serving with a dusting of cracker meal and “small tip of butter” before baking them golden brown for a neighborhood feast.

And it wasn’t just crabs at those delicious gatherings.

“They would prepare dishes and then share dishes. All kinds,” Chestnut reminisces. Food was the heartbeat of the hamlet, a profound expression of connection, so central, so vital, that someone eventually realized Ocean City Beach needed its own cookbook.

More than recipes

The crabbing and cooking memory Kenneth Chestnut relates resonates deeply with my own childhood in Jacksonville, just 25 miles away. Yet, our neighborhoods were worlds apart.

The Chestnuts were Black; my family was white. Although the Civil Rights Act had been law for a decade when we first drove through Ocean City Beach on our way to and from favorite crabbing spots in the early 1970s, Topsail Island’s lines of segregation were clear.

We understood Ocean City Beach as separate, “the Black beach.” Its enduring community cookbook, originally published in 1980 and titled “Ms. Winnie’s Seafood Cook Book,” is a powerful testament to Maya Angelou’s profound truth: “Human beings are more alike than we are unalike. And the minute we began to understand, just the slightest part of that, we recognize ourselves as family.”

Winnie Robinson, a long-time Ocean City Beach resident, painstakingly assembled that first recipe collection as a fundraiser. Chestnut imagines she walked house to house, asking cooks to share their most delicious creations.

The sumptuous dishes, often elaborate in their seasonings — fish chowder with a splash of white burgundy wine, dill- and nutmeg-scented clam fritters, grilled sesame trout, sweet-and-sour sauteed croakers, to name a few — tell a complex story.

In 1949, Edgar Yow, a white man and former Wilmington mayor, witnessed the harsh realities of racism. He envisioned a haven where people of color could enjoy the shore and own oceanside homes in peace.

Yow held seaside property and collaborated with Kenneth Chestnut’s father, Wade Chestnut, and Wade’s siblings to turn part of the acreage into the milelong Ocean City Beach. By 1954, this determined community had 15 homes, a welcoming motel, a bustling restaurant and, soon after, an Episcopal chapel, a church summer camp and the iconic Ocean City Fishing Pier.

“When growing up, I would go on the beach and I would see it was really crowded to the left, really crowded to the right, recalls Carla Torrey, editor of the cookbook’s latest incarnation, “Tried and True Recipes.” “And there would maybe be me and two other people on our beach. And I always was like, ‘Why is that? Is there something special about me?’”

“And then I later realized why. That it was this invisible line where nobody crossed over and came on our beach.”

Unwelcome at many restaurants and living somewhere set apart for no other reason than its residents’ skin color, Ocean City Beach’s talented chefs cultivated a culinary utopia.

Torrey shows a fuzzy black-and-white photo of a community garden thriving even in dry, sandy soil. She yearns for the creamed corn one neighbor prepared fresh from the cob. Chestnut recalls his dad salt-curing mullet in a barrel and neighbors carefully tending molting crabs that would become fried, soft-shell delicacies.

Kitchen creativity, Torrey and Chestnut explain, blossomed during the summers. Moms and their kids, home from school, lived at Ocean City all week. Working dads joined their families on weekends. The women supported each other by sharing meals and recipes. Those carefree days offered them the luxury of time to lovingly prepare food and experiment with fresh ideas.

“It was a joy to her if she didn’t feel pressured to cook,” Chestnut remembers about his mother. “I think that was why she especially loved it down here.”

Each cook infused delights with flavors and methods passed down through the generations along with the latest trends, like Carol King’s Prawn and Egg Curry and Bessie W. Hill’s shrimp-stuffed eggplant.

As Winnie Robinson herself wrote in the original cookbook’s acknowledgments, “Our source has been the ‘world of food.'”

Cooking up the future

Today, 30 Ocean City Beach homes survive from a peak of 100 that existed before hurricanes Fran and Berta took their tolls in 1996. Storms also claimed the Ocean City Beach pier, leaving behind only a solitary tower standing sentinel on a scrubby oceanfront lot. The village nearly blends into the relentless sprawl all around. In 1990, North Topsail Beach absorbed Ocean City Beach into its town limits.

The triumph of civil rights has slowly, gently, loosened ties to this community born of necessity. “Descendants (of original homeowners) can go anywhere and buy anywhere, as opposed to just here,” Chestnut notes. “That’s the way it should be.”

Yet, the important story of Ocean City Beach is far from forgotten. It lives on in an exhibit at Surf City’s Missiles and More Museum, tracing Topsail Island’s history. The community holds a place on both the N.C. Civil Rights Trail and the Jacksonville Onslow African-American Heritage Trail. A roadside marker near the old pier entrance humbly sums up Ocean City Beach’s founding. Blue street signs delineate its roads.

And there’s the cookbook.

While the societal injustices that compelled Ocean City Beach’s creation are a painful memory, they don’t diminish the deep nostalgia families feel for the idyllic summer days they spent in the village. Ensuing generations cling to heirloom recipes and the cherished tradition of sharing meals, a legacy of resilience and joy expressed in the community cookbook.

Chestnut carries on his mother’s clam fritter recipe, the one with dill and nutmeg. His daughter still prepares her grandmother’s Shrimp and Rice Surprise, an easy, irresistible mélange of ham, sausage, shrimp, mushrooms and melty cheese.

Torrey, driven by a passion for preservation, spent hours immersed in Robinson’s pages. She brought forth treasured recipes and solicited new ones for “Tried and True Recipes,” published in 2014, including her own elaborate citrus crabcakes with coriander and blood orange aioli.

Sales of “Tried and True Recipes” help fund maintenance of the chapel and community building, which continue to host gatherings. Potlucks and an annual Labor Day block party happen annually.  

Proceeds also support Ocean City Beach’s annual Jazz Festival. Every Fourth of July, people of all colors come together for two days of music. Torrey’s husband, Craig, organizes a historic walking tour during the event, guiding visitors through streets that hold so many stories.

“Tried and True Recipes” is always available at the festival and year-round online. Both the cookbook and the Jazz Festival are powerful vehicles to tell the story of Ocean City Beach, Carla Torrey says.

“And hopefully keep the history going so it’s not forgotten.”

Caronell Chestnut’s Deviled Crabs

½ cup chopped onion

½ cup chopped celery

½ stick butter or margarine

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ cup milk

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Seasonings as desired

1 pound crab meat

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

Cracker meal or cracker crumbs

Butter or margarine

Sauté onions and celery in butter or margarine until vegetables are tender. Remove from heat and add flour, milk, Worcestershire and seasonings. Return to heat and cook until thick. Add more milk if necessary for the right consistency. Mix this with crab meat and hard-boiled eggs. Fill crab shells or a baking dish with mixture. Sprinkle top with cracker meal or cracker crumbs. Place a tip of butter or margarine on top of each shell. Bake at 350 degrees until brown (about 25-30 minutes).

No matter how big worldwide brands like McDonald’s or KFC get, they’ll never match the iconic status of a tiny Morehead City burger stand named El’s Drive-In.

Tucked away on a gravel lot, shaded by centuries-old live oaks that whisper of a time when forest bordered this 69-year-old restaurant, El’s has no flashy, sky-high sign beckoning motorists from the road. The same faded, white menu board that’s always listed El’s beloved super burger and shrimp burgers is all that crowns the vanilla milkshake-colored brick box.

If you didn’t know El’s was there sitting on its plain concrete slab, you’d probably never stop.

But everyone knows it’s there.

“Sometimes the train will call in his order and say, ‘Can you have it ready in 20 minutes?’” El’s third-generation owner Shelton Franks says, raising his chin to the conductor’s whistle as a locomotive chugs down tracks dividing U.S. 70 in front of El’s.

“And he’ll block the traffic right there so he can come in and get his order,” Franks’ mother, Gail, adds.

The affection people have for this tiny take-out was especially obvious when El’s re-opened on Jan. 17, following a nine-month closure. Every vehicle jamming the parking lot held a personal story.

Mending hearts

Construction worker Joseph Booth is sure he’s been an El’s regular since the days right after he was born 45 years ago in the hospital next door. “My momma used to love coming over here,” he said, “All the time!”

High school sweethearts Josh and Amanda Lyle not only grew up eating at El’s, the restaurant even played a role in rekindling their teenage romance. “I wanted to get back together because I realized the wrongs of my ways,” Josh recalled, “so, she agreed to meet me at El’s after school one day, and it was January 17, of 1997.”

Josh convinced carhops to deliver chocolate milkshakes to his vehicle when Amanda arrived, and he set the mood with her favorite country music playing. “We’ve been together ever since.”

“And we do still try to come back every year on this day,” Amanda said.

An obituary in the local newspaper days before the reopening is one of many over the years to note a deceased’s love of El’s. It reminded Gail Franks of the man who once stood atop the building in honor of a buddy who passed. “All his friends had their hot rod cars lined up out here in the parking lot and did a drive away,” Gail recalled, tearing up.

“You know, people just have a lot of memories. If it weren’t for them, we’d just be a little place.”

Because of its location in a popular coastal tourist area, El’s has long been known outside of North Carolina, but its fame across the state and beyond exploded with the introduction of Google reviews and social media, Gail said. Especially during the pandemic, fans shared their El’s experiences.

But it was clear by 2024 that the old building could no longer withstand the weight of time. The Franks family was forced to shutter El’s that April and do the unimaginable — tear the place down.

A family’s resilience

The Franks family didn’t bulldoze El’s. They convinced contractors, including Booth, to dismantle it brick by brick. Workers salvaged 90% of those bricks to construct a new El’s identical to the original that an indomitable Elvin Franks built in 1959.

Though a childhood bout of osteomyelitis left him with a limp, Elvin persevered. He worked tirelessly in various restaurants since high school, eventually channeling his passion and determination into starting his own business.

“He had a good work ethic and, you know, he cared about what we put out there,” Elvin’s son, Mark Franks, said.

Elvin co-owned an Atlantic Beach drive-in before leasing what is now nearby Cox’s Family Restaurant. There, Elvin and his wife, Helen, operated a drive-in named This Is It, but Elvin soon realized owning property was his best bet.

Ambition brought challenges. Construction of the first El’s couldn’t begin until a house on the property was relocated. Gail Franks recalls stories about Elvin and Helen owning just one car. “She worked in the daytime, and he would work at night,” Gail said. At midnight, Mom would gather her children for the drive to pick up Elvin after his shift.

Mark always knew he would work at El’s. Family legend has it that when Mark’s draft number for the U.S. Army came up, Elvin “talked to somebody” to ensure his son wouldn’t report to duty until after clocking one more summer at the restaurant. “I got in on what they called ‘the delayed-entry program,'” Mark said with a grin.

Like his dad, Shelton was happy to start working at El’s as soon as he was old enough, around age 12. Now, he runs the place, although Shelton stresses that his father “still beats me out here every morning.” And Mark was right there in the kitchen on reopening day.

“He’s my best friend,” Shelton said, “so, I guess I never thought about doing anything else. Why wouldn’t I want to help my dad? Why wouldn’t I want to keep this going?”

Gail is El’s bookkeeper. She and Mark’s daughter, Jenna, have lent a hand at the restaurant too. When the family agreed to expand to Smyrna in 2024, while the original location was under renovation, the goal wasn’t to seed a mega brand. Instead, Shelton wanted to help a cousin fulfill his own entrepreneurial dream. The independently operated El’s food truck there offers the same beloved menu and features a convenient drive-up window. Despite its remote address, a steady stream of loyal customers lines up.

No shortcuts

The Frankses write at El’s website that they have lovingly maintained the Morehead City restaurant “so you can feel the history — but not taste it.” Yet, it’s clear the values that the late Elvin Franks instilled all those years ago still season each order.

“I try to tell people who work for me, ‘Don’t send anything out that you wouldn’t want to receive,’” Shelton said.

What looks like chaos along the narrow kitchen line is a synchronized dance of short-order and prep cooks who patty Black Angus ground beef each morning into El’s signature burgers, the most popular items on the menu.

Creamy slaw for the top-selling “All The Way” — a classic Carolina burger that also gets mustard, chili and onions — is still prepared from-scratch according to Helen Franks’ recipe, with an unexpected hint of ketchup. “If it weren’t for the slaw, we’d just be another burger joint,” Shelton said as his father nodded in agreement.

Every shrimp burger, every piece of fried chicken, everything on the menu, from BLTs to oyster dinners, is cooked to order, no matter if 20 tickets crowd the board and an equal number waits stacked on the counter to take their place.

With nary a second of dilly dally, carhops whiz back and forth, delivering brown bags stuffed full of El’s goodness to what resembles a parking lot pile up. Servers magically monitor who’s just pulled in, who gets which bag and who needs special attention because they’ve been waiting in their vehicle too long.

“It’s hard to explain how we keep track of it,” said Mary Magara, who’s been working at El’s since 2006. “You just know.”

Between monitoring a griddle covered in burgers and five fryers all a go, cooks still take time to slide food to the few people, like Robert Ligas, who slip inside to grab their call-in orders.

Customers know to stay out of the way, but even in the lunch-rush madness, cooks alert Ligas that burgers for his six-man painting crew are almost ready. He doesn’t mind a delay. “We’ve been waiting nine months, so everybody wants a cheeseburger.”

Where did his team eat while El’s was closed? Ligas answers with a true testament of loyalty to this timeless piece of delicious history. “We brought a grill to work, and we made our own burgers.”

Editor’s note: Amanda Lyle is chief community engagement officer with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review.

All the tears shed when El’s Drive-In closed for summer could cut a new inlet through Carteret County.

The owners promised that the beloved Morehead City landmark would return this fall after renovations. They also opened an outpost in up the coast in Smyrna. Nonetheless, a hole remains in the hearts of locals who still remember when El Franks opened this go-to for the famous N.C. shrimp burger in 1959.

El’s is one of those local-favorite seafood restaurants along North Carolina’s coast that don’t just serve tasty food. They bring a sense of joy and connection that keep regulars coming back.

Staff are just so nice, and you’re bound to see someone you know. Even if you don’t, folks at the next table or in line behind you will strike up a conversation. Before long, the owner might join in, sharing family stories, cherished recipes passed down through generations and the names of commercial fishers who harvested the fresh catch.

Of course, fried seafood aromas drift from kitchens into homespun dining rooms, more reasons why locals return again and again.

O’Neal’s Sea Harvest

618 Harbor Road, Wanchese 

The L-shaped counter hosts a cashier taking lunch orders on one end and a second ringing up fresh seafood at the other. Fish and shellfish glisten on ice in between while crews cut seafood behind them. Customers filling the zero-frills dining room savor fried black drum, sheepshead, golden tile, whatever’s biting. Daily specials might list scallop po’boys, grilled mahi tacos or blackened shrimp and asiago cheese stuffed inside baked potatoes. If you decline a side dish, expect the cook to change your mind at the pickup window: “Are you sure I can’t make you something?”

Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café

7623 S. Virginia Dare Trail, Nags Head

The all-hands-on-deck Basnight family, including commercial crabber Vicki Basnight, opened the restaurant in 1996 to uplift the region’s seafood industry during a challenging period of high fuel prices and increased imports undercutting the domestic seafood supply. The local catch remains central in dishes like Wanchese clam chowder and seasonal lump crab cakes, as well as on an “Outer Banks Traditions” menu, keeping year-rounders loyal, even during the busy tourist season.

Bay Brothers Seafood

100 Jean St., Plymouth

You could mistake Bay Brothers’ simple, red brick building for an industrial plant instead of seafood central. Locals come for live hard and soft N.C. blue crabs (a soft-shell crab shedding operation occupies the back), lump crab meat and various fish and shellfish. Tables in the middle of the immaculate market are where neighbors tuck into uncomplicated seafood specials like she-crab soup, tuna salad and broiled, Old Bay garlic butter shrimp.

White Point Take-Out

101 Core Sound Loop Road Ext., Atlantic

This itty-bitty gray cottage tucked within a residential neighborhood has a single take-out window serving fried-to-order seafood like shrimp burgers and soft-shell crab sandwiches, with a side of crinkle-cut fries. Eat on picnic tables under twisty, old live oak trees. Hours vary but the owner reports that for summer 2024, the window opens at 11 a.m. and closes by 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and by 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Wild Will’s Revenge

1015 Morris Marina Road, Atlantic

The hashtag #coresounders and family commercial fishing photos on Wild Will’s Instagram tell you it’s worth the drive to far-flung Atlantic. Grandchildren of esteemed community and fishing industry leader, the late Billy Smith, have Down East roots dating to the 1700s. They named the restaurant for their late father, William Ellis Smith, who ran the original Wild Will’s 20 years ago in nearby Harkers Island. The kitchen serves whatever’s fresh, like jumbo-lump, blue crab cakes. Specials might spotlight heritage recipes such as corned spots in fall and fluffy Down East light rolls. Hours are limited, usually Friday and Saturday starting at 5 p.m.

The Spot Grill

202 Wellons Drive, Beaufort

You’ll leave the pine-paneled dining room wearing the delicious perfume of fried mahi, soft-shell crab, flounder or whatever’s fresh (sometimes conch stew) even if you don’t sit at the counter that’s practically inside the wide-open, galley kitchen. The lingering aroma is a pleasant memory of seafood cooked to order with a side of eavesdrop-worthy conversations about everything relevant in the community. Lunch only and cash only, but there’s an ATM inside.

Blackbeard’s Grill

1644 Live Oak St., Beaufort

The Rose family of commercial fishers operates Blackbeard’s next door to its seafood market. Cross your fingers that the specials menu features North River clams, harvested nearby and smothered in garlic butter, white wine and parmesan. Pray, too, for the Local’s Supper of fresh shrimp and speckled trout with crispy okra and sweet potato casserole and a plate of Harkers Island soft-shell crabs fried according to Aunt Dora’s recipe.

Jordan’s Smokehouse & Seafood

129 Phillips Loop Road, Swansboro

You know the fried sea mullet is fresh when you ask if it’s local and the server replies, “I caught it myself last night.” Arrive early to sit among regulars who don’t mind traveling from the other side of Onslow County for the old-timey oyster bar vibe. Forget being shy. Everyone talks to everyone like they’ve known each other all their lives. In many cases, they have.

Riverview Café

119 Hall Point Road, Sneads Ferry

Sneads Ferry is no longer a tiny fishing village, but it still feels that way at this waterfront restaurant owned by the same family since 1946. Riverview started as an oyster bar behind a store with a single gas pump. All that’s changed but the fresh seafood hasn’t, including shrimp harvested on the family trawler. The whiteboard lists so many specials you have to walk up to read it. Fantail shrimp, bang bang shrimp, peel-and-eats, whole flounder, deviled crab, steamed clams and homemade pie baked from treasured family recipes.

Seaview Crab Co. Kitchen

1515 Marstellar St, Wilmington

Lunchtime is crush time, but moms from the neighborhood, workers in uniform and the guy who just needs a break from his honey-do list wait patiently for orders. They’re quick to share picnic table seats mere steps away from iced-down seafood. Steamed blue crabs and overstuffed fried fish sandwiches are legendary. No matter what you select, expect fellow diners to swoon over your plate. “I almost got that,” they’ll lament. Fortunately, there’s always next time to try and decide between specials like fresh-shucked clam chowder and seared tuna bao buns with gochujang mayo.

Whether you’re a beginning gardener or one who’s been growing beautiful flowers and vegetables for years, one thing is clear: The fastest and easiest way to start a garden is by keeping it small.

“Even on a limited budget it is possible to get a garden going quickly,” Barbara W. Ellis writes in her new book “Container & Small-Space Gardening for the South: How to Grow Flowers & Food No Matter Where You Live.”

The author of two dozen gardening books, Ellis is an expert grower based on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her latest title is an easy read that covers all of the big questions about container and small-plot gardens in the notoriously hot and humid South: which plants to choose, what pots work best, how much to water, how often to feed, and the right spots for small gardens, container or otherwise.

Ellis also shares gardening advice from her years of real-life experience, including how to be an environmentally friendly gardener. She even digs into seed starting, pest management, garden design and end-of-season tasks.

Best of all, Ellis’ practical instructions, alongside gorgeous photos, move smoothly from chapter to chapter, building confidence and excitement to get out there and grow.

Here are some of Ellis’ top container- and small-space gardening tips.

The easiest way to garden

A container garden is the easiest way to garden, “provided you start with big pots,” Ellis says. Large pots hold water, thereby requiring less watering. “I think beginners start off with small pots, 10 or 12 inches, and they can’t keep up with the watering. One of my first containers, years ago, dried out so quickly that if I watered it in the morning it was nearly dead by the time I got home from work.”

Containers are a smart way to graduate to small-space gardens. “The minute you start planting in the ground, it is more exciting but probably more complicated,” Ellis says. “Large containers make it possible to learn about growing plants, plus how to combine colors and plant forms, plus what kind of care makes them look better and be healthier.”

The dirt on sandy soil

Eastern North Carolina’s dry, acidic, sandy soils present frustrating challenges for growing healthy plants. How can gardeners overcome struggles? “Organic matter, organic matter, organic matter,” Ellis says.

“Sandy soils burn through it more quickly than any other soil type.” Add organic matter every time you dig a hole. Keep soil covered with mulch, even spreading finished compost under mulches like pine needles. Additionally, minimize digging “because that increases the rate at which the organic matter gets used up,” Ellis says.

How water should flow

Whenever you water, “water until water comes out of the bottom of the pot or the top few inches of soil are wet. That encourages roots to go down into the soil and not crowd around the surface, which makes them more susceptible to drought,” Ellis says.

Carefully select locations. “A pot or garden that receives sun in the morning and shade in the afternoon will need watering less often than one that receives shade in the morning and sun in the afternoon.”

Keep an eye on plants to understand their moisture needs. “I have learned to look at the leaves of plants to figure out when they need watering. The shape changes as they begin to wilt, and the color also changes.”

Resisting temptation at the plant store

“Container & Small-Space Gardening for the South” stresses the value of balancing your gardening dreams against location reality, right down to calculating how many plants you need to save time, money and effort.

Useful lists help you select easy plants for sun and shade. Still, how can you control wishful thinking while being color-bombed at the garden store on the perfect spring day?

“I use a hard-and-fast personal gardening rule, ‘Be attractive or die.’ That keeps me from bringing home plants I know won’t do well. If I have killed something three times, that’s it,” Ellis says. “This approach also made me get excited about looking for plants that thrive where I garden.”

Ellis advises visiting local public and private gardens and native plant organizations to learn what plants work best for your area.

What full sun really means down south

Ellis’ book is full of guidance you might not think about, like how to assess sun and shade patterns. Garden stores may label plants as “full sun,” meaning they need six to eight hours of direct sunlight a day, but Ellis notes that they don’t necessarily need that sunlight all at once.

“While most food crops prefer full sun, some — tomatoes, for example — will produce fruit in part shade in southern gardens,” she writes. Always remember that many plants markets might recommend for sunny areas refer to northern gardens, Ellis adds. Those plants will need more shade and often more watering in the south.

Saving money and the environment

Plastic wastes like soil bags and plant containers harm the environment. Ellis composts all potting soil for reuse, being careful not to add diseased plant parts or seed and plant parts from invasive species. “Most years, I also just replace about the top third of the potting medium in a pot.”

She donates surplus soil to fellow gardeners. Ellis uses some of her extra soil to pot plants she divides and then donates to a local garden club’s annual plant sale. She recycles and refurbishes planting containers, too. Even terra cotta pots are repairable, Ellis writes.

Traffic rounds the Wilmington Interstate 40 Bypass like a NASCAR final lap but not fast enough to outrun the fish stock start time. I ignore my constantly dinging phone. For sure, it’s Trey Herring texting as I rally toward the backyard where a 10-gallon soup pot waits on me.

As I peak 85 mph, my phone rings, and I pull over. “How long? Are you close? We need to get moving.” Trey speaks hyper-impatiently, like someone is tapping a Timex over his shoulder.

That someone is Herring’s close friend, Capt. Steve Jolley, a seasoned angler and cook from Washington, N.C., who Herring told me weeks before is “true to the ways.”

“When I cook with him, I feel like I’m cooking with my grandparents,” Herring had said.

Today, the men are preparing a sacred Eastern North Carolina dish: fish stew, better known to the unenlightened as “that soup with the eggs on top.” Fresh fish mingles with a holy trinity of potatoes, onions and bacon. Tomatoes plus each cook’s secret spice blend, often just salt and black pepper, season the basics. During the final minutes of cooking, eggs are cracked over the steaming stew.

For an outsider like me, being invited to “a fish stew,” which describes both dish and event, is a sign of acceptance in communities that keep the ritual. Showing up late is akin to stumbling into church halfway through the sermon. So, I arrive ashamed to see Jolley has already lowered the frame of a mighty red drum into the pot.

Fish stew requires a precise, step-by-step process stalled for no one.

I take my licking in the form of a Capt. Jolley silent treatment. Herring, a Goldsboro native blessed with a grandma who made him fish stew on demand, tempers my guilt.

“The stock is the most important part,” he explains. “It has to simmer for the right amount of time to impart a deep flavor rather than a watery foundation.”

Jolley adjusts the gas cooker’s fire and scurries inside to the kitchen. With the stock finally underway, he unwinds, and, alongside Herring, settles into a rhythm of chopping other ingredients.

Born to parents from Hyde and Beaufort counties, Jolley tells me that he hails from a long line of fish stew makers. Any occasion could be a reason for fish stew. Chilly spring nights, card games, birthdays. Jolley’s recipe is “just a mix of watching people cook stew.”

“I try to keep a stew like it’s always been done.”

In the beginning

People have been simmering fish stews over open fires for centuries. Scientists discovered well-preserved traces of marine fish and shellfish fats in 15,000-year-old Japanese cooking pottery.

Many countries boast signature fish stews that began as fishermen cobbling together a meal at the end of their workdays or families making the most of what they had: saffron-laced French bouillabaisse; hot and sour Thai tom yum; coriander-laced Portuguese caldeirada; and spicy Malay fish head curry, to name a few.

Early English settlers often get credit for inspiring Eastern North Carolina’s fish stew, but diverse hands contributed to the pot.

“I want to know who put the tomato soup in it,” seafood chef Ricky Moore says.

At his acclaimed Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, Moore celebrates African American influences that shaped the coastal N.C. cooking he grew up with in New Bern. Moore has seen assorted fish stews: potatoes and no potatoes, tomatoes and no tomatoes, smoked turkey necks instead of salted pork and the cornmeal dumplings that Moore himself adds to fish stew.

North Carolina’s seafood chowders and stews are customarily simple — just onions, potatoes and seafood, maybe bacon, although some think the pork overrides the seafood’s flavor. Tomatoes did not take hold in America until the early 1800s. By then, the Spanish, Italians, Portuguese and French were all putting tomatoes in their fish stews. Moore suspects N.C. cooks who followed suit with fresh or home-canned tomatoes found a shortcut in commercially canned tomato soup first sold in 1897.

Fish stew modifications have also combined taste, creativity and ego, especially at church socials, the center of community life and the place where people showed off their cooking skills in North Carolina’s once-isolated coastal plain.

“Different churches would have fish stews,” Herring recalls from his childhood. “They do barbecue, they do chicken and they do fish stew. That was kind of the three seasons of the church fundraiser.”

The most blatant adjustments happen at the Shad Festival Fish Stew Cook-off, where cooks battle every February in Grifton.

“I got one guy that cooks it, and he puts a lot of sausages in it. And saltwater mussels. He must put $150 worth of stuff in it … It almost wasn’t fish stew,” cook-off organizer Tommy Sugg says. “I tasted it. I liked it,” but share that opinion with aficionados of the traditional stew and “you could be tarred and feathered,” Sugg adds, laughing. “These people are pretty serious about it.”

Variations didn’t surprise Sharon Peele Kennedy, who chronicled historic N.C. seafood recipes and created new ones for her cookbook “What’s for Supper with Sharon Peele Kennedy.” Tinkering dates way back, before supermarkets and gourmet stores.

“They used what they had. Potatoes, peppers, onions. What grew in the garden,” Peele Kennedy told me at her Hatteras home before she passed away in January 2024. Eggs from the henhouse added extra protein to nourish hard-working families when fish harvests were slim.

The cardinal sin

Both native North Carolinians and newcomers to the state brag about attending fish stews. The unanointed dream of landing in a backyard like Jolley’s to see if eggs really do float on top and witness a coastal N.C. tradition disappearing as quickly as undeveloped waterfront property.

No matter which recipe lucky attendees may encounter, they’ll witness one steadfast conviction: Nobody stirs the pot.

“Really, the hardest I’ve ever seen a man get hit was when he walked up to a pot of fish stew and stirred it. And he got knocked right off his feet,” Jolley says.

Eastern North Carolina fish stew harmonizes fish and potato chunks as large or slightly larger than a soup spoon. If whole fish are used, they must retain enough shape so that diners can easily pick the bones. Cooks layer ingredients in a heavy stock pot set over a low flame, a combination that ensures nothing at the bottom of the pot burns. Stirring crumbles components, consequently ruining the stew’s integrity.

I ease away from the cooker as Jolley and Herring begin building their stew, enough for 20 people. They use 8 pounds of drum, 5 pounds of white potatoes, 3 pounds of sliced onions, 1 pound of diced bacon, 2 quarts of home-canned tomatoes and that essential fish stock.

To make the stock, Jolley poached the drum’s boney frame with bay leaves in about two gallons of water for nearly two hours. He renders diced fatback in another huge kettle.

Next, he and Herring lay sliced onions over the fatback, then potatoes, fish and tomatoes. They repeat the process before Herring scatters sliced potato rounds all over the top to “seal everything down.” Jolley pours in the steaming-hot fish stock to cover everything by a few inches.

The seasonings? “That’s a secret,” Jolley says, although both men agree salt, pepper and red pepper flakes are essential.

The stew cooks covered for about two hours. A smaller batch might take one hour, Herring says. “The longer you let it simmer, the better off it’s going to taste. It doesn’t over cook because you’re not letting it sit there and boil. Barely bubbling,” Herring emphasizes. “Then you drop a few eggs and it’s time to eat.”

How many eggs? “At least a dozen,” Herring advises, then corrects himself. “At least two dozen, depending on the size of the fish stew, because, I mean, the egg’s the prize of the fish stew.”

Jolley likes yolks on the soft side, but he says yolks are usually cooked through. “Because a lot of times, it’s kind of one of those things where it is ready, but everyone is still kind of shooting the shit, taking some shots of liquor until someone says, ‘Oh yeah, let’s eat.’”

Herring passes around a bottle of bourbon. Before long, fish stew opining and storytelling begins. Guests debate if fish heads make better stock. They recall old-timers who shunned filets for fish on the bone. Remember that guy who agreed to bring the fish and then showed up with six cans of salmon? Eyes roll. Oh, and those housemates who kept freshwater bowfin alive in the bathtub until it was time to use one for fish stew.

Moment of enlightenment

Banter quiets when Jolley starts setting up a buffet. Cornbread, obligatory with fish stew, is hush puppies Jolley fried in a cast-iron skillet passed down from his grandmother to his mother and then to him. Creamy, old-fashioned slaw fades green to white, nary a fleck of fancy purple cabbage or orange carrot. Sweet iced tea fills tall Ball jars. Lemon pie’s lightly toasted meringue peaks so correctly that Jolley’s ancestors are surely singing praises from on high.

Finally, he dips a wooden ladle into the stew’s layers, releasing heavenly aromas. As each guest steps up to the pot, Jolley asks “Would you like eggs?”

“Pardon?” one man replies.

“Would you like eggs?”

“Um, Sure.”

Herring chuckles. “That was a test,” he tells the hesitant gentleman. “If you would have said no, we would have kicked you out.”

Soon, mms and mm-hmms join a chorus of cardinals in the trees. “And the great thing is it’s better the next day,” Herring says, adding only half-jokingly that the only thing he would have done differently is add more eggs.

Jolley smiles. “I’m sure it would be good if you put a bunch of ginger and turmeric in it, sort of drift from the traditional flavor, but at the end of the day…” Everyone gets his point.

While pie is served, Wilmington-based Folkstone String Band fires up its picks, bows and upright bass. Guests listen to old bluegrass songs in the contented silence of their own memories.

Like oyster roasts and shrimp boils, fish stew is “an art form passed down,” Herring says. “This is the only way you can continue to experience it and hopefully get somebody else that’s interested and wants to learn about it to do it. If you don’t, it dies.”

There are wild cranberries along the highway, U.S. 264, as it passes Stumpy Point in Dare County heading west to Engelhard. 

It is a small patch, according to Bob Glennon, retired Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge planner, and largely inaccessible without hip boots and a guide to find them.

“The cranberries are on the part of the refuge with the deepest muck soil,” he wrote in an email. “The site has very deep organic soil that will not support a person’s weight.”

The cranberries that exist in the pocosin are Vaccinium macrocarpon, the same botanical name given to the cranberry that has become a part of Thanksgiving and holiday traditions. They’re smaller than their cultivar cousins, but it’s the same cranberry. 

The first European settlers did not mention cranberries, but Glennon is confident the plants were there.

“Because they are present where there is very deep organic soil, I would guess that they have been there for centuries, just as other plant communities in extreme environmental conditions … have existed for centuries,” he wrote.

What may be one of the most remarkable features of where the cranberries are found is that the area does not seem to have changed much at all.

“Stumpy Pointers on Excursion” the headline reads in the Nov. 13, 1914, Elizabeth City Advance. The excursion — a cranberry picking expedition that included crossing open water and hiking through pocosin — is described in detail.

“After a twenty minute row across the lake and a hundreds yard hike through dense woods, the party came to an open savanna which must needs be crossed before the cranberries were reached,” the paper reported.

That description is remarkably similar to how Michael Schafale, North Carolina Natural Heritage Program terrestrial ecologist, got to the site.

“That 1914 description really fits,” he wrote in an email. “Lake Wirth, near Stumpy Point, is on the edge of that low pocosin. I went in that way once, walking around the lake rather than rowing across it.  It is not too far to low pocosin that way, though the ‘hike through dense woods’ and ‘savanna’ is understated.”

It does not appear as though the earliest Colonists left a record of the fruit, but North Carolina newspapers’ reporting on the crop dates back to the 19th century. 

The headline on page two of the Oct. 30, 1883, Elizabeth City Economist simply reads “Cranberries” and tells readers that the Massachusetts cranberry harvest was not very good in 1883 and “that the price will probably be higher than any time in recent years.” 

The observation was followed by advice for Dare County residents.

“We hope it will be appreciated by our friends at East Lake and other cranberry sections of Dare County. The dwellers in Dare County by the side of the wild cranberry ponds have no idea of the mine of wealth around them, and which they can so easily gather,” the paper noted.

Knowledge of the potential wealth of the bogs seemed to come and go. If the East Lake cranberries were well enough known in Elizabeth City in 1883 to note their abundance, by the 1930s they seem to have been forgotten.

A July 1, 1938, Dare County Times full page spread extolling the wonders of Dare County as the first show of the second year of “The Lost Colony” theatrical production neared, seems to indicate the existence of the cranberries has just been discovered.

The article describes the bogs with what may be hyperbole, writing that what exists between Alligator River and Stumpy Point “surprisingly enough, constitute the greatest cranberry bog in America.”

The next paragraph then describes how the cranberries had just been discovered.

“Nobody knew very much about the cranberry bog until they began to excavate a road through the unexplored jungle … that lie between the Croatan (Sound) and Alligator (River).”

That road today is U.S. Highway 264, but according to a History of Stumpy Point published in NCGenWeb Project, that road was created in the 1920s. The NCGenWeb Project is part of the national USGenWeb Project and a volunteer-collected genealogical and historical content repository for each of state’s 100 counties.

“One of the biggest milestones in the history of Stumpy Point was the creation of the roads connecting the town to Engelhard and Manns Harbor. The first was the road to Engelhard in 1926, built for Dare County by the H. C. Lawrence Dredging Company,” Harold Lee Wise, the story’s author wrote.

The cranberries seem to have been a good quality crop. Theodore Meekins, a Dare County resident, entered the cranberries in a statewide horticulture competition in 1908 and took home a bronze medal. In November 1939, according to the Dare County Times, Theodore Meekins “suggested that cranberries be cultivated on the Dare County Mainland.”

What is not clear is the extent of the commercial cultivation of the cranberries.

Alan Weakley, director of the University of North Carolina Herbarium at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, responded in an email that if a commercial harvest did exist, it was probably taking advantage of natural conditions. 

“I’m quite strongly inclined to think this was at most commercial exploitation of a natural local population,” he noted. “Maybe they manipulated the habitat some. But I find it really hard to believe that Dare County folks would have the idea of planting cranberries in pocosin habitats in Dare County, where they actually grow naturally and natively, and acquired plants or seeds and set them out.”

Newspaper accounts would seem to confirm Weakley’s opinion. By 1952, according to a Coastland Times article from Dec. 12 of that year, there was no commercial harvest of cranberries in Dare County.

“There was a time when gathering wild cranberries was a profitable venture for persons living in the bogland of the Dare Coast,” the paper reported.

In that same article, the harvest of the cranberries is then described in detail.

“Thomas Hunter Midgett is one person who still gathers wild cranberries in the same method as his parents and grandparents harvested them from the boglands many years ago,” the article noted. “The wooden scoop he uses is one his grandfather used.”

Charles Brantley “Aycock” Brown (1904-1984) was an Outer Banks resident and journalist.

Coastal Review will not publish Thursday and Friday in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday.

We’re all familiar with the image: the lone, white fisherman donning a yellow slicker.

Think Gorton’s Seafood, “Trusted since 1849.” You know the one.

“For some reason, that image is so etched in people’s minds, but what that hides is a lot of diversity in this fishery, in any fishery, particularly when you get to the processing sector, the packing, the trucking, the retail markets and then, of course, cooking,” said Barbara Garrity-Blake, Duke University Marine Lab cultural anthropologist and president of NC Catch. “But there are also African Americans who are commercial fishermen, who are charter boat captains. There’s more than meets the eye.”

NC Catch, a nonprofit aimed at educating consumers about the importance of buying local seafood, is spearheading a collaboration of Black seafood business owners and historians to roll out the North Carolina Black Seafood Trail.

The traveling exhibit will share the under-told, multifaceted, sea-to-table story of Black North Carolinians’ contributions to the state’s fisheries.

The conceptualization of the historic trail goes back a couple of years when conversations within NC Catch, an organization that includes Black chef ambassadors and seafood market owners, began reflecting on Black-owned seafood businesses.

Personal experiences and stories from those who’ve lived it highlighted just how much fishing — from catching fish to cooking it and eating it — is intricately woven into the cultural fabric of Black communities.

John Mallette recalled his childhood days when, invariably every late September through October, families would converge at the Ocean City Fishing Pier in a “statewide pilgrimage to the beach.”

Before the pier met its demise following Hurricanes Bertha and Fran, both of which pummeled Topsail Island in 1996, it was a prime location for spot and sea mullet fishing.

The yield people caught at Ocean City, a milelong stretch of land in North Topsail Beach believed to be one of the first beachfront communities owned by African Americans, meant months’ worth of fish in the freezer.

Cars and trucks too late to get a spot in the pier parking lot lined the sides of N.C. Highway 210. The local motel would have to hang its “no vacancy” sign. Pickup trucks with campers would be parked off the shoulders of the street on which Mallette’s family lived. He remembers how people would sleep in shifts to ensure someone always had a fishing pole in hand. 

“It would be so full, the fire department would have to stop people,” Mallette said.

The influence of those experiences obviously ran deep. Mallette has been a commercial fisherman, he’s a for-hire recreational charter captain, and he’s co-owner of Southern Breeze Seafood in Jacksonville.

He was demonstrating how to cut fish at the North Carolina Seafood Festival in Morehead City last year when Garrity-Blake introduced herself.

She was excited to meet him and pitch the idea of lifting up the stories, recognizing and celebrating the contributions of African Americans to both the seafood industry and fisheries.

“He has so much knowledge about not only what’s going on now, but the history of the sort of cultural coastal traditions of Black communities,” Garrity-Blake said.

Mallette happily accepted the invitation to co-manage the project.

“There’s a lot of different angles to this,” he said. “It’s not as straightforward as just the commercial fishing industry. There’s a lot of things people just don’t understand. There’s so much that people don’t know and there’s a lot of stereotypes that were passed down generation after generation that, unfortunately, push African Americans away.”

Like the stereotype that Black people can’t swim, he said, that’s led to a cycle of African Americans working in the fish houses but not on the boats.

That hasn’t always been the case.

The menhaden fishery was at one time the largest employer of Black people in the mid-Atlantic.

“There was a fish factory in Beaufort and almost everybody in that factory was Black and the majority of the crew members on the vessels were Black,” Garrity-Blake said.

One might argue menhaden, an oily, boney fish harvested for use as animal feed, bait for fisheries and fertilizers, is not really seafood since it’s not sold in a market as such, she said.

But menhaden boat crew members and factory workers carried forth a long tradition of bringing home menhaden roe, perhaps better known as poor man’s caviar. 

“Some of the people in North River, to this day, talk about how the fishermen used to bring home menhaden roe and that was just considered a real coveted food, not just among the Black communities, and people around here in Carteret County and Down East just love menhaden roe and you just can’t get it anymore,” she said. “That was part of the local food that people really loved and there’s lots of stories like that.”

Mallette said the N.C. Black Seafood Trail will not only show North Carolinians how African Americans contribute to fisheries, but also be an opportunity to educate African Americans about the importance of eating North Carolina seafood, questions to ask at their local seafood markets, and offer alternative ways to prepare seafood outside of the more traditional method of frying.

“The older generation is dying off. You have a younger generation that knows about what sustainability is,” he said. “They don’t know to ask the questions. They’re not educated on seafood. Once you educate them, that’s how you make a big improvement on the quality of North Carolina seafood as a whole. It starts with education and goes from there.”

NC Catch received a $20,447 Community Collaborative Research Grant, a program supported by North Carolina Sea Grant and the North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute in partnership with North Carolina State University’s William R. Kenan Jr. Institute of Engineering, Technology and Science.

Working with NC Catch chef ambassadors and the nonprofits regional network, which extends from the Outer Banks south to Brunswick County, Garrity-Blake and Mallette are compiling a list of people to contact and interview. 

Those interviews will be paired with photography and videography to create an oral history for the traveling exhibit. 

The research will be stored in the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island. The museum plans to open an in-house exhibit of the project.

“What I would really like to see is more African Americans being involved in the seafood industry on all levels whether it’s coming down to the beach to fish or buy fish directly off a boat,” Mallette said. “I would love to see more African Americans learn to eat better seafood, eat cleaner seafood. I think starting to see more of that is what would be something I would really love to see come out of this project. This project is the key to that door that we haven’t been able to open.”

For coastal North Carolina, living off the land and sea are a way of life, and the traditions that surround hunting and fishing play a prominent role at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.

The importance of these traditions to Down East communities is always highlighted by the museum, now in its 30^th year of working to preserve Carteret County heritage and history, and will spotlight local food customs with new events during its annual Waterfowl Weekend taking place Friday through Sunday.

The Waterfowl Weekend is free to the public this Saturday and Sunday on the museum grounds. There will be decoy carvers, area crafters, artists, musicians, demonstrations and local seafood served both days.

Visitors also will be able to view the third annual Gallery of Trees: “Telling our Story.” This special exhibit of Christmas trees tells the unique stories of Down East families, organizations and longstanding area businesses, many of which are tied to the seafood industry.

“Seafood was not only one of the main features for Christmas gatherings, but it was the financial base for Down East families that made Christmas possible. Seafood and Down East are inseparable, especially at Christmas,” museum’s Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher said.

In years past, the Friday Night Christmas Gathering was a preview party for ticketholders to get an early look at the museum before opening to the public the next day.

This year, organizers are taking a different route for the Christmas gathering. They are celebrating area food traditions with the new event, the Core Sound Chow Down cooking competition starting at 5:30 p.m. Friday.

Local cooks will prepare traditional Core Sound stews and chowders, including stewed oysters, clam chowder, stewed redhead duck, stew-fried shrimp, venison chili and Cajun-style gumbo. The stews will be judged by guest judges, James Beard award-winning chef Ricky Moore of Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham, University of North Carolina professor and “Edible North Carolina” editor Marcie Ferris and assistant editor KC Highsmith, and Raleigh-based Locals Seafood founders Ryan Speckman and Lin Peterson.

The winner will be announced by 8 p.m. Friday.

Speckman told Coastal Review on Monday that he and Peterson are excited to be a part of this Down East event that celebrates so much coastal North Carolina history and culture. 

“The Chow Down is a fun way for Locals Seafood to support our North Carolina seafood culinary heritage with traditional dishes made by the locals themselves,” Speckman added. “Locals Seafood has been dedicated since its inception to promote the bounty of our coast’s natural resources, and I can’t think of a more authentic way to do that than having the privilege of being a part of this Down East event.”

Tickets to the chow down are $35 each and going fast, Amspacher told Coastal Review on Monday.

Tickets include four bowls of stew or chowder, cornbread and drinks. Beer and wine will be on sale, courtesy of Tarboro Brewing Co. and Beaufort Grocery Co. Ticketholders will also be able to enjoy Christmas cookies, coffee and punch while perusing vendor booths. To purchase tickets, visit the museum’s website.

Amspacher said that Friday night’s opening for Waterfowl Weekend has always been a huge part of the event. But, the museum was damaged in September 2018 during Hurricane Florence, rendering the building unusable for close to two years, and because of COVID-19 precautions, the previously indoor-only event evolved to be held both indoor and outdoor.

“The Friday night event is a new way to adapt to our event structure with outside vendors and our Core Sound Christmas light show and still keep our commitment to local seafood and home cooks,” she said. “We are excited this idea has already caught on — with more than half the tickets sold — and we are looking forward to the start of a new tradition ‘at the end of the road’.”

Amspacher said the museum is honored to welcome Moore and the “Edible NC” crew to the Waterfowl Weekend. 

“Ricky – a native of New Bern – has been to Core Sound often and shares our commitment to local seafood cooking the ‘old way.’ His home-base restaurant in Durham, Saltbox, serves it the old way every day,” she said. 

“Dr. Marcie Ferris has been one of the key leaders in North Carolina’s local food movement and has instilled in a new generation a love for the stories behind the food, a connection that is very important to Down East Carteret County. For us the seafood is inseparable from the men and women who catch, process and market this wonderful resource,” Amspacher added.

In keeping with highlighting area traditions, from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday during Tent Talks, Moore, Ferris, Speckman and Peterson will have a conversation about their work with coastal food traditions, followed by Moore and Ferris signing copies of their books, “Saltbox Seafood Joint Cookbook,” and “Edible North Carolina,” respectively. 

Related: Book explores complexity of eating ‘local’ in North Carolina

“I’m thrilled that the ‘Edible North Carolina’ editorial team is participating in the first-ever Core Sound Chow Down,” Ferris told Coastal Review in an email response. “I’m the editor of Edible North Carolina (UNC Press, 2022), which explores the vibrant contemporary food movement across the Tar Heel State. You cannot know a region’s food culture and history without experiencing the joy and flavor of its distinct places. It is our honor to meet community members and experience the historic, evolving food heritage of the Core Sound region at the Chow Down event.”

She added that during the Tent Talk, “we’ll have an important conversation about the local seafood movement in North Carolina with several of its leading voices, including two of our ‘Edible North Carolina’ essayists Karen Amspacher and Chef Ricky Moore, and Ryan Speckman and Lin Peterson, founders of Locals Seafood, one of NC’s best retail and wholesale fish markets featuring local, NC-caught fish,” she said.

Ferris explained that several years ago, Amspacher visited her food studies class at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill along with her friend and colleague, Ocracoke fisherman Morty Gaskill.  

“Amspacher told my students, ‘North Carolina seafood is your inheritance as North Carolinians!'” Ferris said. “Gaskill explained that the North Carolina coast is one of the most important and abundant fish ecosystems in the coastal United States, thanks to the meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current off of the Outer Banks.”

Chef Moore “taught us about the seasonality of our local fish and seafood, and how to appreciate lesser-known Delicious, native varieties such as croaker, spot, sugar toads, mullet, and fried hardshell crabs,” Ferris continued. “Protecting and preserving our local seafood is a critically important issue of the local food movement. Inlanders sometimes forget about the local seafood movement!! Eat it to save it — says food writer April McGreger, and that applies to one of North Carolina’s greatest treasures, its local fish and seafood — our inheritance.”

Other speakers scheduled for Tent Talks Saturday afternoon at the museum are lighthouse keeper Heber Guthrie, the Fish House liars, and a discussion on Harkers Island boatbuilding traditions.  

The handful of cooks participating in the Core Sound Chow Down cook-off are deeply rooted in Down East or active in the local food community, Amspacher explained.

Sara Lee Yeomans Willis, founder of Seaside Sensations Catering Co. has a family history in the seafood business. She will prepare stewed oysters for the cook-off.

“Her mother and father, Ellis and Melisie Yeomans were fishermen, fish/scallop house owners and beloved members of the commercial fishing industry on Harkers Island for decades. There’s when Sara Lee learned the value of local seafood and how to cook it. Check out her stewed oysters and you’ll understand,” Amspacher said.

Donavan Guthrie is the youngest cook participating. A Harkers Island born and bred native, he learned to cook from his family, the original Capt. Stacy Davis fleet. “Donavan carries forward the love of cooking to the next generation with his version of Down East clam chowder,” she said.

April Scott Taylor will bring Harkers Island’s original recipe for stew-fried shrimp. 

“April, like all young women Down East, learned to cook from her mother, grandmother, aunts and church women, and today as the wife of a commercial fisherman, she shares her knowledge and shared heritage with local seafood – the only kind of seafood Islanders will cook and eat,” Amspacher said.

Keith Fulcher’s stewed redhead ducks come from a long line of waterfowlers from Stacy.  

“His father, Mr. Homer Fulcher, beloved and famed carver and fisherman, made sure his sons — and daughters — carried forward all the traditions of Coresounders … hunting, fishing and cooking.  Keith’s redheads are said to be ‘the best on Stacy’ so we will see,” Amspacher said. Stacy is a community in Down East Carteret County.

Bryan Blake will bring a touch of Cajun to the mix with his chicken and sausage gumbo, she continued. 

Bryan and his wife Barbara Garrity-Blake, the founders of Gloucester’s Mardi Gras each February, “keep us reminded of the strong connections with the traditions of Louisiana and Down East, from fishing, shrimping, hunting to the deep sense of community,” Amspacher explained. 

Wendy Park, co-owner of Beaufort Grocery and chef in her own right, will prepare venison chili, Amspacher said.

“Wendy is one of the most active leaders in the local foods movement in Carteret County and always supportive of community events, especially Core Sound.  Thank you, Wendy, for supporting Down East with your time and support of our community,” she said. 

Shuttles will be available to transport visitors between the museum and Harkers Island School where the 34^th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival will be taking place 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. The Core Sound Decoy Carvers’ Guild organize the festival.

For Lisa Rose, author of the new book, “Urban Foraging,” her fascination with the often-overlooked plants that can be a part of a healthy diet began with family and has become a profession and a passion.

An anthropologist with an interest in ethnobotany and herbal medicine, Rose has written three books. Her first two, “Grand Rapids Food” and “Midwest Medicinal Plants,” were focused on her home state of Michigan. Her latest, though, “Urban Foraging,” released in October, takes a nationwide look.

“I’ve traveled a great deal between both coasts … so in considering this book, I really had to double click into generally what am I going to be able to find across most of my regions,” she said. “So in parts of North Carolina coastal regions, you might have 35 of those plants, whereas 15 might not be immediately at your fingertips. The criteria, first and foremost (was) geographic distribution.”

The foundation for her interest in botany, plants and how they can be a part of everyday life, began in Flint, Michigan, where she grew up. Her father was an engineer and mother an avid gardener, and both parents contributed to her fascination with plants.

“He was always asking questions, “she said, describing her father. “He was very engaged in the natural world. In fact, he taught me at a young age that the natural world is the best engineer, that the natural world has solutions to the problems of imbalance. There’s a natural rhythm, not always nice and frequently chaotic in the restoration of balance.”

It was her mother, though, who applied knowledge of the natural world to daily life.

“My mother was a gardener for a good chunk of my childhood, not because it was a hobby, but because it was a practical, economical way to feed her family,” Rose said. “We had a feral concord grape hedgerow when I was growing up and my mother would put up about 50 to 75 quart jars’ worth of juice. I mean that that really was a foundation of my childhood.”

Not every plant in the book grows in eastern North Carolina. Aspen, according to North Carolina Parks webpage “Vascular Plants of North Carolina,” only grows in the mountains of the state and even then, only rarely. Hyssop, described by the “Vascular Plants” page as “one of the tallest and most robust native herbs in the state,” has not been recorded in the Piedmont or coastal plain.

With 50 plants listed in her book, though, there are plenty to choose from. Some are well known as edible wild plants, particularly blackberries and grapes, although Rose features wild concord grapes of her native Michigan.

Some of her selections are surprising, although when reading about these plants, it becomes apparent why they were chosen.

The prickly pear is a case in point. Rose suggests numerous possible uses for the plant, ultimately settling on recommending a prickly pear simple syrup. When harvesting prickly pear, Rose makes clear the hazards involved, pointing out that the species has two types of sharp barbs awaiting the careless.

“Both the prickly pear pads and fruits are covered in large and tiny spines. While the large spies are somewhat avoidable, the glochids are pesky buggers that can get into the skin and feel like a fiberglass rash,” she writes. “The glochids will embed themselves into fabric, so do your gathering with leather gloves.”

She described for Coastal Review the lesson she learned the first time she harvested prickly pear.

I didn’t realize — It’s not the big thorns that are the worst problem. It’s the glochids. They’re horrible. I had harvested my first batch of prickly pear using a cloth bag and cloth gloves. That was the worst idea ever,” she said.

Her recommended recipe for prickly pear simple syrup is as a “delicious simple syrup for margaritas.”

A number of Rose’s recipes are for mixed drinks, which she noted is part of a long tradition.

“In past generations a lot of plants were preserved into a bitter as digestive aids and served as aperitifs. Monks were brewing them in the Middle Ages, 13th century France, Germany. So it’s really a long tradition, of maybe not for medicinal any longer but definitely today for a cocktail hour,” she said.

Many of the plants Rose writes about are often thought of as common weeds. Field garlic is a great example. Also known, according to the North Carolina State Cooperative Extension webpage as crow garlic, onion grass, stag’s garlic, wild garlic, and wild onion, the plant is common, especially along the edge of gardens. The plant has a distinct odor that is a cross between an onion and garlic and has the appearance of a spindly scallion.

Her recipe calls for a wild garlic flatbread, but she also notes the tops make an excellent garnish in place of scallion in a salad. She also writes that the bulb is exceedingly fibrous and quite difficult to use in a recipe.

Rose also takes readers into the forest. She noted that the needles, bark and resin of pine trees in general are edible. The needles in particular are emphasized for their culinary versatility.

“Chop the needles and use them as an herb to flavor salads, butters and vinegars for dressings,” she suggests in her book. She also notes that homebrewers can use pine needles to create ”a Belgian or wheat-styled ale without making the brew overly pine flavored.”

For Rose, “Urban Foraging” is a way to help readers understand the common plants in our lives that can be a part of our everyday diet — trees, flowers and many that are considered weeds. The book also reminds us of a largely forgotten history, a time when foraging for wild plants was a regular part of life. “In general, common knowledge we’ve forgotten about (wild plants),” she said.  “We’re about two generations now from that having been a really common practice.”

“Local” qualifies as one of the most overused words of the early 2000s. So commonplace then on restaurant menus, in food markets and in food media, “local” became a dubious descriptor even co-opted by nonfood companies (local landscaping anyone?). All the hyperbole culminated in “Farm to Fable,” an investigative series that earned journalist Laura Reiley a Pulitzer Prize nomination for exposing misleading claims around local food. 

That’s too bad because eating local still matters at a deeper level than the cliché “local” leads us to believe.

“Eating is never as simple as we might imagine,” writes author and editor Marcie Cohen Ferris as she introduces 20 leading activists, chefs, farmers, entrepreneurs, scholars and others in the food realm who penned essays for her new book “Edible North Carolina: A Journey Across a State of Flavor.”

The writers Ferris unites demonstrate the complexity, reach and significant impacts of local food in North Carolina. They extend stereotypical farm-to-table’s narrow boundaries out to what Ferris calls “the story of the contemporary food landscape.”

“Edible North Carolina” presents a panorama that encompasses the state’s food history, heritage and Indigenous and regional tastes like the Lumbee Tribe’s collard sandwiches in Robeson County and Down East commercial fishers’ favorite wild-caught scallop fritters. New voices broaden local flavors and concentrate food activism on today’s issues of access, equality, sustainability, reconnection, diversity and inclusivity.

“When I arrived in Cary and became the first Latina food columnist for the local newspaper, the resistance to my voice was swift,” Sandra A. Gutierrez writes in her “Edible North Carolina” essay. She recalls a subscriber in the mid-1980s upset that “her beloved paper had chosen a ‘Mexican’ as the writer for its food section.”

“Had I capitulated to this racism, I would not have witnessed the birth of a new culinary movement in the region. I embraced the culinary traditions of my southern white and Black readers but at the same time found my passion to introduce them to a global world of flavor.”

Baby steps like pulled pork tacos and chipotle in barbecue sauce that Gutierrez and others helped guide over the years led to a 2022 James Beard best chef southeast award nomination for Indian-born Cheetie Kumar of Raleigh’s acclaimed Garland. The restaurant’s Indian and Asian flavors and techniques are “driven by in-season ingredients from our home in Raleigh,” Kumar writes in “Edible North Carolina.”

Population migration has shaped North Carolina’s food landscape since the beginning. Ferris, a southern-foodways-focused professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, traces the state’s “edible history” from Indigenous people to African, English, Scottish, Irish, European and more influences. The mix is responsible for the state’s distinctive and nationally celebrated flavor — North Carolina took three James Beard Awards in 2022. That food scene nurtures understanding and acceptance of immigrant populations.

That’s good news, but behind the scenes, local food culture is ailing.

Lack of food access, poor pay for food industry workers, big agriculture consuming small farms and the fragility of centralized food supply chains are just some symptoms. The COVID pandemic, climate change, political divisions and the immigration crisis have magnified problems that are affecting the “economic livelihoods of thousands of North Carolinians in ways unimaginable in the past,” Ferris writes.

“Now more than ever we viscerally understand what it means to lose local farms, entrepreneurs, food markets, food banks, school cafeterias, beloved neighborhood restaurants and landmark food venues.”

“Edible North Carolina” contributors take readers through a range of unsettling emotions as they describe what is being lost but then lift them up with exciting changes driven by the many challenges.

Carla Norwood and Gabe Cummings offer a heartbreaking account of how Warren County’s once-thriving farm economy has declined over the past 50 years, including the farm that has been in Norwood’s family for generations. Residents who long had access to fresh, healthy, local food face decreasing numbers of supermarkets. Just two remain in the entire 444-square-mile county. Tiny downtown Warrenton alone hosted four bustling food markets 100 years ago.

As agriculture has waned, so have job opportunities. The poverty rate is high; a quarter of the population is food insecure.

“All the cues from the modern world seem to say: leave this place behind; go to a city with high-paying jobs where you can shop at upscale supermarkets and eat in trendsetting restaurants,” Norwood and Cummings write.

“Dislocation” of local food economies, as Norwood and Cummings term it, has impacted commercial fishers as much as farmers. In 2000, Carteret County watermen faced intense competition from cheaper, inferior and unsafe imported seafood, cultural preservationist Karen Willis Amspacher, executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, writes in her piece about North Carolina’s local seafood movement. Fish houses faded as pricey waterfront development overtook communities and blocked entry to public waters.

Instead of giving up, Norwood, Cummings and Carteret County families did exactly what Ferris said she hopes “Edible North Carolina” inspires readers to do: support and help rebuild local food systems that will assure food sovereignty for everyone.

“I really hope that people think about two things maybe: joy and justice,” Ferris says.

“I want people to understand their power as eaters in the state of North Carolina, as people who buy and consume foods and impact the health of their community. I think when you read this book you can start feeling what are the small ways you can help rebuild your little landscape.”

Norwood and Cummings in 2010 founded a nonprofit that connects diverse farmers and food entrepreneurs with new markets. The organization also repurposes abandoned spaces for local food processing.

Commercial fishing families organized Carteret Catch to brand local seafood, show consumers why it was better, and prove to restaurant professionals that diners were willing to pay more for it. Seafood sales increased, and more Catch groups formed along the coast.

Without that local catch and traditional seafood preparations he grew up eating in New Bern’s African American community, chef Ricky Moore would not have won a 2022 best chef southeast James Beard award for his work at Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham. The restaurant’s devotion to local foodways helped put North Carolina on the national culinary map.

“The backbone of my business – North Carolina fish and seafood – is sourced from local fishermen and women,” Moore writes in “Edible North Carolina.”

“As a son of this place, it is my mission to uplift the fisherfolk who tend its waters and share its seafood bounty.”

“Edible North Carolina” grew from Ferris’ classroom teachings on southern and North Carolina food culture. As students listened to guest lecturers like Amspacher and collected oral histories, the need for those voices to be collected in a serious tome emerged. Still, every “Edible North Carolina” essay ends on a light note, a recipe that reflects the writer or subject’s food journey.

Norwood and Cummings share a Warren County resident’s classic sweet potato pie. Anthropologist Courtney Lewis, concerned with the loss of Indigenous foodways, offers tuya gadu, a Cherokee bean bread. First-generation Southerner chef Oscar Diaz contributes BrunsMex Stew with black beans, cilantro and fresh tomato salsa.

Recipes were important to include, Ferris says, because they “speak to a moment. They speak to history …To many generations of family.” A recipe “communicates to us in another language,” she says.

That language is one that everyone understands because everyone must eat. Cooking leads to meals, and meals can stir conversation about what local food really means and the many lives it touches. Over dinner, we might consider numerous ways to help — shopping at the neighborhood seafood market, volunteering to pull weeds at an urban farm, checking supermarket produce sections for local vegetables, lobbying lawmakers, starting a movement.

“Edible North Carolina” makes us realize that we must never let “local food” be relegated to one more meaningless marketing campaign.

Janet Gillikin, 82, can’t help but tell the story again, laughing the whole way through. “I’ll never forget it my whole life.”  

She and Sonny Boy Stacy were children playing on a fish-house dock on their native Harkers Island when Gillikin suggested they race to shore. Running hard as he could, “Sonny Boy started swerving to the side,” Gillikin said. “And he fell right into the water.”

Judging by Stacy’s wailing, Gillikin was sure the boy had slammed into bags of hard clams fishermen stored under water, but when Gillikin asked if he was hurt, Stacy said no.

“Then why are you screaming?’” Gillikin asked, to which Stacy cried, “Because I got my chewing gum wet.”

With its glimpse of island life, Gillikin’s tale is more than a humorous anecdote, just like “Island Born and Bred,” the cookbook that records the story, is more than a recipe collection. Back on store shelves after a two-year hiatus, “Island Born and Bred” is not just Harkers Island’s community cookbook. It’s a definitive history told by the people.

“You can hear their voices in a very intimate, community kind of way,” said historian David Cecelski, who uses “Island Born and Bred” to teach history classes at Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

“If I had to pick 10 books on the folklife on the North Carolina coast for any time period ever, that cookbook would be on it.”

Recipes were an excuse

“Island Born and Bred” was never intended to be a scholarly text. “It is our attempt to tell the people who come and look that there is more to this Island than a weekend retreat or a Sunday afternoon drive. This is our home,” the book’s editor Karen Amspacher read from the hand-typed, black-and-white pages.

In 1987, Amspacher suggested the Harkers Island United Methodist Women craft a cookbook to fund its ministry’s good deeds. Not long from college work as an oral history transcriber, the Harkers Island native was certain that if somebody didn’t record stories she and others had heard their whole lives, those firsthand accounts would be lost forever. Amspacher envisioned recipes as merely the hook drawing readers into narratives. Some of her fellow Methodist Women weren’t so sure.

“I thought it was outrageous,” said Gillikin, who was Harkers Island United Methodist Women president at the time. She believed, “There are too many cookbooks out there. Everybody has 10 or 12 cookbooks. What do we need with another cookbook?”  

The ladies eventually came around, and “Island Born and Bred” ended up a cookbook people did need. People everywhere. Plans in 1987 to print just 500 copies of a 200-page book turned into the sale of 10,000 copies of a nearly 400-pager by the end of 1988 and thousands more shipped far and wide over the next 33 years.

From the beginning

Harkers Island residents put their hearts into the endeavor, sharing 625 recipes from old-timey classics like Fried Clams with Gravy to contemporary Microwave Swiss Steak. Stories, facts, poems and folklore came handwritten on napkins, slips of paper and legal pads or told to the United Methodist Women, who tape recorded and transcribed exactly what they heard.

An entire dictionary devoted to “Island Talk” listed terms like “I shan’t” (I shall not) and “slick cam” (slick calm) written phonetically, giving voice to the distinctive Harkers Island brogue.

Time and again, contributors honored determined ancestors who relied on their wits to thrive on nearby ribbons of sand — Shackleford Banks, Core Banks, Diamond City, Cape Lookout — places that afforded inhabitants freedom, togetherness, a bounty of seafood and stunning landscapes akin to heaven on earth.  

The book’s simple sketches, done by local artists, depict long-gone island scenes like boatbuilders at work, nets hung near once-numerous fish houses and a bonnet-crowned grandmother sitting on the “pizer,” an island word for “porch.”

Illustrations based on actual photographs included a poignant moving-day scene. The original circa 1911 photograph measured only about an inch square but still captured Clem and Louise Hancock on Shackleford Banks driving a horse-drawn wagon full of their belongings to more stable ground. Relocating became common. The “Island Beginnings” chapter traces Harkers Islanders’ lineage from pre-1650 settlements on outlying barrier islands to late-1800s hurricanes that forced residents to begrudgingly float their homes on boats across the sounds to fresh starts on Harkers Island.

Day after day, the United Methodist Women gathered stories and recipes. Every written word was hand-typed by volunteer Ruth Paylor on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Each page had to be perfect, no Wite-Out allowed because it would show up as a blob on the stat camera that print shop workers used to transfer Paylor’s typing to printing plates.

Pages arrived at the church fellowship hall in random lots, pages 53-86 one day, 95-175 another. “We had a room full of fish boxes stacked with batches,” Amspacher said. For weeks, the women collated pages by spreading them out in numerical order on a maze of tables across the fellowship hall. Volunteers wound the labyrinth, picking up page after page until a full book was assembled at the end.

“And they started reading the pages,” Amspacher said.

As the women navigated, they saw friends’ recipes, familiar tales and names of places long gone.

The maze ended at a hand-operated, book-binding machine the women borrowed from the print shop. Stacks of pages had to be carefully placed so that the 15 perforations on each sheet aligned perfectly with the plastic ring binder.

“We put together the first book, and we cried,” Amspacher said, fighting back tears. “We cried because we knew in our hearts, even though we didn’t want to admit it to each other, that Harkers Island was gone.”

A promise to never forget

Harkers Island quickly changed from a remote coastal fishing village in the early and mid-1900s to a tourist haven by the time the book project started. “I think my generation was the last to know it as it was,” Amspacher said.

“Island Born and Bred” held local culture for the ages.

In 1989, the book won the North Carolina Society of Historians’ Award of Merit “for its contribution to the preservation of North Carolina history.” It spawned more Harkers Island historic journals written by residents and helped inspire Harkers Island’s popular Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center. ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Good Housekeeping magazine, local television shows, numerous newspaper articles and glowing reviews all featured the work.

The United Methodist Women shipped orders to England, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean and every state in the U.S.

“I got a call from somebody in Billings, Montana, one night,” Amspacher recalled. “She said she had never seen the ocean but that she really appreciated the community because it reminded her of home.”

Even Harkers Islanders were moved, way more than they expected. After the book’s release, initially skeptical residents realized “Island Born and Bred” was special.  

“I’ll be looking at it and I’ll stumble on a story and get to reading it and forget all about the recipe,” said Dean Johnson, whose grandmother Nannie Raye Poole’s recipes appear throughout the book.

Johnson regularly taps her stained and tattered copy. Most recently, he prepared Poole’s time-consuming Conch Stew, page 194, for a neighbor wishing she could taste it again.

The rubbery shellfish must be pounded for at least an hour to tenderize the meat. As he talked, Johnson craved his late grandmother’s Fried Clam Fritters, page 190, that required fresh clams be gutted and then washed three times to remove grit. He launched into a story about Poole spending all day Saturday preparing Stewed Hard Crabs, pages 198 and 199.

“She started by catching and cleaning the crabs,” Johnson said, and ended by adding the island’s signature cornmeal dumplings.

Reading and rereading has convinced Johnson to gather loved ones more regularly, as Poole always did, to share local favorites, including the true Harkers Island Oyster Roast, page 206, he planned for the weekend. Like his ancestors, Johnson would cook wild oysters over a wood fire and serve them with Fried Cornbread, page 78, sour pickles and cold Pepsi.

“The heritage of it just makes me feel proud to be from where I am,” Johnson said, “and of those people who paved the way.”  

Over the years, “Island Born and Bred” did more than inspire. Proceeds helped many people in need, including North Carolina families economically devastated by a 1987 toxic red tide that closed commercial fishing; South Carolina victims of 1989’s Hurricane Hugo; and a Morehead City family who suffered a kitchen fire days before Christmas.

Profits continue to sustain Harkers Island United Methodist Church and its ministry work, the Rev. Lee Pittard said. Church leaders plan another printing soon. Amspacher expected the several hundred books released this fall to sell out before Christmas.

“But how many have been sold and how much money has been made is immaterial,” Amspacher said. “I can go through the book and tell you every one of the people, what their story is, who they were, what they’d been though.”

“This cookbook was Harkers Island promise to never forget.”

Wanda Willis’ Hurricane Cake

Wanda Willis’ “‘Hurricane Cake Recipe’ was recognized by Good Housekeeping magazine in 1989 and helped make the ‘Harkers Island cookbook a best-seller nationwide, and her ‘stew-beef-and-rutabagas’ helped build the Core Sound Museum,” according to her obituary. “Her kitchen table welcomed many traveling preachers, MYF groups, ballplayers, family members, and friends from far and wide to enjoy her cooking and hospitality.” Willis was “Island Born and Bred” cookbook editor Karen Amspacher’s mother.

Hurricane Oatmeal Cake
1 cup oatmeal
1¼ cups boiling water
2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Combine oatmeal and boiling water; set aside. Beat together eggs, sugars and oil until blended. Add sifted flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Add oatmeal mixture.

Pour into a greased 9-by-13-inch baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

Topping:
1 cup coconut
1 cup brown sugar
6 tablespoons melted margarine (see cook’s note)
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup evaporated milk
Cook’s note: Butter works just as well in this recipe.

Mix together topping ingredients until moist. Spread over cake. Broil until topping is light brown and crunchy, about 2 minutes.

Figs are the main ingredient this weekend on Ocracoke.

The sweet treat that has grown on the island for centuries will be celebrated Thursday through Saturday during the eighth annual Fig Festival at the Berkley Barn on Water Plant Road and the Ocracoke Preservation Society museum, which is sponsor of the event. 

The three-day festival will feature the Fig Cake Bake-Off, fig preserves contest, music, storytelling, children’s activities and crafts, talks by local fig experts, and vendors selling fig preserves, fig cakes, fig trees, local cookbooks and other fig-related goodies. A full schedule of music acts, events and activities can be found on the festival’s website.

In addition to being the centerpiece of the annual festival, fig-infused menu items are being offered at island restaurants, and shops are stocking this fig preserves for purchase.

Special guest Vivian Howard, star of the PBS shows, “A Chef’s Life” and “Somewhere South,” award-winning cookbook author, chef and restaurateur, will be on hand during the festival to sign copies of her cookbooks Friday afternoon, for a public Q&A Saturday morning and will help judge the Fig Cake Bake-Off Saturday afternoon. Tickets are sold out for Thursday’s evening event, The Savory Side of Figs, where Howard will be the guest of honor.

“The first thing I did when I moved back home from New York was plant a fig tree. I’m excited to be back on Ocracoke, the capital of fig country. Fair warning, I’ll do my best to abide by the ‘no pickem, the figum’ mantra, but can’t make any promises,” Howard told Coastal Review on Tuesday.

Fig Festival Organizer Sundae Horn told Coastal Review on Tuesday that she invited Howard to the festival after learning about her interest in Ocracoke. Howard sponsored a fundraiser to help out local restaurants after Hurricane Dorian in 2019 “And I knew that she was a friend to Ocracoke.”

Howard was initially going to be guest of honor at the 2020 festival, which went online last year because of COVID-19, but Horn asked again in 2021. “And so we’re really excited to say that Vivian Howard is coming.”

Horn said that the Fig Cake Bake-Off is the main event for the three-day festival and will be held in the Berkeley Barn, which is truly a barn, with sliding barn doors that will be open. While the weather forecast is calling for rain, the festival will be covered but, because the barn is open on all sides, it’s considered an indoor outdoor space.

The fig cake as we know it was invented in the 1950s or early 1960s by Margaret Garrish, who had a recipe for a date cake and decided to substitute fig preserves, Horn explained. Prior to that, the traditional fig cake was many layers of yellow cake with fig preserves between each layer.

“The idea of the traditional cake has also changed with time, but now we think of it as the Margaret Garrish recipe,” she said.

Cakes go on display at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, judging begins at 4 p.m. and winners will be announced and cake will be served at 5 p.m. 

There are three different categories bakers can enter, Horn said.

For adults there’s the traditional category, which is the traditional recipe that most people follow and the innovative category, which is anything goes as long as they’re fig. The third category for 16 and under is also anything goes as long as it’s fig. “And by anything, I mean truly anything. In 2019, the innovative recipe that won was fig crab cake,” she said, which was the second seafood-based winner. A few years ago, Horn said the innovative winner was for their clams casino recipe

Each category typically has 35-40 entrants and has its own judge. After the contest, the cake is served.

Peter Vankevich, copublisher of the Ocracoke Observer, the island’s newspaper, told Coastal Review that the Fig Festival is one of those events that really is for both the visitors and the islanders.

“Also, for these foodie people who go from one food festival to another — it’s a very popular activity, not only in North Carolina but everywhere — I think this is just one more addition to the list of things to do,” he said.

Vankevich’s wife, Mary, was the first-ever winner in the innovative category in the festival’s baking contest back in 2015. Her secret ingredient: maple buttercream.

“I did a little historical research, you know, since I was not a true Ocracoker, and so I looked up old recipes and I found one spice cake that was done by, I think, a Fulcher, and she used coffee,” Mary Vankevich said Tuesday. “I really ramped it up a lot with spice cake spices and made it spicy but it came out dark and it wasn’t as sweet.”

The maple buttercream frosting not only lightened the concoction visually, it also added the needed sweetness.

“I’m really not a baker at all, so it was a huge surprise to me that I won,” Mary Vankevich said.

Since then, the contest has become more intensely competitive, she said, and the festival has become meaningful for both visitors and islanders.

“I do think that this is very much embraced by the locals because figs are so much a part of our long tradition,” she said.

Peter Vankevich noted that once the judging is complete, attendees can sample the entries, adding to the event’s appeal.

“There’s so much of it that you can eat all you want,” he said.

Horn said the festival started off as a fig cake bake-off during the village’s Fourth of July event in the early 2010s, organized by Robin Payne with the Ocracoke Foundation. Payne helped save Ocracoke’s fish house and was looking for other ways to celebrate Ocracoke’s cultural heritage with food. In 2013, Payne handed the bake-off over to Horn, who was the Fourth Of July coordinator.

“In 2014 we had Hurricane Arthur that ruined our Fourth of July event,” Horn said. “We were looking at August, and we thought well, maybe we’ll take some of that money we had to spend on Fourth of July, and have an end of summer celebration and have the fig cake bake-off then.”

The bake-off was so popular, Horn said they decided to continue to have the Fig Cake bake-off in August and turn it into its own event. By 2015, it kind of became its own entity. Since then, the festival has grown “and it found its rightful home under the awning of the nonprofit Ocracoke Preservation Society.”

 Horn said when she moved to Ocracoke from Ohio in 1992, “I’d never seen a fig. I thought they came in Fig Newtons.”

Her landlord when she first moved to Ocracoke brought her figs to show her, and then the house she and her husband bought in 1994, has a fig tree right by the back door.

“I had one of the older ladies on the island kind of talk me through making my first fig preserves, because that’s how you make the traditional fig cake is with the fig preserves,” she said. “Figs don’t have a long shelf life so that’s what the local people would do with them, put them into preserves.”

Horn said most of the older homes on the island had a fig tree in the yard, which grow really well on the barrier island.

“Our climate is similar enough to the native climate of the Mediterranean, Middle East that they do really well. The early settlers brought them here. There have been fig trees here since the 1800,” she said. Adding the popular varieties are the sugar fig, pound fig, lemon fig, blue fig and brown turkey fig.

MARGARET GARRISH’S FIG CAKE

• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup salad (vegetable) oil
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/4 teaspoon. ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon warm water
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup fig preserves
• 1 1/2 cup chopped nuts

Beat 3 eggs; add sugar and oil. After sifting dry ingredients, add to egg mixture alternatively with buttermilk. Add vanilla and fold in figs and nuts. Pour into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake at 325 degrees for 45 minutes, or in a greased and floured bundt pan at 350 degrees just a little longer. You can also add a second cup of fig preserves and bake a little longer, approximately one hour.

Mark Hibbs contributed to this story.

No matter how you travel the new North Carolina Oyster Trail, whether you visit every single restaurant along the route or take an oyster farm tour, you’ll come away with one thing for certain: inspiration to cook your own oysters at home.

They’re best simply prepared with a delectable sauce, and these five recipes cover all the best ways to serve oysters.

If you like raw oysters on the half shell, go for the sweet Vidalia vinegar sauce with pink peppercorns and a hint of sweet sparkling wine. Oysters roasted in the oven or over a live fire are insanely good with garlic butter hot sauce or creamy jalapeno remoulade. Also start thinking about your own signature cocktail sauce. Consider the classic cocktail sauce recipe below a base for unbridled creativity.

No matter which sauce you choose, abide by one important rule: Never pile on so much sauce that it covers up the oyster’s flavor.

Sweet Vidalia Vinegar Sauce

A few drops of vinegar on oysters is standard in many communities along the North Carolina coast. A little acid balances the oyster’s rich texture and creamy flavor. In France, mignonette sauce — chopped shallots, crushed peppercorns and vinegar – is the classic condiment for raw oysters. However vinegar is served on an oyster, apply sparingly or vinegar’s tang will overwhelm the oyster’s natural flavors.

Blend 2 tablespoons minced Vidalia onion, 1 teaspoon crushed pink peppercorns, a pinch of crushed black peppercorns, ¼ cup white wine vinegar and ¼ cup sparkling pink sweet wine such as Moscato in a small bowl. Gently stir until combined. Refrigerate until ice cold. Spoon on to raw oysters or offer as a steamed oyster condiment.

Jalapeno Remoulade

When you’re piling fried oysters on a sandwich or giving oysters a smoky brininess by baking them in their shells in the oven, a creamy sauce with a bite is a decadent way to complement the shellfish’s flavor.

Whisk together ½ cup mayonnaise, 2 tablespoons chopped pickled jalapenos, 1 tablespoon hot or mild chow chow, 1 teaspoon chopped capers, 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard, 1 teaspoon lemon juice and 1 teaspoon paprika. Fold in 2 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley and 2 teaspoons chopped chives.

Garlic Butter Hot Sauce

No oyster roast is complete without cocktail sauce and little ramekins of hot, melted butter. As oyster roasts progress, those condiments get mixed together little by little as folks double dip in butter and then cocktail sauce or vice versa, creating one utterly delicious amalgamation. That mixing inspired this recipe. Dip steamed oysters into this sauce or drizzle it over fried oysters.

Peel and then finely chop four large cloves of garlic. Place garlic and 1 stick of unsalted butter in a small saucepan set over medium-low heat. Slowly cook the garlic in the butter for 5 minutes. Do not let garlic or butter brown. Continuously stir butter as you add ½ teaspoon paprika, ½ teaspoon chili powder, ½ teaspoon Cajun seasoning, 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon horseradish, 1 scant tablespoon tomato paste and 2 tablespoons hot sauce to the pan. Makes ½ cup.

Classic Cocktail Sauce

Asking oyster roast lovers how they make their cocktail sauce is like asking Grandma for a recipe.

They’ll probably tell you they never measure anything and add a dab of this and a little of that depending on how the sauce tastes as they’re mixing it. Everyone seems to agree that ketchup, horseradish, hot sauce and Worcestershire are key ingredients. From there, it’s up to the cook.

Use this recipe as a starter to create your own blend. You might add grated garlic, lime juice, Old Bay seasoning blend, soy sauce, chipotle, wasabi instead of horseradish or other ingredients to make this sauce your own.

Whatever you choose, the end result should be a balance of sweet, salty and tangy with noticeable but not extreme heat. In North Carolina, classic cocktail sauce is a dip for steamed, fried and baked oysters as well as oysters roasted over a fire. It’s also a condiment for fried oysters served in a hamburger bun, a sandwich known as an oyster burger.

In a small bowl, blend together ½ cup ketchup, 1-3 tablespoons grated horseradish, 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce, 1-2 teaspoons hot sauce, 1 teaspoon lemon juice or a dash of vinegar. Cover and refrigerate sauce until ready to use.

Trust Me Sauce

This simplest of all recipes comes from my late Italian uncle who showed up at our house one night to tell us we had been eating steamed clams all wrong.

He suggested that we lay them out on the half shell, sprinkle each clam with a little oregano and garlic powder and then drizzle on top-quality extra-virgin olive oil.

“Trust me,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about.”

Turns out he was right, and his suggestion was equally delicious on oysters baked in their shells in the oven. Sometime, we sprinkled on a little flaked red pepper, too.

“What’s in that pot in the refrigerator,” I asked my Italian mother, hoping she’d say tomato sauce and meatballs.

“Boiled peanuts,” she answered.

“Boiled peanuts? Who brought you those?” I had to wonder. Mom was a great cook, until it came to Southern food. In dirt clod battles among the neighborhood kids, my brother and I could have armed ourselves with her biscuits.

“I boiled those peanuts,” Mom declared, steam rising as I rolled my eyes. “I know how to boil peanuts. Just ask Charles.”

Charles was Mom’s second husband, and his opinion on boiled peanuts mattered. He grew up in South Carolina, a state where boiled peanuts are the official state snack. For Charles, each salty, tender nugget represented a cherished memory of family and annual fall peanut boils where folks gathered to simmer and then eat freshly dug peanuts.

Charles was so enamored of boiled peanuts that my mother, who had long considered them inedible, not only learned to boil peanuts but grew to love them herself. So did I. Our experience is emblematic of how boiled peanuts got around to being one of the South’s most adored foods.

They were a taste of home and identity never forgotten.

The boiled peanut’s complicated journey

From baseball stadium snacks to PB&Js packed in school lunches, roasted peanuts are an iconic American food, but you’d be hard-pressed to find boiled peanuts outside the southeastern United States.

Makeshift signs advertising “boiled peanuts” in fall are so plentiful across the region, especially around the Carolinas, it seems like boiled peanuts were born there. Instead, they took a complicated journey to that part of the world.

Food historians trace the peanut plant’s roots to what is now eastern Bolivia. The Incas ate so many roasted peanuts that shells still littered their floors uncovered by archeologists centuries later. Peanuts spread all the way to the Aztec empire and Atlantic islands now known as the Caribbean.

The Portuguese especially loved peanuts, raw or roasted, and by the mid-1500s had carried them to West Africa, Andrew F. Smith writes in “Peanuts: The Illustrative History of the Goober Pea.” The book is a sweeping history of the peanut.

Africans were already growing the similar, indigenous Bambara nut, named for a tribe now living mainly in Mali. Bambara nuts were and still are eaten fresh, boiled and added to stews. Both Bambara nuts and peanuts are nutritional powerhouse legumes, complete foods packed with protein, carbohydrates and fat. Prolific, easy-to-grow peanuts overtook Bambara nuts in Africa, spreading so rapidly that some historians thought peanuts originated there.

“Nguba,” the word for peanut in the African Kongo and Kimbundu languages, led to “goober,” the South’s nickname for peanuts. When European traders enslaved tens of thousands of West Africans and took them far from their birthplaces, Africans held on to their cooking traditions and memories of home. Wherever they landed, they recreated the dishes they knew as best they could, including boiled peanuts.

This is who really made boiled peanuts famous

Historical accounts over time have claimed that no one knows who first boiled peanuts. Some credited Confederate soldiers with popularizing boiled peanuts in the South. Johnny Cash, the Kingston Trio and other artists performed the American Civil War-era folk song “Goober Peas.” The lyrics involve battle-weary servicemen eating a lot of “delicious goober peas” and looking forward to more when they got home.

Food writer Robert Moss in his deep research of boiled peanuts doubts soldiers boiled goobers. Most everyone at that time preferred roasted peanuts, leading Moss to believe Africans and their descendants were probably the only people boiling peanuts. And as Smith’s book notes, “In antebellum America, Southern aristocracy viewed peanuts as trash food consumed by poor or enslaved people. Up North, they (peanuts) were looked upon as ungenteel, ‘the very symbol of rowdyism.’”

Boiled peanuts didn’t gain wide acceptance until the early 1900s. In 1915, African American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver started his famous research on how peanut crops could fill cotton fields ravaged by boll weevils. His studies led to the United States becoming one of the world’s top peanut producers. A year later, Carver published a bulletin outlining 105 ways to prepare peanuts, including boiling them for soup

By then, Africans in America had been boiling peanuts for decades. With peanuts suddenly in the spotlight, Moss thinks whites took notice of boiled goober peas. Like recipes for yams, cornbreads, stewed collards and barbecue ribs, boiled peanuts were so delicious they became another celebrated Southern specialty traced to African American culture.

How to cook boiled peanuts

Convenience stores sell boiled peanuts year-round, but as a Tidewater Virginian once told me, and everyone else who came through his line as he spooned out boiled peanuts at a late-November oyster roast, “You should only eat these in the fall. It’s too late now.”

Peanut boils happen in fall because that’s when fresh peanuts are harvested in the South, and green peanuts make the best boiled peanuts. Fresh peanuts cook faster than dried peanuts. More importantly, they are silkier and have a subtler nutty flavor. Moist and highly perishable, fresh peanuts must be used within a few days of picking, hence the need to host a big peanut boil. Whoever comes to help dig and cook peanuts gets to eat their fill.

Always refrigerate boiled peanuts and eat them within a few days, otherwise they’ll spoil. In eastern North Carolina, find fresh peanuts to cook yourself from mid-September to mid-October at farmers markets, produce stands and smaller grocery stores like Piggly Wiggly. Boiled peanuts pop up around the same time at fresh markets and roadside stands.

Boil peanuts in water seasoned with plenty of salt. Consider adding bourbon, seasoning blends, soy sauce or even molasses to the brine. Creative preparations are fine. Pro chefs have been known to swirl boiled peanut purees around trendy, New America pork belly dishes.

I, myself, have swooned over a housemade sweet potato tot swiped across a tasty smear of boiled peanut hummus, but I prefer the pleasure of eating simple boiled peanuts. Squeezing boiled peanuts from their shells and savoring their uncomplicated flavor fills me up with nostalgia for times when food was truly seasonal, something to harvest and prepare together. It’s the kind of food you never forget.

Basic Boiled Peanuts

2 pounds raw, green peanuts or raw dried peanuts, in their shells

1/3 to 1/2 cup of salt (see note)

3 gallons of water

Note: If you are adding other seasonings such as hot peppers, spice mixes, vinegar or bourbon, add to the pot along with the salt. Add more salt if you like salty foods, less if you don’t.

Procedure: Rinse peanuts to remove any dirt clinging to their shells. Put salt, water and peanuts in a large pot and place on the stove over high heat. Cover the pot and bring the peanuts to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for 4 to 6 hours, or until the peanuts are very tender. Check green peanuts after two or three hours, as they cook faster than dried peanuts. To test, remove a peanut from the pot, let cook, open the shell and taste the peanut. It should be tender but not mushy. When peanuts are done cooking, turn off the heat, drain peanuts, reserving some of the liquid, and transfer them to a large baking sheet to cool. Serve peanuts immediately while they’re warm or transfer them, with a little bit of the cooking liquid, into a covered container and refrigerate no longer than 4 or 5 days.

As soon as it was clear Tropical Storm Isaias might end up a hurricane on North Carolina’s coast, we started our storm planning right where we usually do.

“I guess I’d better go to the grocery store,” my housemate said.

“Yeah, wipe out the milk and bread aisles,” I joked before seriously reminding him not to buy anything perishable.

When I opened the fridge after his supermarket run, it was, of course, jammed full of milk, cheese, frozen foods and a bottle of cava best served chilled.

What is it about approaching hurricanes that sends us into a frenzy of illogical food buying? Even before Jim Cantore decides where he’ll be lashed by wind on camera, we start hoarding milk and bread, despite knowing both mold quickly once power is cut and storm-related humidity rises to dripping-wet levels.

Psychologists deduce that sticking to routines makes us feel safe. Buying staple bread and milk as we would under normal circumstances represents our hopes that a storm will pass us by, that electricity will steadily pump cold air through our refrigerators. Canned beans and tinned tuna forecast the disaster we don’t want to face.

Purchasing perishables may feed our minds the calm we crave before a storm, but what do we really need to survive days without electricity and access to the supermarket following a hurricane? Here’s advice from disaster managers.

How much food you need after a hurricane

Have at least a three-day supply of water and nonperishable food for yourself and all members of your household, FEMA says.

Plan on at least one gallon of water per person per day, FEMA adds. That eight 8-ounce bottles or four 16-ounce bottles per person, per day.

What to buy before a hurricane

When shopping, think healthy, high-energy foods that your crowd will eat, and don’t forget everyone’s dietary restrictions, the U.S. government advises at its Ready website that promotes preparedness.

Stock up on foods that require no cooking and taste good hot or cold. Think protein bars, jerky, dried fruit, nuts and nut butters, longer-lasting fresh produce such as carrots, apples and oranges.

Consider tuna in pouches, fruit cups, granola bars and powdered milk. Canned meats, milk, seafood, vegetables and fruit are obvious choices. Choose crackers over bread.

Purchase package sizes that best fit your family’s needs to avoid leftovers or wasted food.

How to plan hurricane meals

Think about foods that can be mixed together easily to create satisfying meals. For instance, a can of garbanzo beans, a can of tuna, chopped olives and chopped pimentos stirred together with a little olive oil and dried oregano makes a nice salad to eat with crackers. Oats soaked overnight can be mixed with raisins, nuts, canned milk and chopped fresh apples.

Before shopping, check out “The Hurricane Cookbook.” Students in Florida International University’s dietetics and nutrition program created the book’s healthy, no-cooking-required recipes as well as a handy shopping list and tips on food safety.

Yummy-sounding recipes include chocolate chia pudding, lentil tacos and salmon with new potatoes in Dijon herb dressing. Find the free book by searching “hurricane cookbook” at fiu.edu.

3 things to never forget

Make sure you have a manually operated can opener.

Remember condiments such as mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup. Look for individual packets or use up what you have.

Limit foods that make you thirsty, such as salty snacks, but include some stress-busting comfort foods like salsa and low-salt chips, crunchy snacks, Pop-Tarts, pudding cups, cookies, M&Ms and a couple bottles of wine.

What food to keep after a hurricane

Once power is restored, clean out the refrigerator and freezer, the USDA advises. “If food is partly frozen, still has ice crystals, or is as cold as if it were in a refrigerator (40 degrees), it is safe to refreeze or use. It’s not necessary to cook raw foods before refreezing,” the agency reports.

Throw out foods that have been warmer than 40 degrees for more than 2 hours, although butter, jams, jellies, mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauces and hard cheeses may be OK. Never taste a food to determine if it has spoiled and always follow the mantra “When it doubt, throw it out.”

Back in the spring, fast-food mega giants McDonald’s and Arby’s went at it over which chain produced the best fried fish sandwich. It was a fight that anyone who’s ever been on or near the North Carolina coast knew neither restaurant could win.

The battle boiled down to peelable breading on a square piece of whitefish atop American cheese at McDonald’s vs. a near-parallelogram-shaped fried whitefish filet on a lot of shredded iceberg lettuce at Arby’s. Plenty of tartar sauce garnished each stack, both of them built on soft, white burger buns.

No doubt, fans hemmed and hawed over one or the other, but in my mind, both sandwiches were disqualified for breaking every single rule about what constitutes the best fried fish sandwich.

Great fried fish sandwiches are made with fresh, identifiable fish filets, hand-breaded and fried to order. They’re towers of tender, tasty fish contrasted by crisp, refreshing slaw and smeared with a zingy tartar sauce that never bullies the fish.

You’ll find the real thing up and down the North Carolina coast, deep into the Piedmont and all the way to Asheville, too. Each place might put its own spin on the classic, but rest assured no matter the variation, all those sandwiches are likely to be better than whoever won the so-called “Fish Sandwich War of 2020.”

Five of the best fried fish sandwiches in North Carolina

Stop wishing you could have one of those fried fish sandwiches people keep posting on Instagram. Go get one. These restaurants serve fried fish sandwiches featuring fresh North Carolina seafood, and you can get these sandwiches to go.

O’Neal’s Sea Harvest

618 Harbor Road, Wanchese, 252-473-4535, onealsseaharvest.com

All seafood is locally caught and purchased daily at this Outer Banks market and restaurant on Roanoke Island. The lunch-only spot is known for lightly fried seafood and putting gourmet touches on fish sandwiches. Recently, grilled golden tilefish landed with fresh spinach, tomato and lemon remoulade on a potato roll. Don’t miss the fries seasoned with Old Bay.

Salt Box Seafood Joint

2637 Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd., Durham, 919-237-3499; 608 N Mangum St., Durham, 919-908-8970; saltboxseafoodjoint.com

Chef Ricky Moore’s tribute to fish camps and seafood shacks has been featured in just about every major food magazine since he opened his first location in 2012. This year, Moore is a semi-finalist in the James Beard Awards best chef southeast category. The New Bern native brings native North Carolina seafood to the inland masses via walk-up, take-out and online ordering services. Fresh catches, fried or griddled, are posted daily and land on the classic fish sandwich, topped with slaw.

Seaview Crab Co.

1515 Marstellar St., Wilmington, 910-769-1554, seaviewcrabcompany.com/midtown

Much respect if you can leave the parking lot before digging into your fish sandwich. Mine came with crispy fried flounder stacked two pieces high, tangy mojo aioli, greens and a tomato slice. Normally, I shun tomatoes on fried fish sandwiches, but the fish’s extra-crispy breading and the toasty grilled roll totally stood up to the juicy tomato.

Quality Seafood Market

309 E. Ehringhaus St., Elizabeth City, 252-335-7648, qualityseafoodco.com

Folks line up all the way to the five-lane street fronting the market for flounder sandwiches, no frills, just crispy fish on a bun for $5.99. Get a side of slaw if you want to dress it up. Do take-out, pick-up at the drive-thru window or dine-in. Family-owned and operated for 40 years, the market stocks a range of seafood from shucked oysters to whole steamed crabs and fish filets.

Southern Salt Seafood Co.

701 Evans St., Morehead City, 252-499-9528, southernsaltseafood.com

Fishing boats pull right up to the dock beside this building, which has been a seafood restaurant since 1941 and a seafood market before that. If you don’t see a fried fish sandwich on the menu, don’t be afraid to ask for one. Local fish is guaranteed, and the kitchen will fix your sandwich just about any way you like it.

Make your own

Fish sandwiches are not so hard to make at home. Follow these guidelines to create your own ultimate version.

Full-flavor fish

Skip mild flounder, especially now as state regulators work to restore overfished populations. Trout, mahi, sea bass, tilefish and triggerfish seasoned simply with salt and pepper are all flavorful and firm enough to shine in a fish sandwich. Be generous. Plan two filets per sandwich, using pieces of fish large enough so some of the meat hangs over the sides of the bread.

Breading

A combination of cracker meal and panko bread crumbs makes a crunchy crust while a simple dusting of cornmeal is lightly crispy and adds that true Southern flavor. The latter also lets you pan-fry fish in less oil, a big deal when facing the challenge of frying at home.

Deep-frying dates back more than 1,500 years to the Greeks, and the Portuguese and Spanish had fish frying down to an art by the 1200s and may have inspired the British fish and chips. After all those years, we still struggle with deep-frying in our own kitchens. If you need a refresher, revisit our story about how to fry fish. And always use a heavy skillet. Nothing works better than a cast-iron pan. And stick to oil that can take the heat, like grapeseed or avocado oil.

Don’t fuss with seasoning the bread crumbs. The sandwich’s toppings and spreads should be all the added flavor you need on that crispy piece of fish.

You must have slaw

Iceberg lettuce on a fish sandwich is, well, kind of a cop-out. Tender fish, hot from the fryer and laid on a soft bun begs coleslaw’s zesty crunch. Go with vinegar-dressed rather than creamy slaw. Shave cabbage, green or red, super thin. Use about ¼ to ½ cup of slaw per sandwich, but not so much that the fish is overwhelmed. Serve the slaw for the sandwiches cold but not ice-cold. You want a cool contrast that doesn’t reduce the fish’s temperature. Try the recipe below on your next fish sandwich.

Amp up the tartar sauce

It’s not a fish sandwich without homemade tartar sauce that touches the fish. If you smear it into the bread, the sauce’s flavor will get lost. Dollop and gently spread a couple spoonfuls on the bottom bun and/or on top of the fish. Store-bought tartar sauce just doesn’t have the same zip and freshness as sauce you make yourself. The recipe below includes jalapenos and Southern chow-chow relish.

Soft, humble bread

This is not the occasion to break out the brioche, sourdough boule, onion rolls, sweet Hawaiian bread, rustic whole-grain or those everything bagels. Stick to simple, white buns or hoagie rolls soft enough to bite through without mashing the delicate fish. Toast the buns insides up under the broiler until they are lightly browned. That will add a bit more crispiness to a fish sandwich and help ensure the bread doesn’t soak up tartar sauce. Rub the toasted sides with a half clove of garlic to add a little more spice.

Extra crispy things

Pickled onions, sliced bread-and-butter pickles, potato chips and crunchy fried bacon are fun, optional garnishes to set on the table so that guests may doctor their fish sandwiches. Put out lemon wedges and Texas Pete, too. Stay away from sliced tomatoes. They’ll water down the fish’s flavor and make the sandwich soggy.

Vinegar Coleslaw

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons sugar

½ teaspoon celery seeds

1 tablespoon olive oil

¼ pound red cabbage, finely shredded

½ pound white cabbage, finely shredded

1 small carrot, scrubbed, trimmed and shredded

1-2 tablespoons pickled mustard seeds

Place apple cider vinegar, sugar and olive oil in a small sauce pan and gently heat until sugar has melted. Remove pan from heat and stir in celery seeds.

Place cabbages and carrot in a medium bowl. Pour warm dressing over vegetables and toss. Fold in pickled mustard seeds. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Makes about 3 cups.

Jalapeno Tartar Sauce

3/4 cup prepared mayonnaise

¼ cup chopped gherkins

3 tablespoons chopped capers

2 tablespoons chow-chow relish, drained

1 small, fresh jalapeno, finely diced

1 tablespoon minced parsley or dill

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Salt and black pepper to taste

Stir together all ingredients in a small bowl. Refrigerate for 30 minutes. Taste tartar sauce, adding more salt and pepper if needed. Makes 1 cup.

Source: Liz Biro

The two most important liquids down South are arguably the water in which you’re baptized and sweet iced tea.

The second evokes as much devotion and emotion as the first. Memorize the prayer that guides the best iced tea makers: “Orange pekoe. Extra sugar. Pure water. Amen.”

Recite it each time you or someone else decides to make iced tea. Southerners are faithful to those three ingredients and dogmatic as to how they should be blended. Correct brews are strong and sugary, just like folks sipped back home, down South, where National Iced Tea Day June 10 is a time to be thankful for family reunions flowing with sweet ice tea.

“I just remember that there was always iced tea there, every time of day, just about year-round. Even in winter, they never slowed down,” Southport resident Rob O’Briant has told me about life at his grandmother’s old farmhouse in Nash County, near Rocky Mount.

O’Briant, who has been known to drink a gallon of iced tea a day, is loyal to his grandmother’s formula. She steeped orange pekoe in pure-tasting water that had barely reached a boil. While it was still warm, she sweetened the brew with lots of sugar, up to one cup per half gallon, no lemon. That’s about 5 teaspoons of sugar for every tall glass of iced tea.

“It was strong, and it was really sweet,” O’Briant said.

Southern iced tea is so famously sweet that the drink is considered a locator of the true South. You may be in Virginia, but if sweet tea is not on the menu, you’re up North, proponents of this position finder say.

The Georgia State House of Representatives in 2003, just before April Food’s Day, introduced a bill that stated “Any food service establishment which serves iced tea must serve sweet tea,” and not doing would constitute a “misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature.”

Why do Southerners love their iced tea so sweet? America is a country founded in part on sugar and tea. Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane cultivation to the Caribbean, and by the mid-1700s it was a cash crop in Louisiana. During Colonial times, world sugar trade was huge. So was tea. The United Kingdom was one of the world’s biggest tea consumers. Colonists brought that taste for tea to young America. Access to sugar meant they could distill molasses into rum, which they used to spike their sugar-laden tea punches.

With access to pond ice frozen over bitter winters, New Englanders could store ice hunks in cool places, providing cubes for tea and punches into warmer months. That kind of ice didn’t exist in the South’s temperate climate. Starting in the early 1800s, the North started shipping ice, but the first nonalcoholic sweet iced tea recipes didn’t show up down South until the late 1800s.

Sweet ice tea got a big boost when it was served during hot summer days at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Sixteen years later, Prohibition nixed spiked tea punches. Uplifting, sweet, caffeinated tea became a popular substitute pick-me-up. Much of the tea Americans drank then was green. When World War II cut off supplies of Japanese green tea, the British shipped plenty of black tea from India to the United States.

As black tea became cheaper and home refrigerators and freezers more available, iced tea secured its place on Southern tables.

The ice-tea-making process is easy, but as author John Edgerton said in his encyclopedic (Alfred A. Knoph, 1987), ”… it’s surprising how many brewers of the leaves botch the job.”

“Part of the problem is in the tea itself,” Edgerton wrote, explaining that the loose-leaf orange pekoe favored for Southern iced tea has been replaced at supermarkets with “flow-through” tea bags and all sorts of flavored, blended and herb teas.

Orange pekoe is a grade of black tea denoting the size of tea leaves in a blend. Large, coarse leaves take longer to brew. Orange pekoe is the grade for the smallest leaves that brew more quickly. O’Briant advises home brewers taste-test various orange pekoe teas to determine which one has the best flavor.

Water is another issue. Mineral content and purifying agents can both interfere with tea’s flavor. That’s not to say you can’t make tea as good at O’Briant remembers drinking at this grandmother’s house.

““It got me addicted to tea,” he said.

His own recipe involves bringing two quarts of water barely to a boil, removing it from the heat and steeping four family-size tea bags, preferably the Luzianne brand, in the hot liquid for 20 minutes. He stirs three-fourths to 1 cup of sugar into the warm tea and then enough water to make one-half gallon of iced tea. Completely chill the tea before serving it over ice.

The resulting brew is so good that it turned O’Briant into the official tea maker for his family’s gatherings, but don’t be offended if when you make it someone asks for more sugar.

Clyde Phillips Seafood Market, like fish houses across North Carolina, is open during coronavirus, but, as the rest of them, it’s doing business a little differently.

Normally, people would hang around the wee pink house where Phillips’ shrimp trawlers dock between two bridges over White Oak River in Swansboro. As fishmongers prepped orders, locals and customers would chitchat or peruse wall photos of the place, in business since 1954.

These days, Phillips has strict rules: Call in orders before you arrive and wait your turn outside if customers are in the market when you get there.

“They’re having to find different methods to go to,” said John Aydlett, seafood marketing office manager for the state Department of Agriculture, of seafood retailers maneuvering change in the age of coronavirus.

Markets are deemed essential services and, therefore, open, but with sales down as much as 80%, thanks in a large part to pandemic-related restaurant closures, market owners are working to get more seafood into home kitchens, Aydlett said.

So are fishers like Ana Shellem. Based in New Hanover County, Shellem sold and delivered the clams, oysters, mussels and stone crab she harvested exclusively to restaurants. That ended March 17, when Gov. Roy Cooper issued an executive order shuttering dine-in service at eating and drinking establishments.

“If that continues into May, I’ll definitely be doing those home deliveries,” Shellem said in late April as governors and the White House debated when businesses could reopen.

While the pandemic has posed challenges to seafood retailers, fish are still running, shrimp are filling nets and seafood is available to purchase, whether you want to pick it up at the market, get curbside service or have it delivered to your door.

How to find seafood markets in North Carolina

Urban seafood markets are easy to find online. Most of them have websites and Facebook pages, as well as other social media sites. Rural fish houses may have no online presence. These organizations have rounded up the names, addresses and contact information for what appears to be every single seafood market in North Carolina.

N.C. Seafood Marketing: ncagr.gov/markets/seafood/index.htm

Hit the “seafood directory” tab at this agency’s webpage to run detailed searches for seafood markets in your area. This division of the state Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services also posts recipes, charts showing what’s in season and links to other seafood resources.

NC Catch: facebook.com/NCCatch

Get regular news reports from coastal North Carolina seafood markets by following NC Catch’s Facebook feed. Pin down what’s up in various regions by following the organization’s regional partners:

• Carteret Catch
• Brunswick Catch
• Ocracoke Fresh
• Outer Banks Catch

Seafood delivery and online orders

Don’t see your favorite market or one in your community on this list? Ask what’s in the works when you call those markets. As the coronavirus lockdown and social distancing continue, seafood markets are constantly adapting by adding online ordering, delivery and shipping, Aydlett said.

Seaview Crab Co.

1515 Marstellar St., Wilmington, and other locations in the Wilmington and Fayetteville areas, 910-777-1228, seaviewcrabcompany.com

Let fishmongers curate a box of mixed seafood (free shipping to some states, including North Carolina) or make a custom order. You may also shop multiple locations in the Wilmington and Fayetteville areas. Seaview owners are working on home delivery to Wilmington residents. In February, owners, who started as crabbers and still harvest some of the N.C. seafood they sell, added a take-out kitchen to Seaview’s Marstellar Street location in Wilmington. Recent menus have featured grilled or fried fish or shrimp in tacos or on fried grits with cheddar cheese sauce. Po’ boys, crab cake sandwiches, seafood salads and daily specials are also available.

Fresh Catch Seafood

57 Harbor Road, Wanchese, 252-473-7484, freshcatchobx.com

This fish processing and packaging operation, owned and operated by fishers, just started putting together family packs, one of which comes with a pound of grouper and a half-pound of plain or bacon-wrapped scallops, ready to cook. Shipping and curbside service is available for all kinds of fish and shellfish.

Carolina Meat & Fish Co.

16709 Orchard Stone Run, Charlotte, 704-458-1011, carolinafishmarket.com

Get bake-and-eat seafood bags shipped to your door. Build your own spicy fra diavolo bag or choose combinations like just shrimp and corn or crab, lobster and shrimp. Each bag comes with “secret sauce.” Eat right from the bag, toss with pasta or spoon over rice. Carolina also ships sea scallops. Order the monthly seafood subscription boxes, and the shipping is free. Each box contains five portions of seasonal seafood, most of it harvested in North Carolina.

R.E. Mayo Seafood

183 Mayo Road, Hobucken, 252-745-5331, remayoseafoodinc.com

The longtime hub for locally harvested seafood will ship small and large amounts of seafood, even 50 pounds of shrimp. Seasonal seafood is packed fresh and then frozen before it hits the road. Depending on the season, offerings include flounder, mullet, sea bass, croaker, spot, drum and trout, crabs, scallops, shrimp and oysters. Call to find out what’s available.

Washington Crab & Oyster Co.

321 N Pierce St., Washington, 252-946-5796, washingtoncrab.com/shop

Shop online for whatever is biting, shellfish, too, and then have it delivered to your door. Get raw seafood like shrimp and sea scallops and cooked seafood including picked crab meat and whole steamed blue crabs. Also find ready-to-cook crab cakes. Check the list online to see what fish are in season.

Topsail Steamer

Surf City, 910-328-2645; Wrightsville Beach, 910-679-5004; topsailsteamer.com

Both locations are open for curbside pick-up — check the website for schedules – but Topsail Steamer also ships its delectable seafood boils nationwide via goldbelly.com/topsail-steamer, and shipping is free. The classic blends jumbo shrimp, andouille sausage, sweet corn, red bliss potatoes and Topsail Steamer’s own seasoning blend. Other pots include clams, scallops, kielbasa and snow crab. You just add beer or water.

Walking Fish

walking-fish.org

Run by a Carteret County-based fishermen’s cooperative, the community supported fishery, or CSF, supplies members in Raleigh and Durham a variety of seasonal N.C. seafood in spring, fall and winter. Sign up at the website for 2- or 4-pound packages delivered weekly or bi-weekly. Choose seafood dressed as close to ready-to-cook as possible, for instance fish filets, or minimally processed seafood like bone-in fish. Find prices and what’s in season at Walking Fish’s website.

Locals Seafood

Various locations in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, 919-675-2722, localsseafood.com

The company was founded by fishers who offer N.C. seafood all the time. Pre-order online and then pick up at the Raleigh State, Chapel Hill or Western Wake farmers markets. Weekly “seafood shares” — 2-pound boxes of what’s in season – are also available. Curbside pick-up and local delivery of prepared food like grilled striped bass sandwiches or meal kits like shrimp and grits, tuna lasagna and lemon-herb-stuffed sea bass, are available at Locals Oyster Bar 3 to 8 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Order online ahead of time. Credit and debit cards only for all purchases. No cash. Visit the website and Locals’ Facebook and Instagram for details

High Country Seafood Co.

215 Beaver Creek School Road, 336-977-1827, highcountryseafoodco.net

This shop is in the North Carolina mountains, but owners work with our state’s fishers to source high-quality seafood in season. Selections change weekly and have recently included red snapper, wild shrimp, wahoo, tilefish and swordfish. Order online, even N.C. favorites such as shrimp burgers, and pick up at the market. Also text or email preorders for family meal boxes that contain all the ingredients you need for dinners such as seafood tacos, shrimp gumbo and Low Country boils. Meals generally feed four people.

Shrimp, rockfish and more seafood recipes

Fried seafood platters are crave-worthy for sure, but seafood is versatile. Here’s where to find recipes galore.

Coastal Review: coastalreview.org/category/ourcoast/food

Sure, we’ll toot our own horn. Coastal Review’s food section serves lots of recipes. Find a story about how to fry shrimp, which puts you one step away from making shrimp burgers at home. Also, learn how to make crab cakes. There’s a recipe for stuffed shrimp and another for classic shrimp cocktail.

Mariner’s Menu: ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/mariners-menu

For years, cooks working with N.C. Sea Grant have been developing seafood recipes for this blog, part of which is assembled in a cookbook by the same title. Besides dishes like grouper in cilantro butter, find tips for selecting, handling and storing seafood.

Haag & Sons Seafood

7901 E. Oak Island Drive, Oak Island, 910-278-1234, haagandsonsseafood.com

Scan Haag’s Facebook page and website for irresistible recipes like seared scallops on white bean and spinach ragu with charred lemon and then call in your order before heading to the market. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or request fish cut to order. Owner Jon Haag has been on the fishing scene for 25 years and has been voted Brunswick County’s top fishmonger.

Jane Bell was a vivacious redhead who lived in a tiny house in Greenville back when tiny houses were places where most people didn’t want to live. The kitchen was one of her three immaculately clean rooms, all set in a row and each festooned in rainbow bric-a-brac, much of it collected on flea market runs with her boyfriend, my father.

All in all, the house could not have been more than 500 square feet, maybe less, most of it dedicated to a floral-heavy living room, vanilla pink boudoir and cramp bathroom surprisingly equipped with a clawfoot tub … or maybe not so surprisingly. Jane believed in reincarnation, and one fuzzy image of a past life put her as a young lady at a grand ball, circa 1800s. She recalled wearing a bright yellow gown decorated in brown ruffles and bows. Surely, her pre-occasion primping those many decades ago began in a similar tub.

Jane thought anything was possible. She was a sparkly eyed optimist whose nose crinkled like a sprite when she smiled. Therefore, we never doubted that from the wee stove in her little kitchen Jane could pull the best damn rum cake you ever tasted. That’s pretty much how Jane put it when she told us the dessert was among her specialties.

Dad was an admirable baker himself, and one who believed any cake was better moistened with brandy. I was a student at East Carolina University, which continually made national lists of America’s best party schools. My brother was not long out of N.C. State, where he constructed an elaborate dorm-room bar. Anything soaked with rum was fine with us three.

The Duncan Hines yellow cake Jane baked was extra moist, basically pound-cake-like, thanks to the addition of Jell-O instant pudding mix. It was covered in caramelly chopped pecans baked upside-down-style into the cake. The masterpiece glistened with rum glaze Jane carefully brushed all over the cake until every drop was absorbed.

The confection looked as innocent as Jane must have in her past-life ball gown, which meant my family and I were not prepared for the straight shots of rum that were our first bites of Jane’s cake. As my Dad remarked, “Woo!”

Jane planned to bring just such a cake to a holiday potluck at the boat plant where she worked. The fact that a couple slices might render machine operators too drunk to continue their shifts didn’t matter to her.

When it comes to rum cake, no setting seems off-limits down South. Since my first rum cake experience, I’ve heard stories of rum cakes at coastal North Carolina family gatherings where spirits were otherwise taboo. Sassy bakers, women or men, were usually behind the cakes.

Somehow, teetotalers tolerate this sinful addition to dessert sideboards. Maybe it’s because of the science that says alcohol added to the cake batter burns off during baking. Perhaps, some cooks use rum extract, which, as American food company McCormick says, has all “the complex yet sweet rum flavoring minus all the alcohol.” It could be those are just the things relatives and friends tell themselves as they reach for another slice. After all, what’s a family get-together without secret giggles?

In its timeline of “The Most Popular Cakes in Southern History,” Southern Living magazine gives the year 1977 to rum cake. Bacardi gets credit for making Jane’s version popular across America. In the 1970s, the company published the recipe in its “Bacardi Party Book.” The formula continued to show up for years in magazine ads, sometimes under the headline “How to make the famous Bacardi rum cake.”

In a 1976 St. Cloud Times (Minnesota) article about the cake, the reporter wrote, “If you’re looking for a dessert that combines all of the best new ideas in cake baking and easy preparation, with fool-proof results, try a Bacardi Rum Cake.” The “real star,” the writer said, was the half-cup of dark rum that went into the batter.

Of course, it was noted that the rum cooked away, but then another half-cup was stirred into glaze brushed on the finished cake.

I doubt Jane used only a half cup.

Rum cake often shows up on coastal North Carolina Christmas tables, which makes sense considering it’s a distant cousin of steamed Christmas puddings that date to at least 17^th century England. Old pudding recipes called for 13 ingredients, representing Jesus and his 12 apostles. Typical components included suet, molasses, lots of spices and plenty of raisins and currants. Moistened with brandy, rum or other spirits, the puddings had such high alcohol content they could be aged for months, important in times before refrigeration.

British colonists carried pudding recipes to the New World. In the Caribbean, the formulas were tweaked to create “black cake,” a heavy molasses spice cake full of rum-soaked fruit.

Rum’s profitability was more important than its preservation qualities. The drink was the colonies’ most valuable industry and favorite beverage. Everyone drank rum, even kids. So did pirates who frequented North Carolina’s shores. Domestic, imported or smuggled, rum was considered potent enough to nix toxins and, thus, healthier than water.

Over time, rum consumption dropped and more delicate, although still strong, rum cakes emerged. They may have been inspired by European yeast rum babas sometimes filled with pastry cream. Italian-Americans like to celebrate birthdays with Italian rum cake. Liquor-soaked vanilla layers sit between chocolate and vanilla pastry cream, the whole thing frosted in sweetened whipped cream.

An unusual Kentucky recipe can be found in Southern Living magazine’s 1983 “The Southern Heritage Cakes Cookbook.” Rum butter cream fills the angel food layer cake and more rum spikes the meringue frosting.

Despite the documented history, Jane will always be the source of my devotion to rum cake. I envision her ball gown being rum-cake yellow and trimmed in pecan-brown ruffles and bows. Surrounded by suitors near a Christmas tree, she demurely sips rum punch with a gleam in her eye that one fellow mistakes for a wink in his direction. She’s really coveting the pound cake behind him, a treat to dip into her cup. His confusion is fortunate for Jane, as the man, who resembles my father, is there to catch her just as she is overtaken by a lightheaded feeling of déjà vu.

Bacardi Rum Cake

Cake:

1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

1 18½-ounce box yellow cake mix

1 3¾-ounce package vanilla pudding mix

4 eggs

½ cup cold water

½ cup Wesson oil

½ cup Bacardi dark rum (80 proof)

Glaze:

¼ pound butter

¼ cup water

1 cup granulated sugar

½ cup Bacardi dark rum (80 proof)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube or 12-cup Bundt pan.

Sprinkle nuts over bottom of pan. Mix all cake ingredients together. Pour batter over nuts.

Bake 1 hour.

Cool. Invert on serving plate.

Prepare glaze: Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in water and sugar. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in rum.

Prick top of cake.  Spoon and brush glaze evenly over top and sides. Allow cake to absorb glaze. Repeat until glaze is used up.

Source: Bacardi

When it comes to burgers, forget lettuce, tomato, pickles and onion. “All the way” is code for something completely different in eastern North Carolina.

Ask for a burger all the way around this part of the state and you’re bound to get the beef loaded down with chili, onions, coleslaw and yellow mustard. Cheese is optional.

What the rest of the country calls a “Carolina burger” is what North Carolinians east of Interstate 95 know as a burger all the way. You can get them west of I-95, too, but, like barbecue, they just don’t seem to taste as good in that direction. Maybe it’s just me.

How the All The Way came to be is rooted in the first chili burger served in the 1920s at Ptomaine Tommy’s, a Los Angles restaurant in business from 1919 to 1958. As for the coleslaw, it’s been on the menu at North Carolina barbecue restaurants from the beginning. Understandably, someone figured it would work on spicy chili burgers, too. Onions and mustard added the perfect zing.

The best All The Ways come wrapped in white paper. They’re a little squashed, wonderfully messy and normally leave a tasty smear of beef-fat gloss on your lips. Look for them at old grills and drive-ins in small towns and along country roads. Soak up the nostalgia while you wait and have cash in hand. Cards usually aren’t accepted, as the burgers mostly cost less than $5. Arrive early, too. Many places close by 3 p.m.

Melvins’

133 W Broad St., Elizabethtown, 910-862-2763

Bring cash and take your place in the usually long but always fast-moving line before closing time at 5:30 p.m. Everyone goes to Melvins’. It’s often the first stop vacationers make on their way to the beach or White Lake. The same chili recipe used since opening day in 1938 goes on griddle-pressed burgers made with beef ground in-house daily. You could add cheese to the chili, slaw, mustard and onions, but that wouldn’t be a Melvins’ classic.

Wards Grill

706 S. Madison St., Whiteville, 910-642-2004

Opened in 1947, Ward’s is a Whiteville institution so popular that service starts at 7 a.m., and folks line up even though there’s no place to sit. You might have to wait outside the door until it’s your turn to fit inside. Don’t dally when you’re up. The clerk and cook maintain a speedy rhythm you don’t want to upset. The burgers are always thick, always juicy, and you may ask for extra-chili. Just be quick about it. The shop closes when burgers sell out.

Cain’s Grill

10120 N.C. Highway 53 West, White Oak, 910-866-4185

Hand-pattied burgers aren’t cooked until you place your order, which means you may have to wait, which is OK at this friendly, off-the-grid spot open since 1964. Fans have been known to drive from as far away as Fayetteville for a Cain’s All The Way. Plenty of chili and plenty of slaw go on top. Some folks like to add a splash of Texas Pete hot sauce. Closing time is 3 p.m.

Dixie Drive-In Restaurant

1930 E. 5th St., Lumberton, 910-738-8118

Although carhops come to vehicles, you’re welcome to sit inside. Choose the counter and watch cooks work the griddle and fryers. The misshapen burgers are supposed to look that way. Hand-pattied, they’re deliciously imperfect but flawlessly charred right down to some slightly crispy edges. Battered fries cut in-house are as good as the burgers. Sweet tea or a Pepsi is what eastern North Carolinians normally pair with their Carolina burgers, but at this spot, open since 1963, many people go for an old-fashioned cherry Mountain Dew. Closing time is 2 p.m. Wednesday and 4 p.m. Saturday, otherwise Dixie is open until 8 or 9 p.m.

Lane’s Ferry Food Truck

lanesferry.com

For six years, Lane’s Ferry restaurant was housed in a 1930s-era general store on Cape Fear River in Rocky Point until Hurricane Florence floods in 2018. Owners continue to serve burgers, dogs and sandwiches from a truck that make stops in Rocky Point and Hampstead. The double cheeseburger Carolina-style is smothered in cheese. Chili and finely chopped slaw are both housemade.

George’s Grille

2394 U.S. 13 North, Goldsboro

Since 1972, this super-friendly, true mom-and-pop shop has been a favorite of locals and truck drivers. Order at the window and happily head down the road with your All The Way. Always check the hours at the grill’s Facebook page. Lately, George’s is only open until 2:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday.

The Kitchen Palate

1007 N. Fourth St., Wilmington, on Instagram @thekitchenpalate

When the chef can get his hands on top-quality local beef, a Carolina burger is on the menu at this food truck completely hidden behind Palate Bottle Shop & Reserve wine bar in downtown’s Brooklyn Arts District. The thick patty is six-napkins-needed juicy, completely cloaked in American cheese, smothered with chili and loaded with slaw.

El’s Drive-In

3706 Arendell St., Morehead City, 252-726-3002, elsdrivein.com

Locals are so loyal to this drive-in opened in 1959 that they crave The Famous SuperBurger and The Famous SuperBurger with Cheese. That’s what El’s calls its Carolina-style burgers. Each version gets a dose of noticeably sweet, housemade slaw. Servers still come to cars to take orders until 10 p.m., 11 on Friday and Saturday. The wait can be long. Consider it a chance to remember when the delay meant more time to hang with your friends and make eyes across the parking lot at the girl or guy of your teen-age dreams.

Art’s Place Bar & Grille

4624 N. Virginia Dare Trail, Kitty Hawk, 252-261-3233, artsplaceobx.com

Beef is ground fresh on-site at this joint opened in 1978. The place changed hands in 2008, but the new owner was a regular and friend of the founder, who guided a smooth transition. Homemade chili goes on the half-pound, hand-pattied Carolina burger with American cheese. As the burger menu says, “Please, no substitutions.” Closing time is 9 p.m.

I woke up craving sweet potato biscuits, delicious enough on their own, but the vision this morning was focused on molasses. I imagined, thick ribbons of dark, smoky sweetness flowing over still-steaming butterscotch-colored biscuits.

A hundred and fifty years ago, when sugar was expensive and butter was available only if the family cow birthed a calf, assuming the family even owned a cow, coastal North Carolinians slathered molasses on biscuits.

Today, we buy molasses, so dark brown that it’s nearly black, in small jars for special recipes like Christmas gingerbread cookies. Afterwards, molasses gets pushed to the back of the cabinet, forgotten until the holidays return.

In the 1800s, however, molasses was North Carolina’s sweetener of choice. It took the bitter edge off collards, made grits, cornbread and popcorn taste better, and molasses was mandatory for pie, especially molasses pie, the ancestor of pecan pie.

Into the early 1900s, ships unloaded tons of molasses at the busy port of Wilmington. One 1920s photograph shows a tanker delivering a million gallons of molasses to a refinery that once existed in the area beneath what is now Cape Fear Memorial Bridge. The American Molasses Terminal accepted freighters at the foot of Queen and Wooster streets.

Early on, molasses arrived in casks. During summer’s extreme heat, the barrels had to be opened as soon as they were unloaded otherwise they would burst. The cautionary measure meant a boon for people hanging around the docks. They gathered the precious molasses drippings to take home.

Sweet as it is, molasses has a grim history.

From the 1600s to the early 1800s, traders sold African slaves to Caribbean sugar plantations in exchange for barrels of molasses. Ships then carried the molasses to New England, where it was turned into rum. The traders carried that rum to West Africa, where they used the liquor to barter for slaves.

The exceedingly profitable Triangular Trade made some New Englanders wealthy and convinced the British Parliament in 1733 to tax molasses imported to the colonies from the French West Indies. The tax plan helped spark the American Revolution.

Slavery continued nonetheless, and southern plantations kept great stores of molasses. In an account of her Wayne County family’s experiences during the Civil War, Harriet Cobb Lane wrote that Union troops arriving at the Cobb plantation house “rolled all the barrels filled with the year’s supply of molasses into the front hall, burst in the heads, and let the molasses run on the floor, after which they brought quantities of rice, oats, peas, meal, etc, and poured all of this on the molasses; then went up stairs, cut the featherbeds and shook the feathers down on it, and then ran horses over it, through the house.”

North Carolina knows two products referred to as molasses: blackstrap, which is the residue left from processing sugar cane into sugar, and sorghum syrup made from a cereal plant.

Sorghum, native to Africa, arrived in the New World in the 1600s and spread into the American South because the plant withstood hot summers and could be used as animal feed. Sorghum growing for syrup started in the 1800s as a cheap alternative to costly sugar.

Presses squeezed liquid from sorghum stalks, which resemble corn stalks. Boiled down, the juice became a dark brown syrup slightly thinner than molasses and possessing a sour edge as opposed to molasses’ bitterness.

As sugar became more available and affordable, especially after World War II, sorghum growers abandoned the labor-intensive syrup-making process. Home cooks traded the molasses they once said “makes everything taste better” for tiny sugar crystals that added no flavor other than sweetness and no color, thereby producing delicate cakes and cookies.

Despite the change, farmers in western North Carolina still grow sorghum and make the syrup that is often mistaken for molasses.

Molasses still shows up, albeit these days more often in fancy presentations.

Morgan’s Tavern & Grill in New Bern is known for its Molasses Chops, two 8-ounce, boneless, grilled pork chops drizzled with molasses bourbon glaze. The Peppered Cupcake in Wilmington sometimes features pork cracklings sprinkled on a sweet potato and molasses cupcake. Black garlic molasses goes with yellowfin tuna crudo at Margaux’s restaurant in Raleigh. Hole Doughnuts in Asheville serves a molasses bourbon doughnut that Bon Appetit magazine called the “best dessert” of 2016.

It all sounds delicious but not nearly as meaningful as “real biscuits” the State Farmers Market Restaurant in Raleigh serves every day with molasses.

Molasses Pie

¾ cup sugar

1 tablespoon butter, softened

3 eggs

1 cup milk

¾ cup dark molasses

1 tablespoon plain flour

1 unbaked, 9-inch pie shell

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Combine sugar, butter, eggs, milk, molasses and flour in a large mixing bowl. Mix well. Pour into the pie shell. Bake pie for 10 minutes at 425 degrees and then lower the oven heat to 400 degrees and continue baking pie until filling is set.

Source: “Coastal Carolina Cooking” (University of North Carolina Press, 1986)

What’s the best food for New Year’s Day? The food that brings you good luck, of course.

Lucky foods for New Year’s might mean a fish fry to ensure long life or a big pot of collards guaranteeing plenty of cash. Fried oysters, grilled oysters or oyster stew could help in the, um, romance department – if you believe.

We dug through Coastal Review Online’s recipe files to find our favorite New Year’s lucky foods. The big bonus is they all go well together, which means you can guarantee yourself good fortune, prosperity, longevity and true love all in one meal.

Black-eyed peas

Some people believe black-eyed peas bring straight-up good luck. Others think they symbolize all the coins destined for your pocket in the coming year. Why? No one knows for sure. Black-eyed peas came to the New World on slave ships from Africa. After the Civil War, slaves were officially freed on Emancipation Day Jan. 1. Another theory pins the idea to good luck foods that Jewish communities served in the South. One of the most delicious recipes is Low Country hoppin’ john, a dish of black-eyed peas and rice seasoned with spices, onions and bacon, or other pork cuts like ham hocks, salt pork or fatback.

Get the recipe: Hoppin’ John

Collards

If you’ve lived in eastern North Carolina for any length of time, you know that you must eat collard greens on New Year’s Day if you plan to have plenty of money in the coming year. The vegetable’s color and thin leaves’ resemblance to greenbacks give the sense of banking cash, even if it is just in your belly.

Get the recipe: Classic Stewed Collards

Seafood

“Eat fish, live longer. Eat oysters, love longer” are words often seen on bumper stickers along the North Carolina coast. In parts of the world, fish with shiny scales are considered a lucky New Year’s food because the scales resemble silver. The Japanese eat shrimp to assure long life. In China, it’s whole fish for the same reason. Fish’s promised effects are not all legends. Doctors agree that omega 3 fatty acids in oily fins like mullet, mackerel and bluefish are good for you. Oysters? That’s still a matter of opinion. No scientific studies prove they kindle the urge, but it’s always lucky to get an invitation to a New Year’s Day oyster roast.

Get the recipe: Fish Fry

Get the recipe: Mable Smith’s Baked Flounder with Potatoes

Get the recipe: Charcoal Mullet

Get the recipe: Oyster Stew

Get the recipe: Crab-stuffed Shrimp

Cornbread

As the saying goes, “Peas for pennies, greens for dollars and cornbread for gold.” Whether you believe it or not, you’re truly blessed when this trio lands on the dinner table. Whether it’s baked in corn-shaped molds, steamed as dumplings atop a pot full of collards or fried in a cast iron skillet, cornbread is tasty and filling. Don’t forget hushpuppies with fish. That’s cornbread, too.

Get the recipes: Traditional Southern-style Cornbread, Deep-fried Cornbread and Jalapeno Cornbread

Get the recipe: Sanitary Restaurant Hush Puppies from Morehead City

We were so proud of the cheese ball we made that Christmas Eve afternoon. I blended gorgonzola, cheddar and cream cheese, folded in spiced-rum-soaked raisins, added dashes of nutmeg, ground cloves, too, and then rolled the whole thing in chopped pecans my boyfriend had toasted on the wood stove.

Full of patting each other on the back as we slathered cracker after cracker with what was surely the most envious cheese ball in all of eastern North Carolina, the two of us decided we should text a photo to the finest cook among our best kayaking buddies.

Beaming at the ding of his reply, certain it was a lip-smacking emoji, we grabbed the phone only to be deflated. A photo and its caption clearly indicated our defeat.

“Sausage balls ?”

When it comes to holiday nibbles in North Carolina, nothing beats these mini-meatball morsels of pork and cheddar cheese. Experiencing a Christmas without sausage balls is like waking up to no presents under the tree.

Throughout December, sausage balls show up on just about every coastal Carolina party table. Hundreds of them stacked on a regal silver tray or packed tightly in plastic containers send the message: “Eat your fill.”

Most people do.

Proper Preparation

Each sausage ball is everything – salty, spicy, savory, succulent. That is, if you prepare sausage balls correctly, which only sounds easy. The basic sausage ball recipe calls for three ingredients: sausage, cheddar cheese and Bisquick baking mix. Perfect sausage balls, however, require practice and finesse.

Achieving bold, irresistible flavor and spot-on crisp-to-tender ratio means choosing a zesty but not overly spiced sausage and sharp but not too dry cheddar. As for Bisquick, add a measure that merely binds the sausage and cheese.

Why Bisquick? Sometime after Minnesota-based General Mills introduced the baking mix in 1931, the company created a sausage balls recipe as one of many ways to use the convenience product. Sausage balls went on to become one of the most requested recipes, General Mills reported at its Betty Crocker website.

You could, of course, forgo the partially-hydrogenated-oil-laced baking mix in favor of a homemade mix of flour, leavening, salt and fat. Sausage balls appear to have started closer to that method back in medieval Winchester, where monks in the late 1400s ate morterells. Cinnamon and chopped onions seasoned a half-and-half combination of sausage and bread crumbs that was shaped into small balls, simmered gently and then fried in lard until golden brown.

Although more elaborate than today’s sausage balls, morterells were considered humble, daily fare, likely a way to stretch meat supplies.

Cinnamon sounds like an interesting twist on the Bisquick recipe. Some people add chopped pecans or chopped jalapenos to sausage balls. Better Crocker continually updates the recipe according to changing tastes. The latest version calls for minced rosemary. Another suggests shredded apples. Milk is recommended to help keep sausage balls moist.

I once made sausage balls with Italian sausage and provolone cheese, and although they were yummy, I don’t recommend the recipe. Nor do I advise homemade biscuit mix. North Carolinians don’t like sausage balls to stray from the simple original.

Tar Heels may tinker with the amount of Bisquick and cheese they use. Some like a moister texture and add less Bisquick. Cheese lovers add more cheddar. That’s about as far as they’ll wander. Fiddle too much with the three-ingredient formula and you might as well put Santa Claus in a purple suit.

When rolling sausage balls, “the most important thing is to make it the perfect size. It has to fit in your mouth in one bite,” Fayetteville Technical Community College chef and culinary instructor Nadia Minniti said.

Minniti suggests each sausage ball be 1½ inches in diameter, about the size of a walnut. Try using a spring-loaded mini scoop to insure each sausage ball rolls out to the same size.

Sausage balls must bake exactly long enough that their bottoms become barely crunchy while the inside remains moist and tender. Temperature recommendations vary from 350 to 400 degrees. The hotter the oven, the higher risk of dry sausage balls, which aren’t so bad. Sausage balls are sort of like pizza in my opinion. I’ve never eaten one I didn’t like.

Betty Crocker recipe developers suggest adding ½ cup of milk to this recipe to ensure moist sausage balls. Choose sausage with a little bite. Many North Carolinians prefer the Greensboro-based Neese’s brand, which sells its original country sausage recipe, spicy “hot” sausage and one with extra sage. Sausage balls may be rolled, frozen and baked straight from the freezer. You may also bake, freeze and then reheat. They’re delicious served warm or at room temperature. Some people load cooked sausage balls in a crock pot, cover them in barbecue sauce and serve them warm straight from the pot, Minniti said.

Sausage Balls

3 cups Original Bisquick mix

1 pound uncooked bulk pork sausage

4 cups shredded cheddar cheese (16 ounces)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease bottom and sides of jelly roll pan, 15½-by-10½ inches in size.

In large bowl, stir together Bisquick, sausage and cheese using your hands or a heavy spoon. A stand mixer works well, too, but mix lightly to avoid a dense texture. Shape mixture into 1-inch balls. Place in pan.

Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until brown. Immediately remove from pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes about 100 sausage balls.

Cheddar Apple Sausage Balls

1 pound bulk pork sausage with sage

2½ cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese (10 ounces)

2 cups Original Bisquick baking mix

1 Braeburn apple, peeled and shredded (about 2 cups of shredded apple) 

Paprika, if desired

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Line cookie sheets with cooking parchment paper.

In large bowl, mix sausage, cheese, baking mix and apple with hands until well blended. Shape mixture into 1½-inch balls; place 1 inch apart on cookie sheets.

Bake 12 to 14 minutes or until golden brown and no longer pink. Sprinkle lightly with paprika. Serve warm.

Makes about 40 sausage balls.

Source: All recipes from bettycrocker.com

In the holiday rush to make everyone happy, macaroni and cheese is the great unifier.

Just about everyone loves mac and cheese. It’s among America’s top 10 comfort foods. Kraft sells upwards of a million boxes a day. Crayola even has a crayon hue called “macaroni and cheese.”

And who could stay angry over political and religious debates at the table when a hot, bubbly casserole of creamy, cheesy pasta gets passed around?

Baking dishes full of macaroni and cheese bless many eastern North Carolina Thanksgiving and Christmas tables, but does it belong between traditional roasted turkey, glazed ham and collard greens?

Thirty-five percent of Southeastern households serve mac and cheese as a Thanksgiving side dish, 15 percent more than the rest of the country, opinion poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight found in 2015. That same year, half of the 1,000 people who responded to a Country Crock survey said they wanted to add macaroni and cheese to the holiday lineup.

Thomas Jefferson put macaroni and cheese on the South’s radar. While traveling in Italy, he and his chef and slave James Hemmings encountered pasta mixed with grated parmesan cheese. Jefferson recorded copious notes on pasta making and brought the recipe back to Virginia.

Soon after, Jefferson purchased a mold for making tube-shaped pasta. He also imported macaroni and parmesan cheese. In 1802, Congressman Manasseh Cutler of Massachusetts wrote of “a pie called macaroni” that he ate at one of then-President Jefferson’s White House state dinners.

Jefferson and his fancy guests weren’t the only people eating mac and cheese.

When Charlotte Observer food writer Kathleen Purvis noticed that more blacks than whites considered macaroni and cheese a necessary Thanksgiving dish, she decided to find out why.

Macaroni and cheese long predates its American history. Around the 1300s, something called “de lasanis” in Italy meant pasta squares tossed with grated cheese, likely parmesan.

A printed recipe calling for cheddar, béchamel sauce and macaroni showed up in the late 1700s in Britain. In 1824, America’s then-most-influential cookbook, “The Virginia Housewife” by Mary Randolph, included a macaroni and cheese recipe that instructed cooks to layer macaroni, cheese and butter in a pan and bake the combination in a hot oven.

The recipe spread across the U.S. through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th. Because macaroni and cheese is so decadently rich, fans forget that it has always been a cheap way to fill up on protein and carbohydrates, hence its wide appeal.

Kraft sealed mac ‘n’ cheese’s fate as a low-dollar comfort food when the company introduced a convenient boxed macaroni and cheese kit in 1937. Suddenly, everybody was eating macaroni and cheese.

Americans love boxed mac and cheese, but it can never match homemade versions. The best smothers sauce-grabbing elbow- or shell-shaped pasta in Mornay sauce made with sharp cheddar. The macaroni then gets layered with more shredded cheddar and crowned with a bread crumb crust that gets crispy brown during baking. That’s my opinion, anyway. I’ve met cooks who add egg yolks, swear by processed Velveeta “cheese” or doll up the dish with shrimp, crab or pulled pork. One chef I know likes to slide a sunny-side-up egg on top of brisket-enriched mac and cheese.

The only bad mac and cheese is a dry mac and cheese. In that case, just say “Pass the gravy, please.”

Baked Macaroni and Cheese

For the Mornay sauce:

3 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons flour

2 cups whole milk, warmed

1 small bay leaf

1 whole clove

½ garlic bulb, peeled

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

½ cup grated sharp cheddar cheese

To finish:

1 pound pasta, cooked (elbows or shells)

2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese

½ cup bread crumbs

For the Mornay sauce: Place a medium, heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. When the pan has heated, add butter. When butter has melted, remove pan from heat and add flour, stirring until well blended. Return pan to heat and cook flour, stirring constantly, for 30 seconds. Remove pan from heat again and whisk in half of the milk. Return pan to the heat and whisk in remaining milk. Drop bay leaf, clove and garlic to the mixture. Bring sauce to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and simmer until sauce has thickened, stirring often. Whisk in mustard, salt and pepper. Remove pan from heat. Stir ½ cup of sharp cheddar into sauce until melted. Taste sauce for seasoning, adding more salt, mustard or cheese to taste.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix cooked pasta with Mornay sauce. Pour half of the pasta into a large casserole dish. Top with 1 cup of grated sharp cheddar cheese. Place remaining pasta in the baking dish. Top with remaining 1 cup sharp cheddar cheese. Sprinkle bread crumbs over casserole. Bake for 15 minutes or until casserole is bubbly.

Serves 6.

Source: Liz Biro

]]> https://coastalreview.org/2018/11/our-coasts-thanksgiving-recipe-roundup/ Mon, 19 Nov 2018 05:00:32 +0000 https://www.coastalreview.org/?p=33683 The best Thanksgiving recipes also tell North Carolina’s food story, says food columnist Liz Biro.]]>

When it comes to finding the best Thanksgiving (and Friendsgiving) recipes ever, we like to dig into the Coastal Review archives.

The people along North Carolina’s shore have their own way with Thanksgiving. Sure, they serve turkey, stuffing, gravy and pie, but they like to sub in seafood here and there, play around with sweet potatoes that grow so well in the region and add a couple unexpected ultra-rich desserts.

These aren’t just our favorite Thanksgiving recipes. Each one has a story to tell about our coast’s food culture, and that makes for delicious conversation at the Thanksgiving table.

Collards

Some cooks start by simmering a few ham hocks for a couple hours and then add “a mess of greens” to the pot. Others fry strips of fatback bacon in a big stock pot before adding collards and water. Either way, the monster leaves must be simmered for a couple hours to achieve the tender, dark green, just-bitter greens and an intensely savory broth known down South as “potlikker.” In Carteret County’s Down East communities, folks like to add cornmeal dumplings on top.

Get the recipe: Classic Stewed Collards

Get the recipe: Cornmeal Dumplings

Sweet potato casserole

When we dug into the history of candied yams, we discovered lots of contemporary sweet potato casserole ideas. Chefs might top candied sweet potatoes with nuts, herbs, granola, cornbread, parmesan cheese or bread crumbs. Some recipes suggest adding roasted chestnuts, crumbled bacon, chipotle chilies, lemon juice, orange zest, garlic, mushrooms, cranberries or dried apricots to the sweet potatoes. Our version calls for a honey bourbon glaze and cranberry streusel dotted with marshmallows.

Get the recipe: Contemporary Candied Yams

Oyster stuffing

Hardly a cook on the North Carolina coast gets through the Thanksgiving season without thinking about oyster stuffing.  The name itself evokes visions of plump oysters hidden in a fluffy blend of herbs, breadcrumbs and rich stock, a dish so luxurious it begs a silver dish rather than a place inside the holiday turkey.

Get the recipe: Oyster Stuffing

Lightning rolls

Some folks along the N.C. coast call them “lightning rolls” or “light bread.” Others say “hot rolls” or “yeast rolls.” No matter the name, these buttery, golden brown yeast rolls baked with a dash of sugar are always a hit, especially for leftover turkey sandwiches.

Get the recipe: Lightning Rolls

Pig Pickin’ Cake

North Carolina gets credit for the pig pickin’ cake because of the treat’s name and how it perfectly cools the palate after a tangy pulled pork dinner. The sweet mountain is so loved across the state that it has expanded beyond pig pickin’s. When the New York Times in 2014 asked Google to find out which dishes residents of each state searched most often for Thanksgiving, pig pickin’ cake was North Carolina’s No. 1. Cool Whip frosting full of pecans, canned crushed pineapple and instant vanilla pudding covers three vanilla orange cake layers prepared from a boxed mix.

Get the recipe: Pig Pickin’ Cake

Sweet potato pie

Ten years after Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to establish a settlement at Roanoke Island, England’s John Gerard wrote about the sweet potato in his 1597 “Great Herball,” or “Generall Historie of Plantes,” in which he suggested “that the sweet potato “comforts, strengthens, and nourishes the body.”The perfect sweet potato pie is a balance of creaminess, sweetness and spices against a sturdy, savory crust. The filling is so smooth and flavorful, no ice cream or whipped cream garnish is required.

Get the recipe: Sweet Potato Pie

Mrs. Geneva Todd laid out a spread so succulent I wasn’t sure where to look first. Dishes and bowls crowded cloth-covered tables pushed together on the lumpy green lawn carpeting her back yard. As adults shooed flies and fretted over where to fit more food, my 8-year-old eyes scanned delights of which I never saw in the New Jersey home my parents had just left for life on the North Carolina coast.

There were skillet-fried disks folks called “cornbread,” green beans stewed so soft with little potatoes, pole beans simmered with bacon and tiny, black-pepper-flecked butter beans, pale green and nothing like the giant, white limas my brother and I despised choking down.

Many of the preparations that summer day were foreign to me, but I recognized most ingredients, except one: long green pods limp in a bowl of clear liquid that rose like sticky goo each time someone spooned up a heaping helping.

When I asked, “What’s that green stuff?” my mother rolled her eyes. “I have no idea.” Mrs. Todd gave me a gentle, “Oh honey, you won’t like those.”

That was my family’s first encounter with okra, a vegetable that initially drew our winces and later won our love.

Okra doesn’t make friends easily. People don’t mind when it’s hidden in the Creole gumbos that the vegetable’s slime famously thickens. On its own, though, okra is an old-timer’s favorite that has never charmed the masses.

Yet, there’s much to love about okra, especially on the Carolina coast where hot, humid summers squash so many garden dreams. As tomato plants wither and worms eat their way through struggling cucumber vines, okra stalks spring tall, up to 6 feet, in even the driest soil on the hottest days. Drive down country roads and the plants’ abundant, butter-yellow flowers, deep magenta centers, catch your eye even at a distance. Each blossom produces the pods whose mild flavor is usually compared to eggplant.

Likely an African native, okra landed in America via the slave trade, and it’s been African cooks who have served okra’s tastiest preparations throughout the South. The Bantu word for okra is “ki ngombo,” which may be the origin of the word gumbo. Gullah cooks of South Carolina’s Lowcountry created Limping Susan, a well-known, bacon-seasoned okra and rice dish akin to Hoppin’ John.

Choosing small, tender pods and taming the goo is key to okra’s acceptance at the dinner table. Southern cooks boil, fry, sauté or grill whole okra, the stem barely trimmed, to keep the mucilage contained.

That’s not to say cooks down South are averse to cut okra. One of the few widely popular okra dishes involves slices fried in a skilled with cornmeal or completely breaded with cornmeal and deep-fried. The meal grabs the slime and adds sandy crispness to okra’s tender texture.

My mother fried sliced okra, sans cornmeal, in a heavy skillet, adding fresh, chopped hot pepper and plenty of salt. The slime browned the okra, making it almost crunchy. I still crave the flavor and recreate the dish as soon as okra season arrives, late summer in eastern North Carolina.

Okra made its way around the world, landing in Asian, Indian, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern recipes. Some cultures even eat the leaves, and seeds may be roasted for coffee.

These days, I also like to slowly pan roast whole okra over low heat in a cast-iron skillet to which I add a little grapeseed oil. I turn the okra now and then to brown all sides and sometimes pour a small amount of water into pan to help steam-soften the pods as they brown. During the last few minutes of cooking, I sprinkle on Indian spices like turmeric, cumin and whole black mustard seeds. Prepared this way, okra has a nice chew and welcomes a cool yogurt dipping sauce.

Of course, stewing sliced okra is the sure-fire way the vegetable wins favor. That’s how my family fell for okra. Within a couple summers of our arrival in Onslow County, my mother was paling around with Mrs. Todd and other neighbors. The ladies had a knack for finding small farms and prolific vegetable gardens whose tenders allowed the women to pick and pay.

Back home, after the morning harvests, they cut sweet corn fresh off the cob and chopped their own homegrown tomatoes. They stewed the two together with okra and salty bacon fat to produce a dish they simply called “corn and okra.”

By lunchtime, Mrs. Todd’s table would be laden with the bright, slightly thick stew, still in its pan, alongside biscuits or fried cornbread, more stewed tomatoes on rice, sliced fresh tomatoes, sometimes butter beans, sometimes cucumber salad and always crunchy fatback slice that they had rendered to season the cooked vegetables.

The menu was duplicated many July and August days, and we kids all ate heartily. I don’t remember any of us asking, “What’s that green stuff.”

Corn and Okra

4 quarter-inch slices of fatback

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 pint whole okra, stems trimmed and pods cut into ½-inch slices

3 or 4 large tomatoes, diced

4 large ears of sweet corn, scrapped

Sugar to taste

Salt and pepper to taste

Dash of Texas Pete, if desired

Place a deep, heavy skillet over medium heat. When skillet is hot, add fatback and cook slowly until fat is rendered and slices are hard and crunchy. Remove fatback from pan and set aside. Add onions and okra to the skillet and cook for 10 minutes, stirring constantly. Add corn and tomatoes. Taste and season with salt if needed. Cover and simmer until okra is tender, about 25 minutes. Stir occasionally. Remove lid, taste stew and adjust seasonings, adding salt and pepper if needed. If the stew tastes acidic, add pinches of sugar, tasting after each addition until stew’s flavor is balanced. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

A wax-paper-lined, red plastic basket full of hush puppies and soft butter for dipping is the amuse bouche at proper fried seafood restaurants along the North Carolina coast. Seeing hush puppies on menus far from the state’s shores can shock Tar Heels, which is why my mouth fell agape in the landlocked city of Indianapolis.

There, in an urban center foreign to the “one, two or three” seafood combination platter, I saw the deep-fried cornbread lumps called “hush puppies” at fancy places to eat.

The hush puppies I discovered nowhere near the stacked wire crab pots and docked shrimp boats of my Onslow County home were nonetheless stuffed with crab or shrimp. They were plump, cakey morsels, fried crusty bronze outside and full of sweet corn flavor. Hot pepper honey or citrus aioli dips were served on the side.

Turns out, hush puppies are finally getting their 15 minutes on new American menus that have taken over the United States.

Deemed the “ultimate comfort food appetizer” by delish.com in late 2017, hush puppies star in America’s 2018 regional comfort food trend. We crave Kentucky Hot Browns, New Mexico’s green chili stew and North Carolina’s hush puppies.

Alas, North Carolina doesn’t own hush puppies.

Current hush puppy mania at hip restaurants may date to landlocked central Texas. Chef Sean Frye served jumbo shrimp and lump crab hush puppies at Shuck-N-Jive Restaurant near Dallas. His recipe won wholesaler US Foods’ 2012 Next Top Product contest. As a result, Frye’s hush puppies became a nationally distributed US Foods product.

Hush puppies have been around way longer than their recent glory, nearly 300 years, according to some accounts.

Florida Gulf Coast hunters and camp cooks of the 1920s usually get credit as the first to toss cornmeal fritters to their baying hounds. As soon as the dogs finished the treat they were no doubt howling for more. Plain hush puppies taste that good.

Folks in St. Marks, Florida, have claimed that the late City Cafe, established in 1929 and later renamed Posey’s, was the hush puppy’s native home. “Important deals were made over baskets of fried fish and (co-owner) Birdie (Coggins’) famous, secret-recipe hush puppies,” Bruce Hunt wrote in “Visiting Small-Town Florida” (Pineapple Press, 2013).

Meantime, up in North Carolina, Harkers Island fishers said they were the first to spare a little fish-frying batter for dog treats.

Another story points to Confederate soldiers who supposedly silenced their canines with fried bread as Union troops approached. Yet one more tale recognizes French Ursuline nuns who in the early 1700s settled in what would become New Orleans. The nuns called their fried corn cakes “croquettes de maise.”

Calming hunger appears the most likely hush puppy pedigree. Native Americans were cooking with cornmeal when settlers arrived in the future United States. Later, Africans captured into U.S. slavery continued their homeland’s deep-fried cooking methods.

After the Civil War, Romeo Govan, born into slavery in 1845, was known in South Carolina for preparing fish feasts that included “red horse bread.” Govan fried spoonfuls of cornmeal batter in lard, South Carolina culinary historian Robert F. Moss writes in “The Real History of Hushpuppies” at seriouseats.com. The fish species redhorse populates South Carolina rivers.

Govan died in 1915, but serving red horse bread at fish fries spread throughout South Carolina.

Moss argues that hush puppies were considered too tasty to toss to the dogs. Rather, the name probably referred to muting a growling stomach, as the term “hush-puppy” previously meant gravy or pot liquor.

Today, the hush puppy as deep-fried cornbread is recognized across the country, even as chefs try to elevate the humble food with enriched batter and creative dipping sauces. No matter if inventive cooks mound caviar onto hush puppies, fill them with pulled pork or serve them alongside cilantro green goddess dressing, a hush puppy still looks and tastes like a lump or finger of fried cornbread.

Oftentimes, so many deliciously addictive, old-fashioned hush puppies are eaten at seafood restaurants that everyone’s full by the time the fried fish, shrimp and oyster platters arrive.

Understandably, nary a bit of criticism is barked.

The inspiration for the famous American dish Oysters Rockefeller had nothing to do with oysters or billionaire oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and certainly not with North Carolina foodways, except that the dish is so enduring many chefs along the state’s shore serve a version of their own.

Oysters on the half shell crowned with a buttery roux full of chopped, fresh herbs and then broiled until the topping becomes just crusty was invented at the legendary New Orleans restaurant Antoine’s.

The year was 1899.  Rockefeller controlled the nation’s oil industry while Antoine’s chef Jules Alciatore faced a shortage of French snails. He needed an escargot substitute.

Trained in Paris, Alciatore took the idea of France’s classic escargots à la Bourguignonne recipe, which relies on butter and herbs, and applied it to oysters. He added some twists and named his new, ultra-rich dish after the richest man in America.

Rockefeller apparently never tried the creation. It was a hit, nonetheless, and remains on menus nationwide to this day, even though the recipe is top-secret.

“Jules Alciatore on his deathbed reportedly demanded eternal secrecy from all who knew just exactly what went into that shell,” according to the book “New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories” (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).

Antoine’s owners still honor Alciatore’s order, but longtime New Orleans food writer Tom Fitzmorris is certain the recipe he published in his 2006 book “Tom Fitzmorris’ New Orleans Food: More Than 250 of the City’s Best Recipes” is as close as any cook can hope to get to the original formula.

Recipe analysts generally agree Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine’s contain butter, parsley and bread crumbs. Fitzmorris expands the list to celery, green onion, watercress, fennel and other seasonings including ketchup and New Orleans’ own Peychaud’s Bitters, created in 1830.

Fitzmorris reported that Bernard Guste, the fifth-generation proprietor of Antoine’s, declared the recipe “embarrassingly close to the real thing.”

Back in 1912, Winnipeg Free Press writer Jane Eddington claimed to have been handed the recipe by Alciatore himself, according to research at foodtimeline.org.

“Jules is extremely reluctant about giving away the secrets of his kitchen, but after some coaxing he was induced to part with the following while slowly sipping his cognac after luncheon,” Eddington wrote in the March 27, 1912, edition of the Canadian newspaper.

“Huitres en Coquille a la Rockefeller–Raw oysters with a dressing made as follows, the quantity of the ingredients to depend upon the size of the order. One bunch of shallots, one bunch of parsley, two pounds of butter, one bottle of Spanish walnuts, half a bunch of tarragon leaves, two stale loaves of French bread, salt and pepper, and a liberal sprinkling of tabasco sauce. All of these things are pounded into a pulp in a mortar, and then ground in a sausage machine, the mass being finally passed through a needle sifter. The oysters on the half shell are covered with the sauce and then placed in a hot oven to bake just three minutes. The oysters must be served at once.”

Was Alciatore pulling Eddington’s leg? Was Guste trying to keep Fitzmorris off track. Who knows?

What’s certain is that Oysters Rockefeller is not what most restaurants today pass off as the real thing: oysters baked under a blanket of creamed spinach, bacon and parmesan cheese. It seems Alciatore’s secret recipe inspired a baked oysters craze that takes on many forms.

Along the North Carolina coast, Oysters Rockefeller has lots of cousins.

The versions that feel most like a taste of the Carolina coast feature local, salty oysters and collards that grow so well in the region’s sandy soil. Creamed collards and onion bacon jam top baked oysters at City Kitchen in Beaufort. The Boiler Room menu in Kinston lists Oyster Boilerfeller wearing collards, bacon, spicy tomato and shaved Parmesan.

Visitors to the Outer Banks food festival Taste of the Beach 2018 will be treated to Oysters Rockefeller made with arugula, gouda cheese and tasso ham March 22 at Outer Banks Brewing Station.

Brie and roasted garlic go on Oysters Mon Louis at Ocracoke Oyster Co. on Ocracoke Island. Fresh spinach, peppered bacon, gorgonzola and white wine cream sauce is the combination at Provisions in Southern Shores.

At Pinpoint in Wilmington, baked oysters are served three ways: Rockefeller, with wilted greens, Benton’s bacon and Pernod; Piperade, with chilis and cornbread; and Hollandaise, with blue crab and whey hot sauce.

Chargrilled oysters at The Pilot House, also in Wilmington, mean smoky morsels beneath butter, parmesan, garlic, panko crumbs, lemon, hot sauce, cayenne, and chives. Years ago, the restaurant served a different riff on Oysters Rockefeller. Chefs spooned tender, chopped collards into the half shells and then laid the oysters on the greens. Country ham, blue cheese and chopped pecans were the finishing touches, a masterpiece that surely would have inspired Alciatore himself.

Front page featured photo: larryjh1234/flickr

If you listed the definitive pies of North Carolina, you would surely start with sweet potato. Pecan might be next, or take top billing, depending on your personal taste. Scuppernong grape, maybe even grape hull pie, deserves a place, as do blueberry and fresh strawberry.

Along the state’s shore, you’d add one more pie, as Jessie Lee Babb Dominique made clear to me years ago when we sat down to talk about her Christmas memories growing up on Portsmouth Island.

Born in the late 1920s and living on Portsmouth until the early 1940s, Dominique remembered what she called “cream pies” playing a huge role on the holiday table. She didn’t mean coconut cream pie or the famous Down East lemon cream pie in a Ritz cracker crust.

Dominique described a custard pie filling in which the baker could fruit if desired. Cream pies were prized among the many desserts Dominique’s single Aunt Elma “Addie” Dixon baked in a kerosene stove for Christmas.

“Mama would say, ‘Addie, why are you making all those pies and cakes? There’s nobody but you.’ And Addie would say, ‘Well, I want to make sure if somebody comes in that I’ll have it so I can give ’em a piece of it,” Dominique said.

“And this is why they made so many. Because people did visit.”

Dominique has since passed away. Every year, at Christmastime, I envision the cream pies she so lovingly spoke about.

North Carolina’s bygone barrier island communities didn’t invent cream pies. The desserts started with coastal natives’ British ancestors. The Brits had a penchant for puddings that cooks eventually began baking in pastry-lined pans. That happened occasionally in 1600s and more frequently by the 1700s.

Canned evaporated milk set the stage for American cream pies in the first half of the 20^th century. Old-fashioned custard pies remain cherished recipes throughout the southern United States.

Dating to the mid-1800s, canned milk fueled Union soldiers during the Civil War. By the late 1800s, the public could buy it, too. The well-known Carnation brand of evaporated milk brand debuted in 1899, but evaporated milk was not widely available until the 1920s.

Shelf-stable and far richer-tasting than milk, canned milk was a dream come true for early 20^th century households without refrigeration.

In 1931, the popular Borden Co. offered homemakers $25 for their original recipes using Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, which is evaporated milk thickened with sugar. More than 80,000 recipes were submitted, the company reports.

Canned milk could be transported by boat to the North Carolina barrier islands and stored for long periods. Evaporated milk lands in quite a few popular coastal Carolina creamy pie recipes, including raisin pie and that Down East lemon pie. Canned milk is also in pineapple pie, another Portsmouth Island holiday favorite that Dominique pointed out. The filling contains canned crushed pineapple stirred into egg yolks, sugar, butter and evaporated milk.

A basic cream filling like the one that goes into pineapple pie is offered by cook Pat Lane in “Island Born and Bred,” a community cookbook collection of Harkers Island recipes, lore and history compiled in the late 1980s by the Harkers Island United Methodist Women. Lane suggests adding either grated lemon zest, coconut or crushed pineapple to the filling.

Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center executive director Karen Willis Amspacher’s old-fashioned egg custard pie recipe requires a similar list of ingredients, minus the fruit.

Cream pies weren’t just for holiday time. Another recipe in the book is akin to a peach version of Dominique’s family’s cream pies. Flour and evaporated milk are heated together and then mixed with fresh peaches, sugar, eggs, butter and vanilla.

Dominique clearly recalled the desserts in screened cool houses. Island residents used the little house-shape structures to cool or keep foods cool. How anyone walking by resisted nabbing a slice pie could well be one of the greatest mysteries of Portsmouth Island.

Basic Cream Pie Filling

2 cups sugar

½ cup all-purpose flour

3 egg yolks, beaten

3 cups evaporated milk

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ stick margarine

In the top of a double boiler, stir together sugar and flour well blended. Add egg yolks. Pour in milk and mix well. At this point, you may add the zest of 2 lemons, a 20-ounce can of crushed pineapple drained or 3 cups of sliced fresh peaches. Add vanilla and margarine. Place on top of double boiler and cook over low heat until thickened. Divide filling between two 9-inch baked pie crusts. Cool in the refrigerator for several hours before serving. Makes 16 servings.

Source: Based on a recipe in “Island Born and Bred” (Harkers Island United Methodist Women, 1987)

Most Americans would say that the United States has two clam chowders, the creamy New England-style and the tomato-based Manhattan kind. They know this in a large part due to the Campbell’s Soup company bringing both chowders to the masses. Who didn’t grow up with Mom pouring a can of clam chowder into a pot?

I would argue there are three types of clam chowder in America, the third and best being North Carolina’s own. Some people call it “Hatteras clam chowder,” others call it “Down East clam chowder,” but most locals just call it “clam chowder” because no matter where you’re from on the N.C. coast, it’s always made with mostly clams.

Agreeing on a clam chowder recipe is no small deal. In New England, where those other two chowders are from, cooks constantly quarrel over which recipe is correct. Milk- or cream-based New England-style with potatoes and onions might be thick or thin. Manhattan-style seasoned with garlic and often soup vegetables such as carrots, onions and celery has many variations. Long Islanders add milk or cream. Floridians include hot chilies. In New Jersey, cooks stir in light cream, creamed asparagus and celery powder.

It was all too much for one Maine legislator to take. In the mid-1900s, New England clam chowder devotee Rep. Cleveland Sleeper was so offended by Manhattan-style chowder that he kept drafting bills to make putting tomatoes in clam chowder a crime. Offenders would have been forced to dig a barrel of clams at high tide.

The issue was supposedly finally put to rest in the so-called “Maine chowder war of 1939.” It was a chef-to-chef battle, New England vs Manhattan. New England won, and Sleeper gloated. “If a clam could vote,” he said, “I would be elected president.”

Debate, however, never ended.

Sleeper thought, as other Manhattan chowder haters still do, that tomatoes polluted the stew. So does milk or cream, as far as native coastal North Carolinians are concerned. They put nothing but clams, potatoes, onions and water in their clam chowder because they like chowder that tastes like fresh clams. What’s more accurate than that?

Food historians think the word “chowder” derives from the French word “chaudière,” meaning “boiler,” or a large iron cooking pot. When early French settlers landed in what are now Canada’s Maritimes, they found the region’s native Micmac peoples cooking clams in hollowed out tree trunks, Alan Davidson writes in “The Oxford Companion to Food” (Oxford University Press, 1999). Water was poured into the tree trunks and fire-heated stones were dropped into the water. When the French introduced their chaudière, it seems chowder was invented.

The word chowder, showed up in North America in the 1730s. Today, it means seafood stew, but it may have originally referred to any soup or stew cooked in a large pot to feed a crowd. Back then, there was no such thing as an “authentic” chowder recipe.

The oldest chowder formulas were water-based fish soups containing root vegetables, potatoes among them, Food Timeline has found. Wine, cider and spices added flavor and hard bread or crackers bulk. Nary an ounce of milk went into a recipe billed New England Chowder in the 1847 cookbook titled “The Frugal Housekeeper’s Kitchen Companion or Guide to Economical Cookery.”

Mid-1800s recipes suggested flour to give the chowders body. Around the same time, Rhode Island cooks were adding tomatoes, thanks to Portuguese immigrants introducing the state to their country’s seafood stews.

By the end of the century, New Englanders were leaving out wine, cider and spices in favor of onions, potatoes, salt pork and milk from the dairy cows that took well to the Northeast’s cooler climate.

Meantime, tomato-based chowder became known as Manhattan-style for no exact reason. In “The Book of Chowder” (Harvard Common Press, 1978) author Richard J. Hooker tells of famed New York restaurant Delmonico’s 1894 recipe for Chowder de Lucines made with pork, parsley, thyme, onions, potatoes, clams and tomatoes.

None of the debate mattered to working families living frugally along the North Carolina and other state coasts. They made clam chowder with what was available. The humble version favored in North Carolina also took hold in Delaware, where cooks added butter. Salt pork went into some North Carolina pots for seasoning. Cornmeal dumplings floated on top added the extra bulk men and women needed for the hard work of fishing, farming and tending homesteads.

Coastal North Carolina families still love that basic chowder. Many tourists visiting the state’s beaches wouldn’t think of a fried seafood dinner at a restaurant without a first course of Hatteras clam chowder. It never goes out of style, and it never comes in a can.

Down East Clam Chowder

¼ pound salt pork, sliced

1 quart coarsely chopped large chowder clams

1 quart water

½ cup chopped onion

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

4 cups diced white potatoes

In a large saucepan, fry pork over medium heat until crisp. Remove pork. Add clams, water, onion, salt, pepper and, if desired, chopped pork to the pot. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer slowly until clams are tender, about 1½ hours. Add potatoes and onions, and cook until potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.

Source: Adapted from “Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas” (North Carolina Sea Grant, 2003)

MOREHEAD CITY – How do you like your oyster on the half shell? With hot sauce? Lemon juice? Apple cider vinegar? Drawn butter? On a saltine with cocktail sauce? Slurp the oyster straight from the shell?

At the second annual Shuck, Rattle and Roll Friday evening, oyster lovers will have a veritable buffet of oysters – and clams – provided by shellfish growers from up and down the state’s coast, all of whom will by vying for the Best Oyster Grower trophy, chosen by ticketholders.

The 7 p.m. fundraising event at the Crystal Coast Civic Center is designed to highlight the Carteret Community College aquaculture program and the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association. There will also be a low-country boil and hors d’oeuvres prepared by chefs and students from the college’s culinary program.

The evening will feature live music by Beaufort Blues Project, a band out Beaufort that performs blues-inspired covers by BB King, Grateful Dead, Jeff Beck, Imelda May and Grace Potter as well as a handful of original songs.

“We are once again excited about what is still a new event for the college and a very unique one too,” Brenda Reash, executive director of the Carteret Community College Foundation, said in a statement. “Event-goers will get to sample oysters from different growers, talk to them about location and technique, and they’ll get to vote for their favorite.”

Tickets are $40 per person. There will be a cash bar featuring craft beer by Beaufort’s Mill Whistle Brewing, a Carteret County brewery. To purchase tickets, contact Jennifer Gould at 252-222-6056 or visit www.cccfoundation.org and click on the Events tab.

Aquaculture program Chair David Cerino said the aim of Shuck, Rattle and Roll is to celebrate the North Carolina shellfish aquaculture industry and raise funds to support the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association and the Carteret Community College aquaculture program.

“We will have over 15 different growers participating. There will be clams that are grown in the sediment under protective netting, oysters grown on the bottom using the ‘spat on shell’ method and single oysters grown in protective bags and cages that are either floating or resting on the bottom,” he said. Spat on shell method is when baby oysters attach to old oyster shells.

“Shuck, Rattle and Roll is a really fun time and provides a great opportunity to learn about shellfish aquaculture from the growers themselves, taste the unique flavor profiles of oysters grown in different water bodies, and experience some amazing cooked dishes prepared by the CCC culinary program students,” he added.

Cerino explained that the Carteret Community College aquaculture program has been around since 2004 and its instructors “teach all aspects of aquaculture, with a focus on marine species including shellfish, finfish and anything else that can be cultured in water.” There are certificate, diploma, associate’s and transfer degrees available. Graduates of the program work in commercial fish and shellfish farms, hatcheries, public aquariums and research institutions.

“Shellfish aquaculture is a great method of food production because it is a net benefit to the environment,” he said about the important role aquaculture plays. “Shellfish filter out the algae that are blooming due to increased nutrient inputs from human activities. At CCC aquaculture, we encourage and promote environmentally friendly production practices and stimulate the local economy by fostering small business development.”

The North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association represents the interests of the many involved in the shellfish industry, and, according to its website, has a broad base of members including shellfish farmers, hatchery operators, seafood dealers, educators, researchers, government regulators and service providers.

Jay Styron is president of the association. He owns the Cedar Island-based farm, Carolina Mariculture Co., with a business office in Wilmington.

The association is an organization that helps educate the public about the shellfish industry and its many facets. It also educates legislators as issues arise, Styron explained.

The group decided to partner with the Carteret Community College aquaculture program because, “… it helps to showcase the growers that participate and bring awareness to the public that we have many oyster farms in North Carolina now and local oysters are now an option no matter what time of year it is,” he said.

Styron said that oysters are a keystone species to our estuarine environment. “That means many other organisms depend on oysters and their structures for part of their life cycle like blue crabs, red drum, flounders and many others. Also, since oysters are filter feeders they take in the algae that is produced from excess nutrients in our waterways. This allows sunlight to penetrate the water and therefore allows more seagrass to grow.”

Now, North Carolina has oysters and oyster farmers that can compete with any other oysters and farms in the United States and they’re available year-round. Ask for local at your seafood markets, Styron added.

Amanda Lyle, development coordinator for Carteret Community College Foundation, said Shuck, Rattle and Roll is in line with the mission of the college, which is to offer opportunities for lifelong learning through high-quality traditional and distance learning teaching, training, support and enrichment with the intended purpose of improving the quality of life for all citizens of Carteret county and eastern North Carolina.

“Shuck, Rattle and Roll is an excellent opportunity to promote this mission because it showcases and celebrates two of our premier programs, aquaculture and culinary arts, while providing the opportunity to educate the public about aquaculture and its relevance and importance in our community,” she said.

“By providing an avenue for education, the CCC aquaculture program is vital to our mission to improve the quality of life for all citizens of Carteret County and Eastern North Carolina,” she added. “The growing demand for seafood coupled with the increased drive to be resource-efficient makes aquaculture an important industry in our community where the seafood industry is paramount.”

Lyle said she hopes that the public will be excited about this unique event that highlights the North Carolina aquaculture industry in a way that is not only educational, but also fun and entertaining.

“Guests not only will have the opportunity to meet and connect with the growers as they sample their oysters from up and down the North Carolina coast, they will also get to try North Carolina-grown oysters and clams prepared in a variety of ways,” she said. Lyle added that the taste of oysters is influenced by a variety of factors that vary from location to location, and this event will give guests the rare opportunity to experience this.

The first Shuck, Rattle and Roll took place last year during the 2016 North Carolina Seafood Festival, held the first weekend of October in Morehead City, but has changed weekend and location.

“We were so honored to be included in last year’s NC Seafood Festival Chef’s Tent,” Lyle explained. “This was the perfect way for us to kick off our inaugural event, which sold out. In order to grow, we realized we would need to look for a new location, and the proximity of CCC to the Crystal Coast Civic Center made perfect sense. Also, moving the date later in the month is helpful for our Culinary Arts program chefs and students, who are already very busy during the Seafood Festival weekend.”

Learn More

• Buy tickets
• Carteret Community College aquaculture program
• The North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association

JACKSONVILLE – Fish scales flew around Bright’s Seafood like confetti at a parade for King Neptune. My memory of that afternoon is as clear as the fall day when I witnessed the flurry. Owners Bennie and Glenda Bright hardly had a minute to leave the whizzing electric fish scalers at their Jacksonville market. The news was all over Onslow County.

The spots were running.

Folks who weren’t waiting in line to buy spots or calling in orders were probably out fishing. Two unofficial “holidays” will coax people away from their jobs on the North Carolina coast: the ACC college basketball tournament and the fall spot fishing season.

Drive along coastal roadways and you’ll know when the fish are running. Small boats crowd around bridges over the brackish waters that spots love. Temporary signs in front of restaurants advertise “We have spots.” Banners go up in Hampstead to announce the North Carolina Spot Festival, held every September since 1963.

At Bright’s Seafood market that day, Bennie was preparing to fry 300 pounds of spots for a politician’s campaign rally while Glenda wondered where a fish scale might pop up next. “I find them in church sometimes. I really do,” she said, giggling. “You know, like one stuck to me.”

I could relate. I’ve scaled, headed and gutted probably hundreds of spots my family and I netted or caught using fishing poles. If the spots were running after school, Mom ran us up to one of Topsail Island’s piers to catch our share.

Anglers prefer double-drop rigs that dangle two hooks between a sinker. You need them both. When spots are schooling, from as soon as late August to sometime in November, it’s not unusual to catch the fish two at a time.

Like Bennie, my family dressed enough spots one year to stock a fish-fry fundraiser. Ours was for my brother’s Boy Scout troop. On weekends, as soon as we pulled into the driveway after New River fishing trips, neighbors jammed our patio looking to buy spots or nab an invite to my dad’s backyard fish fry.

Spots are fried whole. The half- to 1-pound fish, 5 to 7 inches long, are too small to filet. They’re in the same family as croakers, but as Bennie told me, “A spot has got a different flavor all to itself.” Croakers are tender with a mild, sweet flavor. Spots are denser and lean. Their light meat tastes of the sea. “It’s a better fish to me,” Bennie said.

The large spot behind the spot’s gills gave the fish its name. Legend claims the mark was made by the fingers of St. Peter, the fisherman whose bad luck on the Sea of Galilee was turned around, according to the Bible, when Jesus advised “Let down your nets.”

Abundant, easy-to-catch spots must have seemed a miracle to people who lived along the South’s remote coastlines in the days before supermarkets and places like Bright’s Seafood. Much of their diet depended on hunting, fishing, foraging and what they could grow in their gardens. Salted spots, boiled and served with sweet potatoes, is an old-fashioned North Carolina recipe some people still remember.

At my house, we packed our dressed spots in cardboard milk cartons, filled the cartons with water, pushed in the lid and stacked the cartons in a big chest freezer. The water preserved the fish’s texture. The fish tasted so fresh every once a week or so throughout winter when Mom or Dad would, as coastal Carolinians say, “fry up a mess of spots.” No matter if we had them often, spots were always a special treat, and not just because they tasted good. For the hour that we were gathered around the dinner table, our minds were on the river and the next time the spots would be running.

Tips For Perfect Fried Spots

• At the market: Ask for fish to be simply headed and gutted or get spots butterflied with their bones intact. Plan on two fish per person.
• Preparations: Rinse and dry spots. Cut three vertical gashes across the thickest part of both sides of whole fish so that they cook quickly and evenly. Salt the fish inside and out. “The only time you want to put pepper on a fish is if he’s been in the freezer. It kills the freezer taste,” Onslow County fisherman Bennie Bright said.
• Breading: A quick roll in unseasoned yellow cornmeal is all the fish need. Bread the fish inside and out and then immediately drop them into the fryer. Wait too long to fry breaded fish and the coating will be soggy.
• Frying: Choose a high smoke-point oil such as canola, grapeseed, safflower or peanut oil. Pour oil to a depth of 2 inches in a heavy skillet, preferably cast iron. Heat the oil to 350 degrees before adding fish. Use a deep-fry thermometer to help know when to adjust the heat.
• When is it done? Don’t trust the old saying that fried fish is cooked when it floats to the oil’s surface. The fish should cook about three minutes per side or until the flesh easily flakes from the bone. Serve the fish with simple sides like boiled potatoes or coleslaw. You don’t want anything to overpower the fish’s flavor.  Some restaurants offer fried spot for breakfast, over plain grits and a fried egg on the side.

Front page featured photo: Baxter Miller

Any list of essential Southern layer cakes should include carrot, coconut and red velvet. Some people would argue chocolate, too, but in North Carolina, I’d add the pig pickin’ cake instead.

Hardly a hog roast happens without this tower of deliciousness appearing. Cool Whip frosting full of pecans, canned crushed pineapple and instant vanilla pudding covers three vanilla orange cake layers prepared from a boxed mix.

Pig pickin’ cakes are always served chilled. They’re among those deceptively light desserts that get you into trouble. Despite the cake’s lack of wholesome ingredients, you can’t stop at one slice, and the fluffy texture lulls you into believing that’s OK.

North Carolina gets credit for the pig pickin’ cake because of the treat’s name and how it perfectly cools the palate after a tangy pulled pork dinner. The sweet mountain is so loved across the state that it has expanded beyond pig pickin’s. When the New York Times in 2014 asked Google to find out which dishes residents of each state searched most often for Thanksgiving, pig pickin’ cake was North Carolina’s No. 1.

How Carolinians came to love the pig pickin’ cake is probably rooted in the mid-20^th century age of convenience foods. The cake is a cinch to make and comes out tasty every time thanks to its processed ingredients.

As a child, I baked pig pickin’ cakes so often, without adult supervision, that I still know the formula by heart. I never worried about the cake turning out dry. The recipe includes a built-in remedy: Soak the layers with juice drained from the canned crushed pineapple that goes into the frosting. Uneven cake layers don’t matter either. They’re always perfect under all that whipped cream chunky with fruit and nuts.

Some recipe writers suggest two tall cake layers, a thin smear of frosting in between. They advise that pecans in the frosting are optional. Icing should be spread perfectly smoothly. Garnish with a few of the canned mandarin orange segments that go into the batter. Those people are probably of that ilk who don’t understand Southern accents and think the pig pickin’ cake is also called “pea pickin’ cake.”

Tar Heels know that the cake and frosting layers should be about equal height, each barely an inch tall. My mother liked to bake two layers, and then spilt each one to make a four-layer cake, making it moister and a sure-fire means of getting plenty of frosting in each forkful. Pecans help give the cake its distinctive North Carolina character. Gobbed on frosting, the best part of any layer cake, is decoration enough.

I like to make more frosting than the recipe calls for. So did my mother. So did the grandmother who shared the recipe with her. Just about everyone I know has a recipe that was handed down to them. That’s how I think the pig pickin’ cake became a classic, and why hardly anyone says “No thank you” when it makes the rounds.

Pig Pickin’ Cake

1 box yellow cake mix

4 eggs

¾ cup vegetable oil

1 small can mandarin oranges in light syrup

1 20-ounce can of crushed pineapple

1 16-ounce container Cool Whip or other whipped topping

1 small box instant vanilla pudding

1 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease the inside sides and bottom of three 8-inch cake pans and flour lightly.

Using a mixer set at low speed, blend cake mix, eggs, oil and oranges with their juices for 30 seconds. Increase mixer speed to medium and beat batter for 2 minutes. Pour batter in pans and bake about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of each cake comes out clean of batter. Cool cakes in pans on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Remove cakes from pans, set cakes on wire rack and cool them completely.

Drain and press juice from pineapple and set juice aside. Place drained pineapple, whipped topping, vanilla pudding and chopped pecans in a large bowl. Stir until a mixing spoon until well combined. Refrigerate frosting until ready to use.

Place one cake layer on a serving platter. Use a toothpick to poke holes all over the cake. Brush 1/3 of the pineapple juice over the cake. Spread a few heaping spoonfuls of frosting on the cake. Repeat with remaining cake layers. Frost sides of cake. Cover and refrigerate several hours or overnight before serving.

Makes 12 servings.

Among the sacred foods you never, ever mess with down South, tomato sandwiches rank at the top. Mention any adulteration to the simple formula of mayonnaise, salt, black pepper, supermarket white bread and red, homegrown tomatoes sliced not a second before they’re ripe and you’re bound to be looked at like you just shouted “YOU all.”

No one will touch your carefully crafted carrot cake at the neighborhood social. Somehow, you’ll be bypassed when the ribs and tenderloin come off the cooker at the next pig pickin’. Friends may even act like they didn’t see you when you wave “hi” in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.

Everyone has an opinion about tomato sandwiches, right down to the brand of mayonnaise that should be used. If you say Duke’s, someone else will say Hellmann’s, although no one will say Miracle Whip. That’s the one generally agreed upon ultimate blasphemy. When Charlotte Observer food writer Kathleen Purvis wrote about tomato sandwiches in 2009, a firestorm followed, the most “online comments, e-mails and phone calls than almost any food story I’ve written,” Purvis said in her follow-up column.

Tomato sandwiches are so popular during summer in North Carolina that they could be the official state food of July and August. Tar Heels’ annual anticipation for tomato sandwich season moved the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to give away free tomato sandwiches at two of its Greenhouse Vegetable Days in April, two months before the correct field tomatoes would ripen.

Some communities build entire meals around the tomato sandwich. In her book “Dallas, North Carolina: A Brief History,” author Kitty Thornburg Heller notes that “Even the North Carolina state legislature and some churches serve ‘tomato sandwich suppers’ during summer.” The Garden of Concord in Graham hosts one. Charlotte real estate brokers throw a tomato sandwich party that has grown into a must-do event, if you can score an invitation. Merritt’s Store & Grill, operating since 1929 in Chapel Hill, still serves a classic tomato sandwich, just $3.15.

As fiercely loyal as Carolinians are to the tomato sandwich, you would think it was invented here, or at least down South, but no one knows for sure if it was a New Jersey, North Carolina or some other state’s tomato that first landed between mayonnaise-smeared white bread.

Some Carolina plantations were growing tomatoes in mid-1700s, but the plants were likely test runs of the tiny things explorers found Aztecs eating in what is now Mexico. A viable, tasty field tomato did not appear in America, Ohio to be exact, until the late 1800s.

Commercial jarred mayonnaise emerged in Philadelphia in 1907. Mass-produced white bread hit its stride not long after. Tomato sandwich recipes were in print by the early 20^th century, too, not that you need much instruction, although a 2014 CNN story did devote nearly 800 words to how to make a proper tomato sandwich.

I’ve made a lot of tomato sandwiches “the right way.” I’m craving one right now, but, as is the case many times when the tomato sandwich urge hits, I don’t have exactly what I need to prepare the stack. Rather than dismiss my yearning, I’ll use whatever I have on hand to get some sort of tomato sandwich flavor in my mouth. Oftentimes, I’m eating in the garden, my tomato sandwich balanced so that it’s juices run down my arm and onto the ground instead of my lap. It’s those times that a nearby basil plant broadcasts its aroma and I think, “Hmm. Maybe I’ll just keep that carrot cake for myself.”

1. Lay large, fresh basil leaves on a tomato sandwich. If you grow lettuce leaf basil even better.
2. Marinate sliced tomatoes in balsamic vinaigrette for 30 minutes before putting them in the sandwich.
3. Try flaky sea salt or seasoned salts instead of plain table salt. Consider smoked sea salt, French Fleur de Sel, rosemary salt or garlic salt.
4. Sprinkle on red pepper flakes, chili powder or chipotle powder instead of or in addition to freshly cracked black pepper.
5. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of parmesan cheese over the tomatoes on the sandwich, lay the open-faced sandwich half on a baking sheet and broil until the cheese is bubbly. Remove from oven and lay the other piece of bread on top.
6. Make a mayonnaise-heavy pimento cheese and use it instead of mayonnaise.
7. Build a tomato sandwich on a biscuit the same circumference of your tomato slices. Cheddar biscuits are even better.
8. Use sturdy sourdough or whole-wheat bread and stack the tomatoes high, Dagwood style, with pesto or avocado mayonnaise in between each slice. Serve with a fork and a knife, just in case.
9. Sprinkle fresh, sweet corn kernels just cut from the cob onto the sandwich.
10. Make or purchase a huge focaccia bread. Toast each cut side on the grill and then spread on mayonnaise. Place the bottom half of the focaccia, crust side down, on a large, wooden cutting board. Lay a variety of different-colored, thickly sliced tomatoes on the focaccia to completely cover. Drizzle with homemade ranch or green goddess dressing, salt and freshly cracked pepper. Sprinkle with chopped herbs (basil, chives, parsley). Lay the top half of the grilled focaccia over the tomatoes. Press bread lightly. Let sandwich sit for 10-15 minutes. Use a long serrated knife to cut into squares for guests at the table.

The luckiest of occasions during a coastal North Carolina spring is to find yourself at wedding reception, porch party or church social where someone has taken the trouble to make cheese straws.

These delicately crisp sticks, pungent with sharp cheddar cheese and a cayenne pepper sting are markers of the South’s best cooks, those kitchen masters who turn rubbery thick muscadine grape hulls into succulent deep-dish pie filling, boney fish into steaming, rich stews and tough collard leaves and knobby ham hocks into a luscious mélange that makes your heart jump at the memory of their marriage.

Cheese straws are different, though. They’re that something extra meant to impress and savor. “The Heritage of Southern Cooking” author Camille Glenn put it best in the matter-of-fact title she gave her recipe: Very Special Cheese Straws.

Although cheese straws are special indeed, albeit for fleeting seconds on the tongue, the dainties consist of nothing more than flour, butter, cheese and cayenne pepper. The ingredients are blended light-handedly in a manner similar to preparing everyday biscuits or pie dough.

Some cooks add egg yolk, others ice cold water to insure perfection. In Morehead City’s heritage cookbook “A Little Taste of Heaven Since 1857,” recipes call for Rice Krispies cereal to achieve certain crispiness. Southern Living’s “Recipe Revival: Southern Classics Reinvented for Modern Cooks” advises layering grated cheese over the dough and then folding and rolling the dough to incorporate the cheese, thereby producing flakey texture. Fancying up cheese straws with herbs, anchovies, pecans, blue cheese, even pepperoni is the discussion at online recipe exchanges.

Traditionalists might politely say of these folks, “Bless their hearts.” Experienced Southern cooks prefer what they’ve known for generations as the authentic simple recipe, no matter debate over the cheese straw’s history.

Some food writers argue that the cheese straw was invented in England, inspired by British biscuits and cheddar cheeses. Others point to France, although Southerners would say cheese twisted into puff pastry mocks a true cheese straw. One of the earliest recipes for the South’s cheese straws showed up in 1861 in Isabella Beeton’s “The Book of Household Management,” printed in London. Another appeared just after the Civil War in “Mrs. Hill’s New Cookbook” published in New York.

No matter where cheese straws were born, the American South claims them. How the crisps infiltrated the region is a mystery. The area’s warm, humid climate waylaid any longstanding cheese-making tradition.

Writer John Martin Taylor in a 2008 Gastronomica article argued that cheese straws were how Southerners preserved cheese. The theory makes sense when one considers hoop cheese, which may be the South’s best-known cheese. It was once available by the hunk at country and convenience stores all along the North Carolina coast, but the unsalted, nutty, orange cheese spoils quickly. Better to mix it into pastry that keeps for a week in an air-tight container.

With all due respect to Mr. Taylor’s exhaustive research on the cheese straw, one giant hole remains in his theory: No plate of cheese straws lasts long on any table.

Nelle Geer’s Cheese Dreams

Nelle Geer’s Cheese Dreams were a staple at Morehead City social events, Nelle Lazenby Geer writes in “A Little Taste of Heaven Since 1857,” a collection of recipes from Morehead City. Geer cut the dough into circles, but you may also use a pizza wheel to cut 3- to 4-inch-long strips, each about a half-inch wide. Alternately, push the dough through a cookie press. This is her formula, with a little cayenne pepper added and more detailed instructions for various mixing methods. Geer said nothing more than blend the ingredients as you would for pie crust. Most recipes set the oven temperature at between 325 and 375 degrees. Geer goes up to 400 degrees and doesn’t give a baking time, so check the cheese straws at five minutes. She also doesn’t say how many pieces this recipes makes, but it’s a big batch. Expect a yield of about four dozen.

Cheese Dreams

4 cups all-purpose flour, chilled

1 to 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper or to taste

1 pound extra-sharp cheese, chilled

1 pound butter, chilled

Whisk together flour and cayenne pepper in a large mixing bowl.

Grate cheese. Cut the butter into small pieces.

If working by hand, sprinkle the cheese and butter over the flour mixture. Cut cheese and butter into the flour using a pastry cutter or rub the butter and cheese into the flour with your fingertips until a dough forms.

If using a stand mixer, add cheese and butter and blend using the paddle attachment. Add flour and blend just until dough forms.

If using a food processor, sprinkled butter and cheese over flour in the processor bowl and pulse just until a dough forms.

Refrigerate dough for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll dough to ¼-inch thickness between two sheets of wax paper and cut into 1-inch rounds or 3- to 4-inch-long strips, about ½-inch wide each. If using a cookie press, bring the dough to room temperature and pack it into a cookie press cylinder fitted with a star or ribbon disk.

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet until edges are slightly brown.

If ever there was a hard-headed Southerner, it’s the rutabaga. Forget a friendly “hey y’all.” The rock-solid root woos you with its mellow sun-gold hue and then stings you with a sharp bite. Why would anyone ever want to eat these things?

That’s what I wondered the first time I tasted rutabagas. I was a child enticed by a grandmotherly eastern North Carolina cook whose collards, I thought, were better than anything from the neighborhood 7-Eleven candy aisle. When she presented a bowl of boiled rutabaga chunks, I thrust in my fork as eagerly as a child going after birthday cake. I thought I could trust her, but the rutabaga’s dirty bitterness convinced me to never go near the vegetable again.

To this day, even as a food writer who must put a lot of questionable stuff in her mouth, I list rutabaga as one of the few things I don’t eat.

“Bless your heart,” my eastern North Carolina neighbors might say to me about that. Rutabagas are a beloved food tradition up and down the state’s coastal plain. Not long after the cabbage-turnip cross made the trip from its native Sweden to Canada, New England and Thomas Jefferson’s garden in the 1800s, cooks from the Outer Banks to the South Carolina line hankered for rutabagas.

The roots grew well in the region’s soils and suffered no damage buried over bitter winters or blistering summers. They provided sustenance for both humans and livestock. Rutabagas could be squirreled away in sand, a handy storage option in the days before refrigeration. Dense and filling, the knobs stretched meals. During and after World War II, Europeans depended on rutabagas to fill their bellies and still remember, and often loathe, the vegetable as famine food. Harkers Island cooks are known for extending beef stew with rutabagas and cornmeal dumplings.

Rutabagas were important to livestock farmers, too. In the mid-1800s, grower J.W. Brewster yielded 1,000 bushels of rutabagas, or 5,500 livestock feeds, on an acre of land that produced just 50 bushels of corn, about 400 feeds, the University of South Carolina reports at its American Heritage Vegetables website.

Nowadays, rutabagas are mostly a matter of nostalgia on the Carolina coast. Over the years, they have become harder to find. Supermarket shoppers are more interested in carrots and potatoes than ugly wax-coated rutabagas. At farmers’ markets, folks pick over rutabagas for flashy, fuchsia beets and velvety sweet potatoes.

In her cookbook “Deep Run Roots” (Little, Brown and Co., 2016), a tribute to North Carolina coastal plain cooking, eastern North Carolina’s most famous chef, Vivian Howard, dedicates an entire chapter to rutabagas. She prepares them with an assertive Kinston-area cook who sharply advises Howard on how to cut and cook the roots. In this part of North Carolina, cubed or sliced rutabagas are usually stewed with fatback and seasoned plainly with salt and pepper. Their pungent greens may be boiled with the roots, an extra special treat as far as rutabaga lovers are concerned.

My mother was one of them. An Italian, she adored the bitter flavor of chicory, arugula and broccoli rabe. While living on the North Carolina coast, rutabagas were her favorites. She may have experienced them differently than me. Some people describe rutabagas as only slightly bitter with an earthy sweetness. Our perception of bitter roots and greens depends on genes that make us either insensitive tasters or super tasters. The latter group may find rutabagas too bitter to eat.

Cooks, both amateur and professional, tend to tame the rutabaga’s bitterness. Chefs might sweeten a mash with bourbon and maple syrup. A Swansboro home cook I knew layered sliced rutabagas and potatoes in a creamy au gratin. Down in Carolina beach, I met a chef who makes rutabaga soup with apples. Howard offers a recipe for bacon-roasted rutabagas she serves with pork tenderloin.

As I review recipes, I start thinking about raw, shaved rutabagas with honey mustard dressing. I think about sautéing sausage and firm, sweet pears to scatter over rutabaga French fries and then drizzling the whole thing with some sort of sweet and spicy sauce.

But to eat rutabagas simply stewed, and oftentimes mashed, as they have been for so many years in eastern North Carolina is to honor the hardworking families who shaped our coast’s humble and now popular food culture. They had to eat what they could grow and store. My modern refrigerator is full of other choices, but I’m giving rutabagas another chance, maybe with a little honey and a lot of butter.

Stewed Rutabagas

2 3/4-inch slices of salt pork

2 medium rutabagas, peeled and either sliced or cubed

About 1 quart of water

1 teaspoon of sugar

Salt and black pepper

2-3 tablespoons of melted butter

1 tablespoon of honey

Place a heavy, medium saucepan set over medium heat. Lay the salt pork in the plan and cook until fat is rendered. Add the rutabagas and cover with water. Add sugar. Increase heat to high. Bring rutabagas to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until rutabagas are as tender as potatoes. Drain, season with salt and pepper. Drizzle with butter and honey. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

“We ate them because we had to. We were so poor down here. There just wasn’t no money,” Virgil Coleman told me years ago.

The late Calabash native was talking about oysters, which is hard to believe whenever I’m sitting at an oyster bar. Visits to these classic Carolina restaurants are always a special treat in fall and winter, when North Carolina oysters are their fattiest and saltiest.

I like the old-timey oyster bars best, places like Williamston’s Sunny Side Inn where shuckers stand before you behind the bar and open as many raw or steamed oysters as you can eat right before your eyes. The place has been open since 1935, the middle of the Great Depression. That’s around the time Coleman’s father relied on the shellfish to make ends meet.

Back then, people followed a dirt road to find Curtis Coleman cooking oysters just plucked from Calabash River. His fishing boat was powered not by a motor but by Coleman’s hands on a polling oar. He served no cocktail sauce or drawn butter, just oysters cooked outside on a makeshift grate over an oak fire.

“He’d steamed ’em just right, you know, where they wouldn’t shrink up, where they’d be juicy,” Virgil Coleman recalled.

“I can remember shucking oysters for people, too. They’d give me a nickel or a dime, and a nickel or a dime back then was real big.”

People loved the roasts so much that in the 1940s, Curtis Coleman was able to turn his riverfront house into Calabash’s famous Coleman’s seafood restaurant.

Happy outdoor oyster feasts eastern North Carolinians like to attend and host in wintertime move inside at oyster bars such as T&W’s in Carteret County. Like Sunny Side Inn, it’s among the last of the genuine North Carolina oyster bar experiences. Standing behind the bar, professional shuckers and their customers become fast friends in the fleeting minutes it takes those knife-wielding pros to get a peck of oysters out of their shells.

As they lay one juicy delight after another on plates, folks who were strangers before they sat down beside each other at the bar are suddenly debating cocktail sauce vs. Texas Pete vs. butter vs. vinegar vs. naked. Wood crackles in a big brick fireplace opposite the bar. Just behind the scenes, workers in fishermen-style, white rubber boots move and rinse piles of oysters, providing background music that never gets old.

North Carolina oyster bars are so friendly and familiar, it feels like they were born here.

The first “oyster bars” in what would become the United States were gatherings of Native Americans shucking oysters a foot long or as big as pies along the East Coast. They may have assembled on or near natural oyster bars, huge shellfish colonies that rise like sand bars in the shallows at low tide.

Boston’s Union Oyster House, established in 1826, is the country’s oldest continuously operating oyster bar. The eateries are transplants from the Old World. In London, many restaurants began as oyster bars. Wiltons, deemed the oldest, opened there in 1742 and still serves, although on the half-shell in a fine-dining style.

By the end of the 19^th century, oyster bars dotted major cities across America. Creamy and luxuriously flavored, oysters pleased the rich. Cheap and plentiful, they were sustenance for the poor. Everyone found a place at the oyster bar. The shellfish sold for a dime a dozen in Charleston, South Carolina. They were free with the purchase of a beer in Kentucky. African-American-owned oyster bars were tucked between nightclubs and dance halls on “The Block,” an African-American business and entertainment district that existed along downtown Greenville’s Albemarle Avenue during the Jim Crow era.

Such an enormous appetite for oysters led to overfishing and, subsequently, fewer and fewer oyster bars. Successful aquaculture operations have spurred an oyster bar revival in the past few years. More often, stylish raw bars serve oysters shucked out of sight and served on the half-shell. They arrive one-by-one or by the dozen instead of by the peck in a battered tin bucket.

The Boiler Room in Kinston is a hybrid of the two. Celebrity chef Vivian Howard opened the place as a tribute to the North Carolina oyster bars she was forced to visit as a kid with her parents. Back then, oysters were not her thing. Neither were the slaw and drab saltines that accompanied the shellfish at many oyster bars.

That in mind, Howard also serves burgers, fried chicken bites and crowd-pleasing snacks like sausage smothered in melted pimento cheese for scooping up with homemade saltines. Shuckers open oysters at a center island behind the bar, sparing oyster haters full view of what they tend to call “those slimy things.”

“I’ve heard some people wondering who ate the first oyster,” Mr. Coleman told me back when we talked oysters before he passed away in 2011. “I always wonder who ate the first egg.”

Learn More

• Sunny Side Oyster Bar: 1100 Washington St., Williamston; 252-792-3416. Visit Sunny Side’s Facebook page
• T&W Oyster Bar: 2383 N.C. 58, Cape Carteret; 252-393-8838. Visit T&W’s website
• The Boiler Room: 108 W. North St., Kinston; 252-208-2433. Visit the Boiler Room’s website

On New Year’s Day 1802, President Thomas Jefferson, just 10 months in office, received a grand gift of support from the town of Cheshire, Mass. It was a cheese that weighed 1,235 pounds.

Stories of its 13-foot circumference and how it was rolled across the White House lawn to Jefferson’s waiting arms has caused some interpreters of history to bill that “Cheshire Mammoth Cheese” America’s first cheese ball.

The declaration is one Southerners know to be absolutely wrong.

It’s not just that the big cheese was likely a wheel of something like cheddar painted red rather than the ball of spreadable cheese coated in chopped pecans that Southerners claim to be all their own. The cheese ball’s fabled Southern pedigree is not by virtue of true history or special recipes but by the kindness and generosity with which the globes are shared.

Cheese balls became a Biro family favorite when the kindly lady who lived next door gave us one in the early 1970s. Hers was a store-bought, port wine cheddar number rolled in chopped pecans, a perennial favorite across North Carolina’s coastal plain. My European parents, not long on the North Carolina coast by way of New Jersey, had never seen anything like the neon-orange round streaked raspberry red.

From that first bite on a Ritz cracker forward, a Christmas cheese ball was part of our holiday tradition. As a teenager, I became the family cheese ball maker. Even now, when gourmets and top chefs ridicule the cheese ball as a Velveeta generation relic, I brave bringing one to even the most foodie-centric parties. Invariably, at least one person shares a happy memory about their own holiday cheese ball experiences, and a few people request the recipe. No matter their disco-era reputation, cheese balls taste good.

Cheeses soft enough to spread date back at least 5,000 years, but the cheese balls we know down South started, I think, with British potted cheeses and the German’s love of soft white cheeses. In the late 1800s, tavern owners in America’s Midwest and upper South mashed together one or more cheeses into paste with cream, seasonings, beer or wine, vegetables and nuts. They laid out these so-called “crock cheeses” on the bar for patrons to enjoy.

Mass-produced cream cheese arrived around 1873. By 1918, Florence Kreisler Greenbaum’s “Jewish Cook Book” (Bloch Publishing, New York) included a cheese ball recipe calling for one cake of Neufchatel cheese, an equal portion of butter, a tablespoon of cream, a dash of salt and six dashes of Tabasco sauce. New York-based Greenbaum suggested forming one large ball or several small ones and rolling them in chopped pecans.

Cheese ball recipes are easy compared to fussier holiday favorites like cookies. Still, they are extravagant enough that they qualified as once-a-year indulgences in days past down South. Before household refrigeration arrived, soft cheeses would not hold for long. Nuts were either expensive to buy or time-consuming to pick from their shells. To share such special ingredients spiked with a fine port amounted to an exceptional symbol of love, friendship and good will.

My cheese ball recipes vary year to year, but the one I fall back on most often honors the cheese ball that hooked my family all those years ago. Port wine cheese spreads available at the supermarket don’t compare to the dried cherries I soak in good-quality port wine and then fold into a little cream cheese and lots of extra-sharp cheddar. Should anyone imply that my recipe is neither authentic nor Southern, I’ll pass him or her a generous portion of that cheese ball on a Ritz cracker and suggest they hush their mouth.

Port Cherry Cheese Ball

1 cup whole dried cherries or cranberries

¼ cup good quality port wine

12 ounces cream cheese, softened

5 cups shredded extra-sharp orange cheddar

1 teaspoon chili powder

1 teaspoon Cajun seasoning blend

¼ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons good quality port wine

4 cups coarsely chopped toasted pecans

Place cherries or cranberries in a small bowl. Pour port over cherries or cranberries. Soak, stirring occasionally for several hours or overnight until the cherries have absorbed the port. The cherries should be sticky. Coarsely chop cherries and set aside.

Place cream cheese and cheddar cheese in a large, heavy bowl or the bowl of a stand-up mixer. Use a sturdy wooden spoon or the mixer’s paddle attachment, with mixer set on medium speed, to blend cheeses until well combined. When the mixture is smooth and pale orange, add chili powder and Cajun seasoning and blend well again. Gently fold in cherries and their juices plus 2 tablespoons of port wine using a sturdy wooden spoon. Do not use the mixer for this step. Cover the bowl and place cheese mixture in the refrigerator for about an hour.

Spread pecans on a large board. Using a large serving spoon, scoop one-third of the cheese mixture onto the pecans. Using your hands, roll the cheese in the nuts, forming a ball, until cheese is coated. Shape the cheese into a ball and place in a covered container or wrap in plastic. Place on a flat surface in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight. Repeat with remaining cheese mixture.

Makes three 5-inch cheese balls, each providing 8 to 10 servings.

Source: Liz Biro

A fisherman totters against a door frame at his seaside shack. The sun is so bright in the circa 1939 black-and-white photo that the shade line of the fellow’s tilted fedora hides his eyes. Goofing for the camera, he balances a square brown liquor bottle in one hand. In the other, he holds 13 nearly foot-long, dried mullet roes strung like a necklace.

More and bigger bunches of roe hang on nails stuck into the shack’s wall. They dry in the sun alongside a jacket and pants.

The place is Brown’s Island, once mullet fishing central in Onslow County. Fishermen netted thousands of mullets each fall. Salted mullets packed in barrels were such a popular export from the Carolina coast that the Atlantic and North Carolina railroad between Morehead City and Goldsboro was nicknamed the Mullet Line.

Foreign cultures appreciate mullet roe way more than Americans. Italians call dried mullet row “bottarga.” The Japanese call it “karasumi.” The stuff is eaten in France, Greece, Croatia, Turkey, the Middle East, East Asia and North Africa. North Carolina commercial fishing families love mullet roe, but the spongy, bright yellow lobes etched in thread-thin red veins is a tough sale beyond the shore.

That seems to be changing.

Dried mullet roe dates back at least 3,000 years. Egyptian murals illustrate the process. Europeans and the British brought their taste for bottarga to the American Colonies.

Once upon a time, North Carolina coastal fishermen tucked dried mullet roe into their pockets. Roe gave them the protein punch they needed to get through a long day on the water. If road workers knew of someone Down East who prepared especially fine mullet roe, they might swing by to pick up a few pieces for snacks.

Ocracoke Island native Maude Balance shared her fond mullet roe memories when author and historian David Cecelski of Durham interviewed her for a 2004 story in the News & Observer.

“In the fall of the year, Daddy would salt mullet roe and lay them upstairs. I can see Mama’s upstairs now. We didn’t use the upstairs then, and that’s where he’d put them. They cut the roe out and wash them, salt the roe, and then, after they stay salted so long, they’d wash the salt out and just lay them out on a board and they’d dry. You’d have mullet roe just about all winter long. Now I do it, but I freeze them. I love it. And that’s something else good for breakfast, toast and mullet roe.”

As far as many chefs across America have been concerned, the only mullet roe worth their attention was imported bottarga, also made with bluefin tuna roe. In 2007, Anna Maria Fish Co. in Sarasota, Florida, started preparing bottarga using Florida mullet. By 2013, chefs’ interest grew, and the company’s bottarga was featured in the New York Times.

Back in North Carolina, famous Kinston chef Vivian Howard in 2014 highlighted local mullet on her Public Television show “A Chef’s Life.”

In season two’s episode seven, titled “The Fish Episode, Y’all,” Howard shows off huge, dried roes of North Carolina striped mullet, also known as jumping mullet, in the kitchen of her Chef & the Farmer restaurant. She demonstrates how to grate the roe for blending into butter, sprinkling on oysters and using as a “finishing salt” to give dishes “the essence of the sea.”

At PinPoint fine-dining restaurant in Wilmington, chef Dean Neff grates local mullet bottarga into aioli. He pairs that with applewood-smoked Masonboro Sound oysters served with potato chips and pickled red onions. The idea is to put an oyster, aioli and onion on a potato chip.

Neff also paired the bottarga aioli with salted triggerfish fritters. He served them alongside stewed tomatoes and orange-seasoned, braised escarole at Tales of the Fish, an annual culinary celebration staged at Wild Dunes Resort in Isle of Palms, South Carolina. Neff’s aioli was a hit among some 200 guests and acclaimed chef Mike Lata of highly rated Fig restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. Lata called Neff the next day to ask where he could get the same bottarga.

“It kind of gives everything you put it on this kind of really fresh, ocean flavor,” Neff said. “This is actually really clean, really bright.”

The bottarga Neff uses is prepared by two brothers with strong ties to the North Carolina coast’s celebrated fall mullet runs.

Noah and Gabriel Harrell grew up in Burgaw. As kids, they spent a lot of time at the Topsail Beach home where their mother was raised. Noah Harrell remembers being awed by shadows of giant mullet schools in the ocean. He ate mullet as a kid, but bypassed the roe.

A performer who teaches theater at Pender High School in Burgaw, Noah Harrell was working in Vermont when an Italian friend introduced him to bottarga from Italy. She tossed shaved bottarga with garlic, butter, lemon juice and pasta. “I thought it was awesome,” Harrell said.

Later, in Pender County, the Harrell brothers bought local mullet at the fish market. They discovered one fish fat with roe. They took the gift as a sign to start making their own bottarga. After all, imported bottarga costs up to $100.

The brothers carefully extract the delicate roe, coat it in olive oil and sea salt and let it air dry for about three weeks. Next, they pack the dried roe in salt and cure it for two to three months. The first year, the pair caught all the mullet they used. In 2015, they purchased a few fish to add to their haul, 30 mullets in all to produce 60 pieces of roe. They plan to keep the business small, local and seasonal.

“October and November, particularly, is mullet season here in Pender County. I like that ritual,” Noah Harrell said. “It’s always nice to see those traditions that make sense seasonally. Is it coincidence? I don’t know. But mullet run in the fall, and the fall is the perfect time to dry the roe. I feel a connection.”

“It tastes like the beach. It tastes like marsh and salt air and all the good flavors of coastal eating and living that I love.”

I can see Mr. A.C. Todd sitting by his kitchen table for dinner as clearly as if I was standing before him right now. He and his wife, Geneva, lived in the house next door to the one where I grew up in Onslow County. My mother had sent me over to borrow a cup of something. While Mrs. Todd rummaged through the cabinets to find it, Mr. Todd finished the last couple bites of his meal and then considered a plate of cornbread.

I envied Mr. Todd getting to have his wife’s cornbread anytime he wanted it. Her breads were legendary in our neighborhood. If Mrs. Todd popped over to share a bowl of stewed collards she had just taken from the pot, you crossed your fingers that she brought cornbread, too.

What happened next made me to question if Mr. Todd deserved full access to that cornbread.

“Do you have any buttermilk?” he asked his wife.

Mrs. Todd nodded toward the refrigerator behind her husband’s chair. He retrieved the carton, crumbled cornbread into a drinking glass, poured buttermilk nearly to the rim and then ate the mixture with a spoon.

Coastal North Carolina likes some weird food combinations. Cornbread and buttermilk is just one of them. The sources of these mash-ups vary. Cornbread crumbled into buttermilk probably originates with the African-American slaves and poor farmers of America’s early days. Corn grew well in the South. Eating it at nearly every meal led cooks to imagine different ways to serve it. Rather than discard the liquid left from churning fresh or soured milk into butter, they soaked stale cornbread in it, thereby creating a cheap, nutritious meal.

Peanuts and Pepsi

There was a time when you almost couldn’t go into a country store and not see someone sipping a bottle of Pepsi with handful of salted, roasted peanuts floating in the soda. How this happened is anyone’s guess. Maybe it was just easier to eat and drink out of the bottle rather than try to juggle a pack of peanuts and a soda, especially when you were driving the pickup truck down a bumpy road. The only sure thing is that sweet and salty flavors are mighty pleasing together.

Spots and grits

When the small, saltwater fish named spot runs in fall, the words “fried spot” light up country cooking restaurants’ signs along the coast. The most old-school of places serve cornmeal-dusted fried spots on grits. The fish are headed and gutted but never filleted. African-American slaves ate fish with grits. Fishermen did, too. Grits are cheap and they keep you full for a long while. Spots are plentiful and easy to catch. Their mild flavor is delicious, but because spots usually weigh no more than a pound, they’re not a commercially viable catch, so most of the harvest ended up being eaten at home.

Vinegar on Fish, Oysters, Greens and Pulled Pork

Ocracoke Island native Maude Balance’s father was a commercial fisherman. In 2004, she told the News & Observer about his boiled fish breakfasts. He and other watermen sprinkled hot vinegar on the fish. Down East residents like a dash of vinegar on their oysters. Every table in a true North Carolina country cooking restaurant will host a bottle of Texas Pete green tabasco peppers packed in vinegar. Everyone knows it’s for splashing onto stewed greens. The use of vinegar as a condiment came from the Old World to the colonies. Think malted vinegar on British fish and chips. Hot vinegar is also a traditional soul food condiment. Vinegar-and-pepper sauces used on pulled pork may have originated in the West Indies, where islanders mopped a lemon juice and chile pepper sauce on pork.

Mullet and Sweet Potatoes

Mullet and sweet potatoes are both plentiful in fall. Sweet potatoes make a nice change from the white potatoes so common in coastal North Carolina’s old-fashioned seafood recipes. Rich, oily mullet have enough flavor to stand up to the sweet potatoes. This is an uncommon stew even among fishing families, but worth recreating. Render some pork fat in a pot. Layer mullet and onions on top, add enough water to cover halfway, bring to a boil, lay some sliced sweet potatoes on top of the fish and simmer until the fish and potatoes are cooked through. Alternately, bake the fish and vegetables together in the oven.

Ritz Crackers and Lemon Pie

Lemon pie made with a Ritz cracker crust is a Down East classic. A little salty, a little sweet and plenty tart, it hits all the South’s favorite flavors. Thank modern convenience foods for this meringue-topped creation. Sweetened condensed milk landed in the mid-1800s and required no refrigeration. Packaged Ritz crackers arrived in 1934. Lining a pie tin with the crackers was easier than mixing pastry. This pie was made famous by Capt. Bill’s Waterfront Restaurant in Morehead City.

Barbecue and Slaw

Germans and the Dutch who settled in the Piedmont brought coleslaw to North Carolina. They were already eating the cabbage salad with pork. Their descendants put it on barbecue restaurant menus, according to “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue” (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Before mayonnaise was mass marketed in 1912, cooks who wanted creamy slaw prepared boiled dressing, a tangy-sweet flour-thickened custard containing egg yolks, milk and vinegar.

Chili, Slaw, Onions and Mustard

How do you know you’re from North Carolina? If these four words instantly mean something to you. You order hamburgers with these four embellishments. You put them on your hot dogs, too. When someone says Carolina burger or Carolina dog, you know what they’re talking about. The dogs are said to have showed up around the 1950s in eastern North Carolina. Why the slaw? See previous barbecue entry.

The beauty of coastal N.C. seafood cookery is the simplicity threaded through every preparation, fancy or casual. Stuffed shrimp ranks as a special-occasion dish, and, certainly, the summer’s waning days are worth homage.

This time of year, brown shrimp skimming the Atlantic peak in size, up to 9 inches long. Blue crabs are their biggest and fattest, too.

Large enough to butterfly, these late-season brown shrimp make the ideal package for fresh blue crab meat. Brown shrimp have the richest flavor of all North Carolina shrimp species. Their buttery goodness contrasting sweet crab means hardly any seasoning is required, an instruction always delivered by coastal natives. They don’t like anything sullying seafood’s flavor, even if it’s a five-star worthy recipe, for which stuff shrimp qualifies.

I like crab-stuffed shrimp the minute they emerge from the oven wearing bits of crispy brown trim. Their lusty aroma is more savory than all the smoke at a pulled pork cook-off. Carefully placed on a hot grill, stuffed shrimps turn out equally regal.

Kudos to the unknown person who first decided to put what basically amounts to a crab cake inside a jumbo shrimp. My guess is the cook was somewhere in Louisiana.

Crabs were too much trouble for the ancients. Romans preferred shrimp roasted, fried or boiled, maybe with a honey glaze, although cooks did prepare shrimp cakes.

British colonists brought portion-stretching crab cakes to the American colonies. The cakes were especially popular along Chesapeake Bay, where crabs were so plentiful fishers considered the crustaceans a nuisance clogging seines.

America’s shrimping industry took off in Louisiana in the mid-18th century. A hundred and fifty years later, blue crabbing became a thing in the Gulf of Mexico. Ultimately, Louisiana would host the world’s largest blue crab fishery, and New Orleans became known as one of best places to eat on the planet.

The list of ingredients is short for any worthy stuffed shrimp recipe. The devil is in the time it takes to butterfly the shrimp and pick stray shells from crab meat.

“Backwards butterfly” is the term I use to describe how I prep the shrimp. I’m finicky about how stuffed shrimp look. I like the shrimp to stand tall, with their tails curled over the crab cake mound. That requires carefully pulling out each shrimp’s vein without slicing open the back along the curve. Grabbing the vein is a slippery operation, but the good news is you’re dealing with jumbo shrimp, just eight or 10 to the pound. Four or five stuffed shrimps per person is an ample serving.

Once the vein is out, I butterfly along the inside curve, starting with a shallow cut at the tail end and sliding a paring knife in a little deeper as I move toward the head.  I fan out each shrimp, and then plop on a generous spoonful of crab filling.

I blend the crab meat with lemon zest, fresh parsley, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and/or horseradish and a smidgen of oh-so-finely minced red pepper for color. I prefer Duke’s mayonnaise and an egg white to bind the mixture rather than cracker meal or fine dry bread crumbs, but I may add a filler to help hold the mixture together if necessary. I never add salt or black pepper.

If you have a crab cake recipe you like, use it.

All this can happen several hours before cooking the shrimp. Once arranged on a baking sheet or in a covered container, the stuffed shrimps may be refrigerated or frozen until it’s time to put them into the oven or on the grill.

Yes, you could wrap stuffed shrimp in bacon or spoon a creamy sauce like béarnaise over the cooked stuffed shrimps, but you’d mask summer’s essence, a crime during these fleeting days.

Stuffed Shrimp

2 pounds jumbo shrimp (8- to 10-count)

1 pound unpasteurized blue crab meat, lump, claw or a combination of both

2 tablespoon minced parsley

1 tablespoon minced red bell pepper

2 teaspoons lemon zest

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce or horseradish

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

Dash of hot sauce

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 egg white

Butter or vegetable oil

Lemon wedges.

Peel the shrimp, leaving the tails intact. Devein, butterfly and refrigerate the shrimps.

Pick stray shells from crab meat. Lightly toss in parsley, red bell pepper and lemon zest. In a small bowl, blend together Worcestershire sauce or horseradish, Dijon mustard, hot sauce, mayonnaise and egg white. Stir lightly into crab meat.

Grease a large baking sheet with butter or vegetable oil. Shape a tablespoonful of the crab mixture into a small ball and place on a single shrimp. Curl the shrimp’s tail over the crab filling. Stand the shrimp, tail up, on the baking sheet. Continue with remaining shrimp. At this point, the stuffed shrimps may be covered and refrigerated for several hours.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake the stuffed shrimp uncovered in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes, until the shrimp are pink and the crab meat is heated through. Alternately, cook the stuffed shrimp on a fine-mesh or foil-lined grate on a hot, covered grill.

Serve stuffed shrimp with lemon wedges.

Serves 6 to 8 people.

Source: Liz Biro

To Learn More

• N.C. shrimp species
• Crab cake recipe

SOUTHPORT — Recipe for a perfect crab cake: Lots of blue crab and no fillers.

That’s the formula I hear recited most often when conversation turns to crab cakes. Seems everyone I talk to up and down the North Carolina coast agrees that no amount of blue crab meat molded into a disk and sautéed until golden deserves even the slightest hint of breading, or anything else for that matter.

Yet, crab cake after crab cake wadded with soggy bread crumbs or cracker meal, flecked with red bell pepper and asserting too much Old Bay, Worcestershire and lemon pepper keeps coming from restaurant kitchens. The ultimate insult? A side of tropical fruit salsa.

Down in Brunswick County, Pelican Seafood husband-and-wife owners Tony and Jeanne-d’arc Wehbe start their crab cakes by hand-picking every tiny bit of shell from fresh, unpasteurized North Carolina blue crab meat. They shape that meat and only that meat into an inch-thick, burger-size cake. Panko bread crumbs coat each patty that Tony Wehbe gently lowers into a deep-fryer.

The crab cakes’ light, crisp crust is like the delicate entryway into the sweetest depths of juicy, tender euphoria. As Jeanne-d’arc Wehbe likes to say, “Every bite is a delight.”

Lots of people who visit or live along North Carolina’s southeast coast ask me “Where is your favorite seafood restaurant?” I always point them to Pelican Seafood Market & Restaurant on Oak Island’s mainland. The place is tiny and no-frills enough to qualify as a seafood dive, but excellent seafood and friendly service rank it several notches up.

Décor is basic. A seafood market and small grocery that stock the restaurant anchor one side of the azure, white-trimmed building that used to be a house. The restaurant flanking the other side resembles a tidy home cleared of furniture to make room for Pelican’s handful of tables, chairs and a simple order counter.

An open kitchen between the two spaces is where the Wehbes lightly bread and fry not just crab cakes but fish, shrimp and shellfish, sometimes with a distinctive Pelican signature. I once had bone-in flounder cut horizontally into strips, cornmeal-coated and fried. I picked up each length as I would fried chicken.

The Pelican grill, sauté and steamer stations get as much of a work-out as the fryer. Tony Wehbe’s secret, minced-garlic sauce recipe goes on fire-roasted oysters served on the half-shell. He tosses wahoo into noodle stir-fry. Skewered grilled scallops come alongside grilled fresh lemon and avocado tomato salad.

My favorite dishes here hail from or are inspired by the Wehbes’ homeland, Beirut, Lebanon. I crave the CCC Shrimp. Curry, cumin and coriander – “and other spices,” Tony Wehbe adds with a wink – season sautéed, jumbo, heads-on shrimp. Fried wahoo or grilled black sea bass land on or with a bed of Jeanne-d’arc Wehbe’s tabbouleh. She also prepares hummus, hand-rolled stuffed grape leaves and labor-intensive Middle Eastern sweets like walnut-filled cookies named maamoul.

The couple have asked me many times to come for their version of the Lebanese specialty, tahini-coated fish. I’m not sure why I haven’t taken them up on the offer.

Call ahead if you’re looking for a particular dish or Middle Eastern items. The menu changes with what’s in season and what the Wehbes feel like cooking – and eating. Trust their appetite.

Tony Wehbe has been cooking since he was a kid. As a boy, he fished the Mediterranean regularly with his father. That’s when Tony Wehbe learned to grill. During Lebanon’s mid-1970s civil war, he operated a vegetable cart. Wehbe stocked enough produce each day to earn a profit and take some home for his family to eat.

“In the war, it was tough times,” he recalled. “You had to do whatever it took to make a living.”

Tony Wehbe’s parents sent him away from war-torn Lebanon when was 18.  He ran restaurants in Los Angles, waited tables in famous New Orleans restaurants and opened his own bar. After obtaining a nursing degree, he continued to cook at home those dishes he had watched chefs prepare.

Jeanne-d’arc Wehbe grew up on her mother’s traditional Lebanese cooking. She was a dentist when she met Tony at a wedding that he had returned to Lebanon to attend. The pair felt an instant connection. Three months later, in 1996, they were married.

Required years of dental school in America to get her license to practice in the United States convinced Jeanne-d’arc to give up her dental practice and start a family. The couple has a daughter and three sons. Tony Wehbe’s job brought the clan to Fayetteville. The mild climate convinced them not only to stay but also operate a seafood market and grocery in their spare time.

Vacations on Oak Island led to a job for Tony Wehbe at the former Brunswick Community Hospital, near Supply. The work was less exciting than his previous surgical nursing gigs. Seeking a challenge, the Wehbes in 2006 launched Pelican Seafood market in that old home that they themselves revamped. They added the restaurant in 2009.

A decade later, the Wehbes remain as giddy as newlywed business owners. In 2011, they opened Pelican Seafood II, in a red barn-shaped building on Oak Island. They post photos daily on Pelican’s Facebook pages. One shows Jeanne-d’arc grinning as she prepares to dress a 50-pound grouper. Smiling Tony shows off a whole cobia. Of course, live and steamed local crabs make it into shots as do those incomparable crab cakes.

“This is a small place, nothing fancy,” Tony Wehbe said, “but I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people say, ‘This is the best seafood I’ve ever have had in my life,’ and that to me, that’s very rewarding.”

Pelican Seafood

• On the mainland: 4332 Long Beach Road, Southport, 910-454-8477
• On the beach: 6235 Oak Island Drive, Oak Island, 910-933-4564                                                  

I probably should own a Kindle, but I don’t. I’m too enamored with cookbooks in my hands. More than 100 volumes line above-cabinet shelves encircling my kitchen. Each time I write a Coastal Review food story, I get to dive into the pages of my absolute favorites. They’re the books about North Carolina and Southern cuisine. They bring me home and, oftentimes, to tears of joy and nostalgia. Sometimes, I keep one on the pillow next to me when I turn out the lights.

Each of these books helps tell the story of Eastern North Carolina cooking. They are essential reading for anyone who loves our coast.

Coastal Carolina Cooking

This list is in no particular order, except for this book. Each time I read it, which is often, I can clearly visualize North Carolina home cooks stew-frying a mess of spots and sweet potatoes. I can hear their brogues and dialects, see the sunlight brightening their happy kitchen curtains.

In the 1980s, authors Nancy Davis and Kathy Hart traveled from Currituck County south to Brunswick County to document traditional cooks and their recipes. Coon stew, baked shad roe and molasses popcorn are the kinds of old-fashioned recipes they gathered. The slim tome contains no photographs. Pencil sketches depict each cook. A map delineates their locations. You won’t find contemporary restaurant dishes, just down-home family food. “They can hardly believe you are asking about their recipes,” Davis and Hart write, “ones that were passed along from a relative or neighbor and are as much a part of coastal tradition as boat building and net making… They told us about their families, their traditions, their way of life – all in the context of food.”

University of North Carolina Press, 1986. $19.99

Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas

Back in the early 1970s, North Carolina Sea Grant tapped Carteret County cooks to develop seafood recipes that would help fishers and seafood processors market the catch. In Morehead City kitchens, author Joyce Taylor directed the mostly women. The crew had a lifetime of knowledge about traditional North Carolina seafood cookery, but they also developed and tested new ideas. Sea Grant published their efforts in this seafood bible in 2003. It’s not just full of recipes. How to select, handle, clean and store seafood as well as various cooking methods such as poaching, broiling, clarifying butter and flaking fish are included. Recipes range from classic crab cakes and shrimp bisque to contemporary orange-marinated snapper. The work of these cooks continues and is documented regularly at the Mariner’s Menu blog, marinersmenu.org

University of North Carolina Press, 2003. $29.95

Island Born and Bred

Harkers Island has changed rapidly over the past decade or so. Development has placed new residents between longtime family homes. Island traditions are preserved in this part cookbook, part history of Harkers Island. Each chapter starts with a different aspect of island life: early settlements, churches, schools, legends, traditions, change. Find recipes old and new, some illustrated with simple sketches: a shoreline baptism, men building wooden boats, Nettie Lewis Brooks in a bonnet sitting on the “pizer,” the name islanders gave their porches. The book contains a dictionary of island expressions. Recipes speak to family meals built on the local bounty and eventually modern conveniences. Chicken and pastry, baked bluefish with onions and potatoes and raisin pie share space with cheese balls, three-minute barbecue sauce and no-bake banana pudding.

Harkers Island United Methodist Women, 1987. $1995

Holy Smoke

North Carolina’s coastal plain is not all about seafood. “One friend from down east has gone so far as to claim that barbecue is the great sacrament of our people,’” authors John Shelton Reed, Dale Volberg and William McKinney write. They trace barbecuing all the way back to the Old Testament and then through to Native Americans grilling fish in the 1500s on the Carolina coast and finally to the pulled pork eastern and western North Carolinians argue over today. Vintage menus, photographs and interesting quotes – “All differences are made as nothing by the benign influence of the barbecue” – pepper the text along with recipes for real-deal sauces, side dishes and desserts.

University of North Carolina Press, 2008. $30

Outer Banks Cookbook: Recipes & Traditions From North Carolina’s Barrier Islands

While everyone else rushes to the Outer Banks for sun, fun and fishing, author Elizabeth Wiegand is drawn to its food. No matter if she shares a recipe from home or one from a restaurant, Wiegand promotes local ingredients, namely seafood fresh from North Carolina waters. The opening chapter tracks Outer Banks culinary history, starting with Native Americans who dried oysters near Buxton before explorers arrived and continuing to modern-day tourists craving grilled mahi tacos. Find recipes for the Humble Hatteras clam chowder that has sustained so many generations of fishers right up to new American grilled wahoo with charred tomato, chipotle and guajillo sauce. The key lime pie visitors crave at popular Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café in Nags Head is in there, too.

Globe Pequot, 2008. $20.

Southern Food

John Egerton chronicles the South’s food ways in what may be the best book on the subject. When I’m researching recipes, say Muscatine jam or hushpuppies, I find them paired with history, factoids and commentaries that put the dishes into perspective. The opening chapter, Pass and Repast: A Gastronomical View of the South, roves through time and various places, helping readers discover how their local food traditions took hold. I most relish the short selections in the margins. Black-and-white photographs and quotations from books, articles, poets, journalists, authors and ordinary people humanize the text and echo the emotions you feel while reading.

University of North Carolina Press, 1987. $32.95

The Southern Heritage Cakes Cookbook

American revolutionists rejected the royals, and Southerners made the layer cake their crown. That’s how it seems to me. Coconut cake, carrot cake, red velvet cake, pig pickin’ cake, no Eastern North Carolina groaning board is complete without layer cakes weighing down one end of the table. The mile-high frosting delivery systems sweeten many of this book’s pages. My copy dates to the original 1983 printing. Its age enhances old photos and the vintage advertisements for eggs, cocoa and other baking essentials slipped between recipes. The narrative and anecdotes tell the history of cakes. In times long past, layer cakes were one of the few creative outlets for many Southern women. Hence the reason we enjoy so many delightful varieties.

Oxmoor House, 1983. Prices vary at Amazon.com

I’m looking at the remnants of a long-ago garden plot on Portsmouth Island. Under the weight of summer heat and humidity, the sand is dry, white dust. Surely it is too thin to grow anything nourishing.

“What would they have raised here,” I ask my guide. Collards for sure, he says. Figs, corn, beans, Irish potatoes.

My imagination stops at “Irish potatoes.” It flickers, struggling to make the connection to the rich potato salad I see at every summer fish fry, pig pickin’ and church supper I attend on the N.C. coast. Those potatoes that wrestled harsh barrier island conditions 100 years ago? Cooks stewed them with game, seafood, vegetables or cornmeal dumplings. The potatoes were key to keeping stomachs full.

Today, we like to boil those Irish potatoes and then fold them with chopped hard-boiled eggs into heaps of silky store-bought mayonnaise. We eat so much that we chastise ourselves for consuming all the carbs, calories and cholesterol that come with potato salad.

But it tastes so good, especially when the potatoes and eggs are still a little warm just after you’ve folded in the mayonnaise and maybe a heaping spoonful of sweet pickle relish. The side dish is the perfect mild and creamy counterpoint to a salty, crispy fried fish or a spicy, vinegary pulled pork.

The potato salad I’m talking about is a fairly new recipe in the New World. Spanish explorers brought potatoes from South America to Europe in the 16th century. By the end of the 1500s, French and German cooks were serving cold potatoes dressed with oil, vinegar and salt.

Potatoes were introduced to American farmers in the early 1800s. North Carolina potato farming began later in the century, according to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Sandy, coastal soils suited the same potatoes grown in Ireland, white potatoes with brownish skins. Coastal Carolina natives still refer to them as “Irish potatoes.” To this day, most of North Carolina’s potatoes are grown in coastal counties, mainly Beaufort, Camden, Carteret, Currituck, Hyde, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Tyrrell, and Washington.

Picnic-style potato salad we recognize took hold in the second half of the 1800s. Cooks could have made their own mayonnaise with oil and egg yolks. Down South, perhaps they substituted boiled dressing, a tangy-sweet flour-thickened custard containing egg yolks, milk and vinegar that was often used to prepare coleslaw.

Whichever sauce cooks chose didn’t matter much by the start of the 20th century. In 1907, Amelia Schlorer of Philadelphia began selling her own mayonnaise in her family’s grocery store. Around the same time, Richard Hellmann featured his wife’s homemade mayonnaise in salads at his New York City deli. It was so popular that by 1912, Mrs. Hellmann’s mayonnaise was mass marketed.

Commercial mayonnaise got around, as did easy potato salad recipes that came with it. You don’t see mayonnaise-based potato salad recipes mentioned in connection with Portsmouth Island. The place had no electric refrigeration to store jars of mayonnaise once they were opened. We relish what the islanders missed and with every forkful of potato salad thank them for taming those poor, sandy soils.

Potato Salad

6 medium Irish potatoes, peeled and diced

Water

2 teaspoons salt

1 small onion, diced

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

1 stalk celery, chopped, or 1 teaspoon celery seed

1 bell pepper, finely diced (optional)

¾ cup mayonnaise

2 tablespoons prepared mustard

¼ cup sweet pickle relish

¼ teaspoon sugar

In a large pot, cover potatoes with water. Add salt. Boil potatoes until tender and drain. In a large mixing bowl, combine hot potatoes, onion, eggs, celery and bell pepper. Add mayonnaise, mustard and relish. Combine. Season with pepper and sugar. Serves 6 to 8.

Source: Evelyn Styron of Hatteras for “Coastal Carolina Cooking” (University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Styron worked for more than 30 years as a restaurant cook, according to the book.

Old-fashioned Southern Boiled Dressing

1½ tablespoon all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon dry mustard (see cook’s note)

2 egg yolks

Dash of hot sauce

2 tablespoons of butter, melted

¾ cup milk (see cook’s note)

¼ cup lemon juice or apple cider vinegar (see cook’s note)

Pinch of Cajun seasoning or cayenne

Pinch of salt

Cook’s note: Mary Foreman, the author of this recipe, says, “I used Colman’s spicy dry mustard. Can use pretty much any vinegar to your liking — red wine, champagne, apple cider or regular white vinegar, and adjust to taste, using more or less. Use 1¼ or more cups of milk to thin for use as a salad dressing. Whisk in until it reaches desired consistency. Depending on the use, fresh herbs or other seasonings can also be added, such as celery seed for coleslaw, or parsley for potatoes.”

Procedure: In a small saucepan, whisk together the flour, sugar and dry mustard until there are no lumps. Add the egg yolks, hot sauce, butter, milk, and lemon juice or vinegar; whisk in well. Place over a medium to medium high heat, and whisking constantly, until mixture is smooth and thick like a custard. Do not allow mixture to actually boil. Remove from heat, whisk in a pinch of Cajun seasoning or cayenne and salt, and set aside to cool, then store in refrigerator. Makes about 1¼ cups. Excellent for coleslaw, vegetable and potato salads.

Source: Mary Foreman at deepsouthdish.com. Former is the author of Deep South Dish: Homestyle Southern Recipes (Quail Ridge Press, 2015). Follow her on Twitter @DeepSouthDish or SouthernRecipes on Facebook.

Strawberry shortcake means different things to different people. A tender, split biscuit layered with sugar-macerated berries and fluffy whipped cream is recognized as the traditional version. Growing up on the N.C. coast, I never once encountered such a shortcake at restaurants or homespun gatherings.

My father’s shortcake was three, sponge-cake layers high. Fanciful swirls of fresh whipped cream frosted it in the regal style of rococo coffee shops in his native Hungary. Divine as it was, his creation in my childhood mind could never be true strawberry shortcake.

There’s probably no such thing as a traditional strawberry shortcake. This is the version many in the South know since childhood: berries in a biscuit. Photo: Fine Cooking

Here’s a version using cake instead of a biscuit. Photo: Taste of Home.com

A glazed donut cut in half and filled with berries and cream is a decadent substitute.Photo: SteakandPotatoKindofGurl.com

The real thing required a trip to the IGA or Piggly Wiggly for packages of little, yellow, bowl-shaped vanilla sponge cakes. All the moms, aunts and grandmas I knew spooned syrupy, sugar-soaked, fresh berries into the cakes’ wells and then plopped on a big dollop of that glorious, white chemical amalgamation known as Cool Whip.

Supermarkets still sell those cakes and tubs of Cool Whip, but my strawberry shortcake preferences lately lean pound cake. I like two buttery, orange-scented, slices – at least an inch thick, please — practically hidden under fresh, sliced berries so sweet they need no sugar. Stratus clouds of cream whipped until just frothy should nearly cover the whole thing.

I don’t believe a “proper” strawberry shortcake exists. The dessert seems more a matter of personal taste. Each version is authenticated by the nostalgia to which it is linked.

King Henry VIII’s chef, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, was the first to serve strawberries and cream. The combination appeared at a 1509 banquet. Food historians identify the original strawberry shortcake as being a sweet cake or biscuit leavened with baking soda or baking powder. The recipe’s English predecessor, dating to the late 1500s, involved an unleavened base, meaning I may rearrange my personal tastes with pie crust rounds cut the size of sugar cookies if I’d like.

The classic biscuit-style recipe was widespread by the mid-1800s, spurring strawberry shortcake parties at berry harvest time. That’s when Tar Heel cooks parade out their various strawberry shortcakes. When it comes to strawberry production, North Carolina ranks third in the United States. Nearly all of the 20-plus million pounds of fruit is sold fresh, directly to consumers at pick-your-own farms and local markets and grocery stores where, more often than not, those little yellow cakes, pound cakes or angle food cakes are stocked nearby.

That North Carolina lacks a single, identifiable, authentic strawberry shortcake makes it reasonable to assume strawberry farming is new to North Carolina. Conversely, farmers here have been cultivating strawberries on the coastal plain since at least the mid-19th century. Production did not spread across the state until much later. In the early 1900s, the Chadbourn area of Columbus County in the southern coastal plain, was a major strawberry-growing area. During a single day in 1907, the region sent forth 180 boxcars full of berries.

The Lady Thompson strawberry bred in North Carolina in the late 1800s caused a stir when it arrived on the scene. It was believed to be the largest strawberry in cultivation, with reports of one growing to 7 inches in circumference, reported the April 1895 issue of Meehan’s Monthly: A Magazine of Horticulture, Botany and Kindred Subjects. The berry fetched 30 to 40 cents a quart, more than double the price of other varieties.

“The fortunate man who got it first grew 10,000 quarts an acre, and cleared $13,000 on it in one season,” Meehan’s Monthly quoted O.W. Black, a N.C. strawberry plant tester, as saying.

“Of 100 or more varieties on my place, it is the most independent of drought and the quickest and fastest grower of all.”

Lady Thompson didn’t hold court for long. As evidenced by Black’s diverse test fields, strawberry plant development progressed rapidly from new variety to new variety, each descendent outdoing its parents in one way or another. Researchers today continue to create new breeds, providing so many strawberries for so many different strawberry shortcakes.

No matter the modern domesticated strawberry, its lineage traces to North America’s native Fragaria virginiana. That wild berry’s range touches nearly every U.S. state. A cross between Fragaria virginiana and Chile’s native Fragaria chiloensis birthed the first garden strawberry in the 1750s in Brittany, France. Previously, Europe’s own woodland strawberries were transferred to gardens.

Tiny but tasty, Fragaria virginiana was the strawberry Native Americans were gathering when colonists arrived in the New World. The June moon was known among Algonquin tribes, which inhabited eastern North Carolina, as the Strawberry Moon because the month was the time for gathering wild strawberries, according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Many different tribes used strawberries for food and medicine. They ate strawberries fresh in season. Sometimes, they blended crushed berries with cornmeal for baking into strawberry bread. Or would that more accurately be called “shortcake?”

Corn Muffin “Strawberry Shortcake”

3 quarts hulled and quartered strawberries

½ cup sugar

2 teaspoons lemon juice

1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 cup yellow cornmeal

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

1/4 cup honey

1 large egg

1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1 cup heavy whipping cream

¼ cup confectioner’s sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Prepare strawberries: In a medium bowl, blend together 2 quarts of the strawberries and sugar. Set aside. Reserve the remaining quart of berries in a separate bowl.

Prepare muffins: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease the 12 wells of a standard muffin pan.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In another bowl or large measuring cup, whisk together the milk, honey and egg.

Pour the liquid all at once into the flour mixture, stirring quickly and gently until just combined. Once everything is barely combined, stir in the melted butter; there’s no need to beat it, just stirring is fine.

Scoop the batter into the prepared pan, filling the muffin cups about 2/3 full.

Bake the muffins for 15 to 18 minutes, until one of the center muffins tests done: the top should spring back lightly, and a toothpick inserted into the center should come out clean, or with just a few moist crumbs clinging to it.

Remove the muffins from the oven, and as soon as you can safely handle them, transfer them to a rack. Serve warm, or at room temperature. Store tightly wrapped at room temperature for several days; freeze for longer storage.

Prepare whipped cream: Blend together whipped cream, sugar and vanilla. Whip by hand with a wire whisk or use an electric beater set at medium speed to whip cream until soft peaks form.

To serve: Spilt one muffin. Place bottom half on a dessert plate. Spoon about ¼ cup of berries and ¼ cup whipped cream over muffin. Balance top half of muffin over berries and cream. Spoon on more berries and their juices and more whipped cream. Garnish with the fresh berries that were not blended with sugar.

Continue with remaining muffins.

Makes 8-10 servings.

Source: Muffin recipe based on a recipe from King Arthur Flour

A cast-iron frying pan as big around as a hug sits in a dark storage room where I keep seldom-used kitchen things. Dust covers its broad basin, too big for any stove. Rust reveals neglect. I have no plans to give it away.

Like many cast-iron pans that lay forgotten in cabinet corners or that remain Southern cooks’ favorite workhorses, this one has a story.

In the mighty tome titled The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford University Press, 1999), author Alan Davidson writes that in medieval kitchen scenes, “many a cauldron bubbles in exotic settings: devils tend their pots over the fire of hell in a Last Judgement (sic), cooks stir their dinner on the back of a whale at the bottom of a page. A stew pot perched on the head of a rakish monster in a manuscript border, a stumpy little man carved on a bench end, clutching a ladle as long as himself …”

No doubt the cauldrons are cast iron. Animal skin soup pots that 14th century Scottish and Irish cooks fashioned on three posts above fire could never have taken the devil’s heat.

Cast-iron cooking vessels date at least to China’s Han Dynasty (25 B.C.E. to 220 C.E.). Exactly when cast-iron cookware first appeared is “impossible to say,” Theodore A. Wertime argues in The Coming of the Ages of Steel (University of Chicago Press, 1962). The ancient Chinese narrative history Zuo zhuan contains a 512 B.C.E. account of the casting of iron cauldrons. Bronze casting of pottery apparently led to casting in iron, Wertime concludes.

While wild medieval depictions of cauldrons “suggest that cooks were exceedingly cross and their kitchens in perpetual uproar,” by Davidson’s account, writer Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat in her History of Food (Bordas, 1987) also finds that “The pot-bellied cauldron full of delicious things simmering away has a prominent place in folk memory.” Despite “sinister concoctions” (“Medea boiled old King Pelian himself”) Toussaint-Samat surmises that “the image of the steaming pot on the table has remained the symbol of tranquil family pleasures in the Paradise Lost of childhood.”

That’s where my cast-iron frying pan’s story resides.

Summer weekends when I was growing up were reserved for fishing Onslow County’s New River in and around Sneads Ferry. My family didn’t grab poles and picnic away the day. Dad was outside usually by sunrise hitching up the boat trailer. It carried a small, green, fiberglass skiff we jammed with coolers, nets, clamming bags, snacks, drinks, a bottle of cooking oil, a bag of cornmeal and a small cast-iron frying pan.

Once on the water, Dad maneuvered the boat to a small island. We unloaded quickly, allowing my father time enough to set off and drop a gill net in his favorite fishing area during early morning hours. While he was gone, we gathered wood and spread a blanket under a low-hanging, live oak.

As nets filled with fish, we dug clams. Dad might head to the beach for some surf casting or drag the shrimp trawl. Close to lunchtime, he and one of us kids would pull up the gill net. Back on the island, Mom steadied a makeshift grill over a small fire. The minute Dad returned, we were dressing spots and croakers that Mom would dust in cornmeal and then fry in that cast-iron skillet set over the flames.

You never forget the flavor of fish so fresh. It ruins you for any other fins, no matter how reputable or expensive the restaurant. The flake, the juiciness, the essence of a life spent swimming in the mild salt of brackish waters infuses each bite. My brother and I called it “fresh meat.” The cast-iron skillet in which the fish fried wasn’t even an afterthought for us. A giant cast-iron frying pan back home got all the glory — although sometimes the cast-iron kettle Dad hung over a fire for simmering the stews of his native Hungary snatched the big dog’s celebrity.

Because cast iron retains heat and withstands open-flame cooking, it has outfitted kitchens across many cultures. Settlers and pioneers brought their cast-iron pots and pans to the New World. Inexpensive and durable cast-iron cookware dominated American kitchens until the early 20th century, when lighter, cheaper aluminum was introduced. Non-stick skillets and chef-endorsed stainless steel pots and pans further eroded cast iron’s place in U.S. homes.

Down South, however, many cooks clung to their cast-iron skillets, precious pans passed down through generations. Along the N.C. coast, they are the optimum vessels for frying and “stew-frying,” the latter referring to browning vegetables or flour-dusted seafood or game birds in pork fat and then simmering them until tender. The heavy pans keep cooking oil evenly hot without burning it. Oil absorbed into the iron creates a non-stick surface that rivals Teflon. Black cast iron shows no soot marks from a fire.

Cast iron gives thin cornmeal griddle cakes the perfect brown. A cast-iron skillet full of biscuits or cornbread hot from the oven at one time warmed family tables nearly every day.

By late afternoon on New River, my family’s coolers were loaded with fish and shrimp, and the boat was weighed down with at least 1,000 clams. We sold some to wholesalers, but we carried a good bit home to stock our chest freezer to share with neighbors.

Everyone who lived nearby knew to look for the little green skiff on its trailer rolling into the Biro driveway just before sundown. As soon as we unloaded our catch onto the concrete patio out back, the neighbor from two doors away was by to purchase bluefish no one else wanted, not even the seafood markets. Strangers who heard they might find fresh clams on our street showed up in hopes that Mom and Dad might have a hundred or so to spare for a good price. Neighborhood wives came to help gut fish. Curious kids unlatched coolers to marvel at the two eyes flounders wore on just one side of their heads.

Once the boat was washed, the coolers stowed and a whole bunch of fish dressed, Dad sparked the day’s second wood fire, this one in the huge brick grill he had built in the back yard. Then he pulled out his grand cast-iron frying pan, the one that whispers today from my storage room. It was a point of pride almost greater than the two-foot long flounder Dad once caught. I have no idea where he acquired the pan. We marveled at its circumference. Your perception of size changes from the time you’re a child to adulthood, but the frying pan appears as huge today as it did when I was a 8 years old.

Wearing a grin I recall as pure sparkle, Dad fried dozens of cornmeal-dusted fish, or sometimes his specialty beer-battered filets. Eight or 10 of them at one time bubbled in hot oil. Meantime, my mother and her friends pulled together potato salad, steamed corn, sliced fresh tomatoes, cucumber salad, fried okra, or whatever they picked at local farms. Miss Todd, the matriarch among them, contributed cornmeal griddle cakes cooked in her favorite cast-iron skillet.

We gorged ourselves, all 15 or so of us, nearly every summer weekend. At the kids’ table, my brother, the seven Melson kids who lived next door and I pulled what seemed to us like giant chunks of meat from the bones of small spots and croakers. “Fresh meat,” one of us would cry each time we boasted a hunk of fish at the end of our white plastic forks.

When the eating was done and us kids were chasing fireflies while grown-ups pontificated in lawn chairs encircling lemon yellow mosquito candles, the cast-iron frying pan slowly cooled to the touch. Before the night ended, Dad poured the leftover oil into an empty coffee can for use during the week. We didn’t mind the fishy flavor on our fried potatoes. Finally, holding a soft cloth or paper towel and with the gentlest hand, Dad wiped the pan clean and put it away until the next fish fry.

People ask me all the time how to season a cast-iron pan. “You rub it with oil and put it in the oven right?” “Should I use olive oil?” “Do I need to season it over and over again?” “Is a pre-seasoned pan better?”

And they want to know how to care for cast iron. Many fear they’ll ruin a skillet or that it will absorb deadly bacteria if they don’t wash it in soapy water. “Couldn’t I just rinse it with bleach?”

Their questions are endless. Books thick and thin have been written on the subject – with appropriate cast-iron recipes. Line after line of advice is available online. My answer to queries is much briefer and always the same: Buy whichever kind of cast-iron pan you like. Steel wool away the rust in any old pan you inherit. Wipe clean with plain water. Immediately fry a mess of fish. Invite a bunch of people to come eat. Repeat the process over and over again, weekly if possible.

Never give your cast-iron pan away.

Learn More

• How to season a cast-iron pan
• How to remove rust from a cast-iron skillet
• Seven myths about cast-iron pots

We get so caught up in the big picture of eastern North Carolina food that we sometimes forget the important, little things.

What would our famous pulled pork be without that splash of red pepper vinegar, our biscuits without molasses, our steamed oysters without a few drops of Texas Pete?

I was reminded of the little things we take for granted recently when I interviewed celebrity chef Carla Hall. The co-host of the afternoon ABC show “The Chew” hails from Nashville, Tenn., so it wasn’t long before we were deep into our Southern drawls talking home cooking.

When I asked Hall if she knew about cornmeal dumplings, she went speechless and stared at me with her mouth agape. “If you do cornmeal dumplings on a pot of collards, that’s very old-school North Carolina where I come from,” I told Hall.

In an instant, she grabbed both my hands as if I had just saved her soul. “I’m totally going to do that. When you see it on ‘The Chew’ I’ll give you credit,” Hall said, serious as she could be.

I, of course, don’t deserve the credit. Historians believe cornmeal dumplings date to the boiled cornbread of Native Americans. Corn was their single most important food crop. When colonists arrived in the New World, Native Americans taught them how to grow and use corn.

Cornmeal dumplings are gut fillers, surely a way to extend humble rations in lean times of days past and present. Along the N.C. coast, cooks have long dropped the dumplings into game and seafood soups, stews and chowders. Nowadays, they taste good even when you’re not pinching pennies.

Like Hall, I was surprised the first time I encountered a pot of stewed collards dotted with cornmeal dumplings. I was at a meeting of state-level marine fisheries managers. They were gathered for a potluck dinner at a tiny eastern Carteret County volunteer fire department.

I’d lived on the N.C. coast, in Onslow County, most of my life, but had never seen cornmeal dumplings. In North Carolina, they show up more often right along the coast. One of the women in attendance, a local who worked in the state marine fisheries office, looked at me like I was nuts when I asked “Are those potatoes?” She couldn’t imagine anyone never before having seen cornmeal dumplings on a pot of collards. They are that common in central and northern N.C. fishing villages.

“If you want to stir up a controversy in coastal North Carolina, just ask a group of cooks how to make the ‘best’ cornmeal dumplings,” wrote authors Nancy Davis and Kathy Hart in the book “Coastal Carolina Cooking” (The University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

Recipes call for all cornmeal; one half cornmeal, one half all-purpose flour; or two parts cornmeal and one part flour, about one cup in all. To that, cooks add a touch of salt and about a cup of liquid, usually water or cooking liquid from whatever soup or stew is on the stove. Sometimes, a little fat is added, maybe butter or shortening, but leaveners such as baking powder or baking soda are never included.

The disk-shaped dumplings, often about 2 inches in diameter and ½ to 2 inches thick, may be shaped individually by hand. Alternately, some cooks form the dough into a log and slice off dumplings. They most often drop the dumplings along the edge of the pot or rim a pot of collards with cornmeal dumplings, where they steam without stirring in the last minutes of cooking.

When are the cornmeal dumplings done? You can almost hear a family matriarch reply, “Well now that depends?” If they’re small and thin and dropped in conch stew, maybe five minutes. If they’re thicker and topping collards or simmering in squirrel stew, maybe 20 minutes. All depends on what you’re cooking and how you like your dumplings. The best way to find out, of course, is by testing and tasting.

Cornmeal Dumplings

2 cups of cornmeal

1 teaspoons salt

½ to 1 cup of water

In a mixing bowl, combine cornmeal and salt. Add just enough water to hold the mixture together. Shape into small patties or cake. Drop around the edge of chowder 15 minutes before serving.

Source: Eloise Pigott of Gloucester, N.C., for “Coastal Carolina Cooking” (The University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

“Easy beast,” I said to chef Kyle Lee McKnight shortly after I met him in 2010. The local foods movement that had been gaining momentum nationally since 2000 was just catching on in Wilmington. McKnight was blasting restaurants that claimed to serve local foods but really weren’t.

McKnight had caught my eye some months earlier on Facebook. I noticed him chastising another chef for using strawberries out of season in North Carolina. McKnight wasn’t exactly gentle.

I interviewed McKnight not long after that at the hugely popular downtown Wilmington restaurant where he worked. The place was packed more than a few nights a week. Summer tourist season was especially crazy. Still, much of the produce that the kitchen used was grown locally. A lot of it McKnight raised on an acre and a half he was farming organically near Carolina Beach. That was the point of my interview with him. McKnight worked the land, harvested the crops and canned, froze and pickled the harvest to help keep the restaurant stocked in winter.

I learned how McKnight commissioned organic farmers to grow what he himself could not produce in large enough quantities. He also sourced happy, free-range hogs for the charcuterie he cured in a secret space tucked between walls near the ladies room. If you fixed your lipstick at a particular sink, you caught the undeniable scent of an Italian salumeria.

McKnight started all this a few years before other Wilmington-area chefs even noticed the local foods movement. I left that interview thinking, “That guy is a beast.”

“I’m really a nice guy,” McKnight has told me again and again over the years. And he really is. That chef McKnight Facebook spanked for serving out-of-season strawberries? He ended up McKnight’s friend, and McKnight shared his farmer and fisher contacts with the guy.

Blunt but polite, serious but passionate, McKnight has what seems like an unparalleled drive among N.C. chefs to not only source local food but help farmers and fishers expand markets for their harvests. Additionally, McKnight has deep respect and appreciation for N.C. food culture, even though he’s not a native Tar Heel.

Born in Germany and raised in Washington, D.C., McKnight has cooked in France, Miami, Argentina, Charleston, S.C., and the Virgin Islands. He grew up vacationing with his family on the N.C. shore. When his mother moved to Carolina Beach, McKnight followed in 2005. Something about the place stuck.

Tour a McKnight menu and you’re bound to find a taste of the N.C. coast down to the S.C. Lowcountry, even now that McKnight helms stoves far from the beach at Hickory’s Highland Avenue restaurant. The dining room seats 145, the event space can host nearly 700 people, but farmers and artisan food makers still carry their bounty directly to McKnight through the restaurant’s back door.

“North Carolina shrimp and grits” has been on the menu since the beginning. Starters include Carolina chowder with bacon, sweet potato, cornbread, black eyes and smoked oyster cream. Crispy fried N.C. oysters arrive with pickled ramp cornbread rouille.

Many chefs and restauranteurs will tell you that acquiring local foods is too spotty and expensive. McKnight not only finds ways to make local food work on his menu, his efforts and cooking have earned Highland Avenue a place among Southern Living magazine’s 2015 list of the South’s best restaurants and McKnight’s charcuterie a Good Food Award. Garden & Gun in 2015 named McKnight among five Southern chefs to follow on Instagram, noting “Plenty of chefs appreciate local produce, but few take it as far as this hardworking chef.”

McKnight still works the line just about every night at Highland Avenue. He clocks well above 40 hours a week between prepping, cooking, making charcuterie and working with the people producing the bounty he uses. Still, he took a little time to talk to Coastal Review about his work.

How does the North Carolina coast influence your cooking?

How does it not? The influence came from being at seafood markets … hanging out around the docks over there by Blackburn (Brothers) Seafood (in Carolina Beach), seeing all the different stuff that came in and (working for Carolina Beach restauranteur) Ralph Freeman. I was 19. We’d have beautiful tuna. We’d have trigger before it got real popular. We’d have tilefish. We’d have sheepshead. But he was always eating, like, sugar toads, or toad fish. Or spots and croakers. You know, what old-timers ate … so I learned a lot about the bycatches. You know, I will always be the proponent for N.C. seafood because I think it’s so much better than anywhere else on the East Coast. There’s just something about the water. The seafood is so much better … I know it’s not in my head. I can taste the difference between two species of fish from two different locales.

Getting that North Carolina seafood to the mountains can’t be easy?

I use a lot of the bycatches, and that’s what I’m really going for. You know grouper is a huge fishing industry in North Carolina, but I think it’s overfished. So, I’m always looking for sheepshead, for monkfish, some of the tilefish. I’ve gotten sugar toads a few times. It’s just tricky getting stuff sent from the coast sometimes. I’m using a distribution company that I have long-time ties with. Some distributors will say, ‘Oh, we’ve got N.C. scallops,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, how come nobody else has N.C. bay scallops, and you’re telling me they’re N.C. bay scallops?’ I’ve been around the coast long enough, and I know the times of year when these seafoods and these fish run. I don’t always have N.C. fish, but I always have N.C. shrimp. And I will be the first one to say that I serve frozen shrimp. They’re not going to come to your plate frozen, but I make sure my shrimp is always from North Carolina. I appropriate deals when they’re in season. I’ll say, ‘Put up six, seven hundred pounds for me,’ and make commitments to people that I’m going to buy this. And 90 percent of the time, I’ll have N.C. crab. And I pay more expensive prices for it, but I do it because that’s what I feel compelled to do for the economy of the coast, just like I buy agricultural products in the area where I am now. It directly affects somebody. It helps their children. It helps pay bills.

It’s not just the coast’s seafood that has influenced your cooking.

No, not at all. You know agriculture, but it’s also the cooking style, honoring some of the traditions that are cooked up and down the Southeast, from the Lowcountry, when I cooked in Charleston, to Wilmington. They’re very similar, the style of cooking, the ingredients they use. It really lends well to who I am as a person, and it enhances my food greatly.

When did you become “the beast?” When did you get into going out of your way to source local food?

I was introduced to it young, when I was (cooking) in Charleston. You know it was the ethical thing to do. It was the way you bought food. And I had many jobs where I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have the ways and means to contact people I wanted to contact. But for me, everything was relationship based. I wanted to know the people that were actually producing or raising or harvesting these food because the love and the care that goes into it, I believe, translates into the taste. The food just tastes better … and it’s about helping and it’s about sharing. I wanted people to know where their food came from, and that there are people and there are faces and everybody deserves a voice.

In North Carolina, it’s illegal for restaurants to buy directly from fishers. How do you cultivate relationship with fishers that then translates into you getting local seafood?

It’s all trust-based. Once you develop a relationship and trust with them (fishers), you can introduce them to the right people, (a wholesaler) who genuinely cares, and these fishermen bringing in X amount of, say, these five different species to the right people that are consistently going to buy and who are going to be honest in telling you (a chef) where it comes from, and then they (wholesalers) can help distribute the product from there.

And you work with farmers in a similar way?

Yep. I’ve gotten meat raised specifically for me by a farmer through a company I’ve consistently bought from, Eastern Carolina Organics, and the pig has been graded out. It’s been N.C. Ag-certified, USDA-certified. If I wasn’t able to take as much as I thought I could take, then I call other chefs to see what they can use, but I try not to over commit ever.

In the first few months you were at Highland Avenue, you started introducing the area to your favorite coastal purveyors, namely Rose Hill organic farmer Herbie Cottle of Cottle Organics.

He’s a guy I beat down about growing lettuce (for me when I worked in Wilmington), and now he’s doing great with it because of his connection with Eastern Carolina Organics. If I was in Colorado, I would probably try to get the man’s produce because it’s that good, and we have that strong of a relationship. And the same with seafood. People ask me, ‘How come you don’t have salmon? How come you don’t have tilapia.’ You know why? Because it does nothing for our state; it does nothing for our fishermen. I buy food from friends, period.

Charcuterie is a serious part of your craft, and your meats have a decidedly N.C. touch. I’m thinking of your recent salami flecked with diced sweet potatoes.

I call it progressive preservation. I want to help my friends out as much as I can. I want to honor the animal as best I can. So if I can make something that has inadvertently been touched by every one of my friends, then I can serve it to guests, who I consider new friends, for me that’s the ultimate way of saying ‘thank you.’ I think that salami is going to end up a signature of mine. Sean Lilly Wilson who owns Fullsteam Brewery in Durham is a really good friend of mine, and he makes a Carver sweet potato lager. So I use that beer. And then, friends of mine up here (in Hickory) who grow the white sweet potato O’Henry, which is my favorite sweet potato, and then I use Beauregard sweet potatoes that were grown by my friend Jamie Swofford in Shelby, and I also use a little bit of Covington sweet potato that was grown by Herbie Cottle. My whole thought was to produce what I would call a ‘North Carolina salami.’”

You’re in the mountains now, but you visit family on the coast regularly. When you return to the shore, what’s the first thing you want to eat?

Well, um, I try to get Britt’s donuts (laughs) and fried shrimp on Ocean Grill’s pier or oysters.

Learn More

• Bigger Restaurants Can Feature Local Food
• Highland Avenue Restaurant
• The South’s Best Restaurants
• Good Food Awards
• Chefs to Follow on Instagram
• Britt’s Donuts
• Ocean Grill

If you’ve lived in eastern North Carolina for any length of time, you know there are two things you must eat on New Year’s Day: black-eyed peas for a lucky and prosperous year and a side of collard greens for added cash.

The peas represent all the coins destined for your pocket in the coming year. The collard greens stand for greenbacks. You could mix the two together for a beans and greens dish, but lots of folks, not just in North Carolina but all over the South, make hoppin’ john.

Hoppin’ john is a dish of black-eyed peas and rice seasoned with onions and bacon, although other pork cuts may be used, say ham hocks, salt pork or fatback. Everyone adds their own spices and seasonings.

Food historians believe hoppin’ john hails from the South’s Low Country region, which runs along the S.C. coast and up into North Carolina’s southernmost shore. Created by Africans, hoppin’ john is related to African pilaus, or rice simmered in a flavorful liquid, a preparation that has been recreated in countries around the world.

From the Low Country, hoppin’ john spread throughout the South. The name may have originated in Louisiana from the French Creole name for pigeon peas, which are similar to black-eyed peas, according to a N.C. State University study guide. The French Creole term for pigeon peas is “pois a pigeon,” which is pronounced “pwah peeJon,” not such a far stretch from how the words “hoppin’ john” sound.

The blend of peas and rice has been called hoppin’ john ever since the early 1800s. What appears to be the first published recipe for hoppin’ john showed up in the 1847 book The Carolina Housewife by Sarah Rutledge.

A good hoppin’ john should be flavorful, without too much meat in the mix. This is modest fare despite its promise of fortune. Never soupy, hoppin’ john’s peas and rice stand apart but are still moist. Start with dry black-eyed peas and the Carolina Gold rice that was grown in the Low Country and up into southeastern North Carolina starting in the late 1600s. Look for it at some supermarkets and specialty markets.

Recipes for hoppin’ john call for sparse seasonings. The peas and the pork do most of the work. That’s not to say you can’t play with the recipe. A little thyme, hot pepper, garlic and bell pepper all work in hoppin’ john. A splash of vinegar at the table is a fine condiment as is plenty of cracked black pepper and a crumbling of pork rinds or bacon.

And who’s to say you can’t go ahead and stir in those greens.

Hoppin’ John

3 pounds small dried black-eyed peas

8 cups water

2 pounds of ham hocks or bacon

2 medium onions, chopped

3 cups long-grain white rice

Salt and pepper to taste

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)

Wash and sort the peas. Place them in a saucepan, add the water, and discard any pebbles or peas that float.

Gently boil the peas with the ham hock and onion until tender but not mushy – about 1½ hours — or until 2 cups of liquid remain. Remove the meat from the ham hock bone and return the meat to the pot.

Add the rice to the pot, cover, and simmer on a very low setting, for about 30 minutes, never lifting the lid.

Remove from the heat and allow to sit, still covered, for another 10 minutes. Remove the cover, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Fluff the rice and peas with a fork and serve immediately. Makes 8 servings.

Source: N.C. State University.

Also on the menu

Our Coast’s Food: Collards

OCEAN ISLE BEACH — Nostalgia and remembrance are important to the holiday season. Typically, we only look back a few generations when we make family plans for Christmas and the New Year. Recently, though, one cook in Brunswick County looked back a little further – to our Colonial past – for a food-centered presentation.

“It’s nice to go back in time and think about food the way our forefathers might have,” said Karen Moshoures. “The bills of fare for Christmas time had meats and vegetables, but not as many sweets as you’d think.”

Ingredients like sugar and spices were rare and expensive. Recipes were unspecific guidelines and were accomplished, without modern cooking equipment, in cauldrons on wood fires.

For the past three years, Moshoures has been the host of local cable channel ATMC-TV’s “The Coastal Kitchen.” The presentation was a part of the regular Tuesday night lecture series at The Museum of Coastal Carolina in Ocean Isle Beach.

“We tend to cover history and we thought this would be a good fit,” said Susan Silk, marketing coordinator for Ingram Planetarium and the museum. “Karen’s programs are popular because they are informative and tasty.”

Moshoures has given other food-related talks at the museum in the past – on topics from seafood to appetizers. But this Colonial Christmas program was an ideal assignment for her. She is a big believer in holiday gatherings and she lived in Great Britain until she was 12, a place that is the root of Colonial traditions in the United States. Although she still travels there on a regular basis and is familiar with plum puddings and English desserts, Moshoures researched recipes and traditions for this lecture for more than a year.

Not all of the recipes turned out well. “I think people back then ate because they got hungry, and not necessarily because the food tasted good,” she said during the presentation.

Still, attendees enjoyed the wassail and cookies she offered served.

There were two resources she found to be helpful: the Colonial heritage programs in Williamsburg, Va., and Old Salem, the Moravian settlement in what is now Winston-Salem. She did include some savory dishes for the program like the Welsh Rabbit (or Rarebit) recipe from Chowning’s Tavern.

“But I love to bake,” she said. So she focused on desserts, including those sweetened with molasses and brown sugar. “I also wanted to include ones that anybody could do in their own homes,” she said.

She tweaked the recipes in her own kitchen in Ocean Isle Beach, where her show is also taped. She and her husband both love to cook and got into the habit of cooking for crowds, sometime 30 or 50 people at a time, when one of their dear friends was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. “We would cook once a week to help keep his friends and family close by,” she said.

Their kitchen reflects that love of entertaining. Moshoures has a stainless steel double-refrigerator and five ovens. It’s right next to the extensive dining room that seats 16 people. Other rooms in the home reflect a love of history, antiques and decorating for the holiday.

“We have always tried to be a place where anybody can come for Thanksgiving or Christmas if you don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said. It’s a holiday sentiment that is timeless.

Colonial Recipes

Apple Tansey

From The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, 1754

“Take three pippins, slice them round in thin slices, and fry them with butter; then beat four eggs, with six spoonfuls of cream, a little rosewater, nutmeg, and sugar; stir them together, and pour it over the apples; let it fry a little, and turn it with a pye-plate. Garnish with lemon and sugar strew’d over it.”

Moshoures Notes: The cook tried three different versions of this dish, using varying modern measurements in place of these ambiguous ones. Although she guesses that the desired result would be apples baked in custard, the results were closer to an egg-ier taste, she said. Pippins were a popular apple, but Granny Smiths work in their place.

Blown Almonds

From The Court and Country Cook, or New Instructions for Confectioners, 1702

“After having scalded and blanch’d your Almonds, let them be stirr’d about in the White of an Egg:  Then let them be put into powder’d Sugar, and well roll’d in it. Having thus ic’d them over once, if you perceive that they are not done enough, dip them again  into the White of an Egg, and afterwards into powder’d Sugar:  At last, they may be laid upon a Sheet of Paper, and bak’d in an Oven, with a gentle Fire.”

Moshoures Notes: This recipe for basic candied nuts works well for modern cooks, too. Use ½ to 1 cup blanched whole almonds, 1 egg white and ½ cup sugar. Try using a finer-grained sugar, but not powdered. Put the sugar on a plate or saucer about ¼ of an inch thick. Lightly beat the egg white. Dip the almonds in the egg white, and then the sugar, and place on a pan. Allow to dry 20-30 minutes and repeat dipping almonds into the egg white and sugar. Bake at 300 degree oven for 15 minutes. You can watch a video of this recipe in a replica Colonial kitchen.

Holiday Wassail

Wassail is a translation of “To your health”

1 cup sugar

4 cinnamon sticks

3 lemon slices

2 cups pineapple juice

2 cups orange juice

6 cups dry red wine

½ cup lemon juice

1 cup dry sherry

2 lemons, sliced

Boil the sugar, cinnamon, and 3 lemon slices together with ½ cup water for 5 minutes. Strain and discard the cinnamon and lemon. Heat (but do not boil) the remainder with the remaining ingredients. Garnish with lemon slices and serve warm. Makes 20 servings

Recipe courtesy The Williamsburg Cookbook

Gingerbread

Several versions of this holiday treat can be found in Colonial cookbooks. Moshoures decorated them with a sprinkling of powdered sugar.

1 cup sugar

2 teaspoons ginger

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup melted margarine

1/2 cup evaporated milk

1 cup unsulfured molasses

3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 teaspoon lemon extract

4 cups stone-ground or unbleached flour, unsifted

Combine the sugar, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda. Mix well. Add the melted margarine, evaporated milk and molasses. Add the extracts. Mix well. Add the flour 1 cup at a time, stirring constantly. The dough should be stiff enough to handle without sticking to fingers. Knead the dough for a smoother texture. Add up to 1/2 cup additional flour if necessary to prevent sticking. When the dough is smooth, roll it out 1/4 inch thick on a floured surface and cut it into cookies. Bake on floured or greased cookie sheets in a preheated 375 degree oven for 10 to 12 minutes. The gingerbread cookies are done when they spring back when touched.

Recipe courtesy Entertaining Ideas from Williamsburg

Mix the fragrance of pine and cedar with that of sweet ’taters, light rolls and cakes baking in the oven of a big ‘ole’ woodstove, topped with a big enamel coffee pot perking on top…you’ve got the “fragrance of Christmas.”

Madge Guthrie, “‘Christmas Was’…John’s Creek, 1930s, from “Remembering Christmas Past” (Seasonal Keepsakes from The Mailboat, 1991)

Christmas is five weeks away, but I can already smell the light rolls in the oven. Some folks along the N.C. coast call them “lightning rolls” or “light bread.” Others say “hot rolls” or “yeast rolls.” I like the name lightning rolls best. My mind plays the words in the melodious brogue of the High Tiders. For generations, they have lived along the state’s central and northern coasts, where this bread is ubiquitous at holiday time. In the chatter of long-ago Christmas morning kitchens, I hear their “i’s” pronounced “oi” as in “Hoi Toider.”

Loitin’ Rolls

I’m neither a High Tider nor a native North Carolinian. I was born in New Jersey. Although I spent most of my life on North Carolina’s southeast coast, my parents were European. Lightening rolls have never been part of my holiday celebration.

My education about these buttery, golden brown yeast rolls baked with a dash of sugar comes from years of reporting about the state’s commercial fishing industry. The many High Tiders with whom I crossed paths readily shared their food traditions. I smell the rolls each year in the weeks before Christmas thanks to vivid memories written in a series of “Seasonal Keepsakes” booklets published by The Mailboat. It’s a journal documenting N.C. coastal life in the words of people who live or have roots along the shore.

Lightening rolls always fascinated me. In the South, a region better known for biscuits and cornbread, how did this yeast bread rise to such prominence, especially in North Carolina’s remote barrier island communities?

(Christmas) Dinner was served as soon as everyone got there and the rolls came out of the oven. Mammy waited last to put them in so they would be nice and hot.

Harriett Whitehurst Kirk, “Christmas at Mammy’s” in Bettie from “Core Sound Memories: The People and Places that Make Christmas Special” (Seasonal Keepsakes from The Mailboat, 1996)

The Romans were the first to make breads comparable to those we know today. They also enriched breads with milk, eggs, spices and sweeteners, producing expensive loaves for the wealthy.

Bakeries abounded in the Middle Ages. Most people couldn’t afford store-bought bread, so they baked at home. Dark or whole-wheat breads were common. Folks preferred white-flour breads for their lightness, flavor and appearance, but the expense of milling white flour made those loaves too costly for the average person.

“White bread was considered as much a luxury as fine handmade cake is today,” William G. Panschar wrote in Baking in America (Northwestern University Press, 1956).

Yeast came from the fermenting barm of wine and beer, not little packages at the supermarket.

Europeans brought their bread baking traditions to the New World. Within a few decades of Jamestown’s founding, commercial bakeries sprang up around city centers. Most settlers, however, lived in rural areas and baked at home. They relied on oven chambers built into fireplaces or Dutch ovens set directly on the coals. Some used “roasting kitchens,” raised boxes with openings placed close to the fire.

“The Colonial housewife was no less a baker then the craftsmen of the bake shops. Indeed, it was generally accepted that the homemade loaf was superior to anything that the baker could turn out,” Panschar wrote.

Well into the 1800s, homemakers apologized to guests to whom they served commercially baked bread.

White loaves were baked throughout the colonies. Southerners preferred biscuits, cornbread and breads hot from the oven.

Roots in Cornwall

Everyone ate in Mammy’s kitchen, taking turns by the menfolks, to women, and the children. As we children would wait for the men to eat, Mammy would sneak some of her huge, crusted light rolls out from the kitchen to us hidden under her apron. They would have a big hunk of butter melting inside where she had cracked the rolls open – a feast for starving young ’uns.

Harriett Whitehurst Kirk, “Christmas at Mammy’s” in Bettie from “Core Sound Memories: The People and Places that Make Christmas Special” (Seasonal Keepsakes from The Mailboat, 1996)

Lightning rolls seem most closely related to Cornish splits from Cornwall, a county on England’s southwestern tip. Similar buns, known as Devonshire splits, come from Devon, immediately north of Cornwall. Early settlers along North Carolina’s Outer Banks were English, Scottish, Irish and Scot-Irish, hence the High Tider population’s lingering English dialect traced to the Elizabethan period.

Splits recipes call for butter, milk and sugar. Cornish splits served with golden syrup and clotted cream are said to come with “thunder and lightning.”

As agriculture flourished in America, wheat was grown and flour mills popped up along the coasts. Soft wheats grew best in Southern climates, as they did in Ireland and England. Those wheats produce low-protein flour that insures the tender crumb mandatory for perfect biscuits. Low-protein flour also makes softer yeast breads. By the early 1900s, Wilmington had at least three companies selling their own brands of specialty flour.

Lighting rolls likely took strong hold along the Carolina coast in the 1900s. Previously, bakers, whether professional or home cooks, had to prepare their yeast starters from scratch. Flours required more sifting to filter out foreign matter. Uncontrollable temperature and humidity could ruin the rise.

In the 1860s, The Fleischmann Co. introduced standardized cakes of compressed yeast to the American market. Dry yeast followed during World War II. It did not require refrigeration, had a long shelf-life and produced more consistent results. Improved milling technology reduced the price of white flour, and shelf-stable shortening replaced butter.

Even with all the advances, making lightning rolls required effort in yesteryear’s remote Outer Banks communities, where everything was delivered by boat and kitchens lacked modern conveniences into the 1900s. Biscuits and cornbread could be prepared in a relative flash. Lightning rolls mandated time. Old recipes call for double and triple rises, making the preparation an all-day affair. Extra ingredients – lard or shortening and sugar – were needed to make the rolls lusher than everyday bread.

Holiday time is when cooks go all out. Perhaps that’s why lightning rolls are so often mentioned in association with Christmas along the banks. The aroma of lightning rolls ready to be pulled from the oven and their steamy softness warming cold hands by the fire on Christmas Day remains a precious memory, even if, as in my case, it is imagined.

Christmas Day at Mammy’s was many delightful things, all of which to make a child happy. Looking back now, I realize it was ‘a time’ that was a gift. We were given the gift of belonging – knowing that we were a part of everything; of feeling cherished – knowing that others had done a lot of extra work to make us happy, and we knew that we were loved.

Harriett Whitehurst Kirk, “Christmas at Mammy’s” in Bettie from “Core Sound Memories: The People and Places that Make Christmas Special” (Seasonal Keepsakes from The Mailboat, 1996)

Lightning Rolls

• 1 yeast cake
• 3 tablespoons warm water
• 5 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 to ½ cup lard or shortening
• Warm water

In a small mixing bowl, dissolve yeast cake in 3 tablespoons of warm water. In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients and add yeast mixture. Cut in lard or shortening. Using hand, work more warm water into the mixture until the dough forms a ball. Let dough rise in a warm place for 2 hours. Knead again until dough no longer sticks to hands. Pinch of small pieces of dough and use your hands to roll them into the shape of a biscuit. Place on an ungreased baking sheet in a warm spot. Cover with a light, soft cloth and let rise until double in size. Bake rolls in a 425- to 450-dgree oven until brown.

“There is an idea prevalent that anybody can cook sweet potatoes, this is a very great mistake, and the many, many dishes of illy cooked potatoes that are placed before me as I travel over the South, prompt me to believe that these recipes will be of value.”

George Washington Carver made this observation during the 45 years he studied sweet potatoes. Some four dozen reports resulted. Many contained those recipes of value, including Thanksgiving’s ubiquitous candied “yams.”

If you’ve ever sat down to a holiday meal in eastern North Carolina, you’ve seen your share of marshmallow-topped candied yams. Cloying, mushy, canned sweet potatoes often bob in rusty, sugar syrup.

Did Carver’s cooking lessons even matter?

Those unappetizing casseroles are especially a shame in North Carolina, America’s No. 1 producer of sweet potatoes — 1.1 billion pounds on 54,000 acres in 2013, a Carolina Demography report at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center found. Most of those sweet potatoes grow in the coastal plain, which provides sandy soils and warm temperatures the tropical plants need to thrive.

Certainly, candied yams should be tender and sweet, a delicious contrast to savory roast turkey and sharp, stewed collard greens on many N.C. Thanksgiving tables east of I-95. Over time, however, candied yams seem to have lost some dignity. It’s hard to imagine dark, soupy, marshmallow-coated candied yams are in any way related to the version British Revolutionary War Gen. Charles Cornwallis adored so much that old church and junior league cookbooks list recipes for Cornwallis Yams.

First, a clarification. Candied yams are not really yams. In America, the term “yam” is used to denote a softer variety of sweet potato. A true yam is a drier, starchier root native to Africa and Asia. The sweet potato we see on holiday buffets originated in South America.

Tubers from the wild plant that spawned today’s sweet potatoes were found in a Peruvian cave inhabited before 8,000 before the common era, according to the Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford University Press, 1999). Cultivation began during the last centuries B.C.E., spreading the sweet potato to Mexico, the Caribbean and by the 13^th and 14^th centuries across the ocean to Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand.

Columbus in 1492 found natives eating sweet potatoes when he landed in what is now Haiti. Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1540 saw Native Americans growing sweet potatoes in present-day Louisiana and Georgia.

Europeans took the sweetest varieties home. Sweet potatoes grew well in temperate southern Europe, especially Spain. From there, explorers carried sweet potatoes to the Philippines, where the Portuguese spread the root vegetable to India and the East Indies. By the 16^th century, sweet potatoes were in China. Two hundred years later, they were in Japan. Slave traders brought sweet potatoes to Africa, where they started replacing the yam as a major carbohydrate-rich food source.

Virginia colonists were cultivating sweet potatoes by the mid-1600s. The crop was especially important during the Revolutionary and Civil wars. It grew quickly underground, hidden from marauders.

Discerning historical sweet potato recipes from old white potato recipes is difficult. Europeans called them both “potatoes” until the 1740s, a Library of Congress article titled “A Sweet Potato History” said. Candied sweet potato dishes may have originated in 16^th century Europe, but candied yams as we know them down South are mostly American, as evidenced by Carver’s and many other candied sweet potato recipes published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, “A Sweet Potato History” determined.

How did we get from fresh, baked sweet potato slices Carver recommended layering with butter and sugar in a casserole to the gooey, marshmallow-crowned candied yams served today? The transition seems to have started with late 18^th and early 19^th century sweet potato pudding recipes. Mashed sweet potatoes blended with milk and spices were baked under an egg white topping.

By the 1850s, France was selling marshmallow candy, www.foodtimeline.org found. Marshmallow mass production arriving in the late 1800s turned the treats into penny candy for kids in early 20^th century America. Marketing and improved manufacturing moved marshmallows into home kitchens.

“In 1917, the marketers of Angelus Marshmallows hired Janet McKenzie Hill, founder of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, to develop recipes for a booklet designed to encourage home cooks to embrace the candy as an everyday ingredient,” Saveur magazine reported in 2011. The booklet contained “the first documented appearance of mashed sweet potatoes baked with a marshmallow topping.”

A year later, a candied yam recipe, billed as especially adapted to the South, appeared in The Barrett Co.’s “Sweet Potatoes and Yams,”  a guide to growing, selling and using sweet potatoes. The booklet advised that a sweet potato “that has a candied appearance after baking, as though it has been dipped in cane syrup, is ideal for the Southern market.”

However you choose to candy and cap your sweet potatoes this holiday season, select fresh, N.C. sweet potatoes and treat them with care. Look for firm, smooth, unbruised sweet potatoes. Small and medium-size sweet potatoes tend to be less starchy. Store them in a cool, dark place, but never the refrigerator (cold temperatures may cause sweet potatoes to become bitter), for no more than two weeks.

“And just so you know, sweet potatoes and marshmallows are not married,” the N.C. Sweet Potato Commission has noted at its website. Chefs agree. They might top candied sweet potatoes with nuts, herbs, granola, cornbread, parmesan cheese, bread crumbs or, heaven forbid, nothing at all. Some recipes suggest adding roasted chestnuts, crumbled bacon, chipotle chilies, lemon juice, orange zest, garlic, mushrooms, cranberries or dried apricots to the sweet potatoes.

Tabor City chef and former restaurateur Jim Smith, a regular winner in his hometown’s N.C. Yam Festival Cookoff, likes a streusel rather than marshmallow topping. He might add nuts, cayenne or tart apples to his sweet potatoes to temper their saccharinity. Smith is just as likely to stir in Marshmallow Fluff. Tinkering with “candied yams” is fine, he said, as long as the casserole stays somewhat sugary.

“It’s something sweet you can eat,” Smith said, “but you can eat it during a meal, so it’s a treat.”

Contemporary Candied Yams

Three pounds of sweet potatoes.

Glaze:
⅓ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
⅓ cup honey
2 tablespoons bourbon
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon freshly ground ginger
½ of a single chipotle chili in adobo sauce, mashed to a paste

Streusel topping:
½ cup light brown sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
¾ cup toasted pecan pieces

To finish:
½ cup fresh or dried cranberries
¼ to ½ cup miniature marshmallows

Prepare the sweet potatoes: Peel then cut sweet potatoes into ½-inch thick slices. Put potatoes in a large pot of lightly salted water. Bring to a boil. Boil 5 minutes. Drain potatoes and cool.

Prepare the glaze: Combine brown sugar, honey, whiskey, cinnamon, ginger and chipotle chili in a small, heavy saucepan over moderate heat. Stir mixture until sugar is dissolved.

Prepare the streusel topping: In a large bowl, whisk together brown sugar and flour. Cut in butter until mixture is crumbly. Stir in cinnamon, salt and pecans.

Prepare the casserole: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 1½- or 2-quart shallow baking dish. Lay rows of slightly overlapping potato slices in baking dish, starting at one end of the dish. Spoon glaze evenly over potatoes. Sprinkle potatoes with streusel topping and fresh cranberries. Bake dish in oven for 50 minutes, or until potatoes are tender and topping has browned.

If using marshmallows, remove casserole from oven after baking dish for 40 minutes.

Sprinkle with marshmallows, return casserole to oven and bake another 10 minutes, until marshmallows are lightly browned. Allow finished casserole to sit 5 minutes before serving.

Makes 6 servings.

Source: Liz Biro

Cornwallis Yams

6 medium sweet potatoes
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ cup butter
3 eggs
½ cup crushed pineapple
1 cup sugar
½ cup grated coconut
1½ cups milk
More grated coconut for garnish
Boil sweet potatoes until softened. Peel and mash. Season with cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter. Beat eggs and add to potatoes. Combine with remaining ingredients. Pour into a greased 9-by-13-inch pan or a 3-quart casserole.

Bake in a 350-degree oven until light brown, about 1 hour. Top with a sprinkle of grated coconut. Serves 10.

Source: This recipe from the former Hillsborough Colonial Inn was provided by N.C. Sweet Potato Commission.

Johnny cakes, hush puppies, corn pone, corn muffins. Fluffy and yellow. Thin, crispy and almost white. Baked in a pan, steamed as dumplings atop a pot full of collards, poured into corn-shaped molds or fried in a cast iron skillet. Cornbread has seen it all.

Cornbread started changing not long after Native Americans introduced their version to New World colonists. Algonquins used the word “apan,” meaning “baked,” when they prepared their simple combination of ground corn, water and salt. The blend was boiled, cooked on hot rocks or wrapped in leaves and baked.

Apan led to the term “corn pone.” From there, the original Native American cornbread that sustained early New World settlers went in various directions.

Seeking something richer, the British added milk and eggs. Flour and eventually leaveners were mixed in to produce a lighter texture.

Despite the South’s famous reputation as having the country’s most insatiable sweet tooth, it was Northerners who preferred sweetened cornbread. Southerners liked their cornbread seasoned with salt, bacon fat and pork cracklings.

Flint yellow cornmeal blended with flour was common up North, white cornmeal stirred with little or no flour down South. Northerners wanted cakey cornbread. Southerners liked it on the crispy side – and oftentimes crumbled into a glass of buttermilk.

How the batter was cooked added to the array of styles. Cornbread baked by a fire might be spread on a propped-up hoe, plank, or stone, Mary Randolph wrote in the 1824 tome “The Virginia Housewife.”

“Each colony, each community, had its own versions and names, a tradition that faded as the iron kitchen range made all hearth cakes virtually obsolete…”

That didn’t stop cornbread’s evolution. Today, fresh jalapenos, cheddar cheese, hot dogs, blueberries, broccoli, pumpkin, fresh basil, roasted peppers, sausage, bacon, zucchini and cottage cheese have all landed in cornbread.

Chef Karen Taylor felt nary a tinge of guilt when she went to tinker with  her grandmother’s cornbread recipe. Taylor adored the family recipe made with buttermilk and baked in a well-greased cast-iron skillet. But something was missing.

“I like the sweet cornbread,” Taylor admitted. “It’s almost like having dessert and having a meal, too.”

At her Taylor Cuisine Café and Catering in Southport, Taylor cubes and toasts that slightly sweet cornbread to make croutons. She lays them on a salad of pecans, fried chicken and mixed greens. Sometimes, Taylor tops cornbread batter with salsa or drizzles it with cilantro oil before baking. She might stir in jalapeno peppers and cheese and then serve the bread with black bean soup.

One of her favorite versions of cornbread comes from a friend who operates a Jamaican restaurant in the Bronx. The fried, sweet, light bread is more like the Italian doughnut called “zeppole,” Ms. Taylor says. She likes to serve it with jerk pork or chicken. “I think the sweetness of it helps you really enjoy a spicy dish.”

Ms. Taylor doesn’t think her grandmother would mind all the cornbread recipe tweaks. Perhaps tolerance of changes is what caused cornbread to endure.

“I see it outlasting all of us,” Ms. Taylor said.

Traditional Southern-Style Cornbread

2 tablespoons Crisco vegetable oil

2 cups coarse yellow cornmeal

1 ½ cups flour

2 teaspoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons sugar, optional

3 large eggs, beaten

2 cups buttermilk

1/4 cup melted unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Put oil in a 10-inch cast iron skillet and place into oven.

In a mixing bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and sugar if using. In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, buttermilk and butter. Combine the dry ingredients and stir just until all ingredients are moist.

Remove skillet from oven sprinkle the bottom of skillet with dry cornmeal. Pour in batter and bake for about 20 to 25 minutes, until golden brown. Serves 8 to 10.

Vernon’s Jamaican Festival

3 cups self-rising flour

1 cup yellow coarse cornmeal

1/4 cup sugar

½ teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg

½ cup evaporated milk

1 stick unsalted butter

1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

A pinch of cinnamon

Ice cold water

3 cups of vegetable oil

Mix dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, beat egg lightly, then stir in dry ingredients. Add milk and water enough to form a dough. Tear off golf-ball-sized pieces of dough and roll them in your hand.

Heat oil in a saucepan to about 250 degrees. Gently drop dough balls into oil. Fry until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Makes about 20 pieces

Jalapeno Corn Bread

2 cups yellow coarse cornmeal

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 ½ teaspoon kosher salt

1 ½ tablespoon baking powder

2 tablespoons sugar

2 large eggs

2 egg whites

1 1/3 cups buttermilk

1/3 cup melted unsalted butter

1 cup corn kernels (can or fresh or frozen (thawed))

1/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese

1/4 cup finely chopped jalapeno peppers (remove seeds if you do not want too spicy)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Grease 10-inch cast iron skillet and place in oven.

In a bowl, mix together dry ingredients. In another bowl whisk eggs, egg whites, buttermilk and melted butter.    Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixtures. Stir until just combined. Gently fold in corn, cheese, and jalapeno pepper.

Pour batter into hot skillet. Bake for about 30 to 35 minutes, until golden brown. Serves 8 to 10.

Source: All recipes provided by Karen Taylor.

MOREHEAD CITY — Growing up on the coast of North Carolina where seafood is bountiful, I’ve grown accustomed to eating my share of fresh local shrimp.  Shrimp are the most popular shellfish in the United States, with shrimp cocktail being one of the most favored ways to prepare them.

As a young child, I learned that shrimp weren’t so welcomed before my time. This surprise came one day when I was eating a shrimp burger with my stepfather, John Betts Jr.

He shared with me his memories of growing up on Front Street in Beaufort and eating shrimp as a child in the early 1940s. His brother-in-law, Charles Davis, owned a fish house and menhaden plant in Beaufort called Charles Davis & Sons. Charles was the person who told my stepdad about shrimp being a nuisance to fishermen.  He said that they were once referred to as “bugs” and considered a nuisance to commercial fishermen when caught in their gill nets.

Shrimp cocktail is a perfect appetizer for gatherings, being easy to assemble and a welcomed finger food at any event, formal or informal.  It first made its debut on American menus in the early 1900s.  Shrimp cocktail is also a healthy dish that is simple to prepare. It can also be prepared a day ahead of time, allowing plenty of time for other tasks when preparing for an event or gathering.

Shrimp cocktail is typically served as an appetizer with a cocktail dipping sauce. The shrimp are typically boiled with herbs, seasonings and lemon slices. Once the shrimp have cooled, I remove the shells, except for the tail, and serve over ice. There are many variations of preparing cocktail sauce, but the two main ingredients are ketchup and prepared horseradish.

When choosing shrimp, I always buy locally caught, fresh shrimp from the N.C. coast. Fresh shrimp are recognized by having firm bodies that are still attached to their shell. You should always avoid shrimp with any sign of odor or pink color.

If you’re planning on preparing the shrimp within a couple of days, the best way to preserve freshness is to place it in a plastic bag in a large bowl of ice in the refrigerator.  To preserve shrimp for a longer period of time, seal well in a plastic bag – you can also fill the plastic bag with water – and freeze.

I purchase different sized shrimp for different types of recipes. When preparing shrimp cocktail, I normally will buy medium to large shrimp. The presentation of shrimp cocktail varies depending upon preference. The shrimp can be served around the rim of a shallow glass, such as a martini or margarita glass, with cocktail sauce poured into the glass. I choose to serve my shrimp over ice in a large serving platter because it saves time by not having to prepare individual servings.

Following is my recipe for shrimp cocktail. Adapt the cocktail sauce to your personal preference by adding more or less of the individual ingredients to suit your personal tastes.

Shrimp Cocktail

Ingredients:

For the shrimp:

8 cups water

1 lemon, thinly sliced

1 heaping teaspoon minced garlic

2 bay leaves

About 4 sprigs Italian parsley

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1-1/2 pounds medium to large shrimp

For the cocktail sauce (yields 1-1/8 cups):

1 cup ketchup

1-1/2 teaspoons lemon juice

½ teaspoon fresh ground pepper

1/8 cup prepared horseradish

1 teaspoon hot sauce

In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, place lemon slices, garlic, bay leaves and parsley in the 8 cups of water and bring to a boil.  Add shrimp and stir well.  Remove from heat and place a tight-fitting lid over saucepan. Allow shrimp to sit for about 10 minutes, or until just cooked through. Drain in a colander and allow to reach room temperature. Prepare cocktail sauce while shrimp are cooling by mixing all ingredients together in a medium bowl. Cover and refrigerate. Once the shrimp have reached room temperature, pick the shrimp from the other ingredients and place in a covered container and refrigerate for at least an hour. Before serving, peel shrimp and de-vein them, if desired, leaving just the tail. Serve shrimp over ice with cocktail sauce.

WILMINGTON — Was it the Cape Fear region’s Brunswick County? Brunswick, Ga.? Brunswick County, Va.? All of them lay claim to the original recipe for Brunswick stew, that steaming mélange of corn, tomatoes, lima beans, potatoes and so much tender, shredded chicken.

Or should that be beef? Or pork? Or a combination of beef, pork and chicken? This is where self-proclaimed Brunswick stew purists roll their eyes. Squirrel is the choice for true Brunswick stew, they say — unless you’ve trapped a raccoon or opossum.

Wait. The debate isn’t over yet.

Some people consider black pepper vs. cayenne pepper. Others like Brunswick stew more sugar-sweet than spicy. Discussions center on soupy or thick. Georgians like Brunswick stew in a bowl; North Carolinians prefer it as a side dish to pulled pork and fried chicken, possibly because Brunswick stew is a way for barbecue houses to use up leftover pork and fried chicken.

Food arguments over regional variations on a single dish usually boil down to, as chef Larry Casey put it, growing up “dirt poor” and making do.

“When I was a kid, we normally put whatever in it,” Casey said of Brunswick stew.

The version Casey serves at his Casey’s Buffet Southern cooking restaurant in Wilmington is hardly the one he grew up loving in New Bern, where he and his cousin, as kids, trapped and sold raccoons to earn money.

“In a (Brunswick) stew, it’s (raccoon) absolutely perfect,” Casey said.

His memories sum up cause for the Brunswick stew debate. Like Casey, many Southerners recall Brunswick stews containing foods their families raised and hunted.

“My mom and my aunts always had tomatoes that had been cooked and canned in the pantry,” Casey said, “as well as corn and green beans, etc., canned in the pantry, freezer. And making Brunswick stew was definitely a means of stretching the protein.”

Turns out, Brunswick stew has always been a humble mishmash of whatever was available.

Historians say Brunswick stew started in Brunswick County, Va. They credit early 1800s slave and hunting camp cook James Matthews. Legend claims he was known for a fine squirrel stew. Matthews slow-cooked the meat on the bone with bacon, onions, butter and a crumbled loaf of stale bread, creating a rich, dense stew.

Matthews’ employer, Dr. Creed Haskins, and Haskins’ relatives living in and around Mount Donum, Va., deemed Matthews’ stew the original Brunswick stew in letters. The correspondences were printed in the 1906 booklet Brunswick County, Virginia: Information for the Homeseeker and Investor, published by the Brunswick County, Va., Board of Supervisors.

Vegetables in Brunswick stew showed up later. No one knows exactly when. Perhaps, it was the batch Haskins is said to have made famous at an 1828 rally for Andrew Jackson. Corn and limas hark to Native American succotash. “It seems safe to say that Indians were making stews with wild game long before any Europeans arrived, and in that sense, there was Brunswick stew before there was a Brunswick,” the late Southern cuisine authority John Edgerton wrote in Southern Food (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

Sacred as “authentic” Brunswick stew is to its fans, recipe tinkering continues.

“Indeed, it would appear that there is not just one secret but even tens of thousands of secrets, at least one for every Southerner who makes the stuff,” author Wilber W. Caldwell wrote of Brunswick stew in Searching for the Dixie Barbecue: Journeys Into the Southern Psyche (Pineapple Press, 2005).

Champion Brunswick stew maker Oren Knicely’s various recipes respect most opinions of what constitutes true Brunswick stew.

The Shallotte resident a few times has won the December Brunswick County Brunswick stew cook-off, usually held in conjuction with the town’s Christmas parade. He also competes in the Brunswick, Ga., Brunswick stew cook-off, but he alters his secret recipe to suit Georgia tastes.

For North Carolinians, Knicely adds smoked pork, brisket and chicken breast in a stew of onions, tomatoes, okra, potatoes, carrots, lima beans and creamed corn.

“When you’re eating it, it’s got just a little bit of sweet then the heat kicks in right behind the heat,” Knicely said.

In Georgia, cooks prefer pulled pork and pulled chicken in a more vinegary, ultra-thick stew.

No matter the recipe, one characteristic is key across state lines. “The paddle you’re stirring with should stand up (in the finished stew) without a problem – freestand,” Knicely said.

Rules and tradition don’t stop N.C. chefs from doctoring Brunswick stew. They may begin with a classic mirepoix  — chopped onion, carrot and celery sautéed together. To that, they might add garlic, herbs, smoky chilies, homemade barbecue sauce and grilled meats.

“Maybe a deconstructed thing, where you have the butter beans and corn with a pork chop, and the Brunswick stew flavors in the background.” Wilmington chef James Doss brainstormed.

The owner of the Port City’s Rx and Pembroke’s restaurants grew up eating Brunswick stew alongside barbecue in the eastern N.C. pulled-pork capital of Goldsboro.

How about a cornbread bowl filled with Brunswick stew, Doss said. “Or maybe with grilled chicken or a grilled pork chop or braised and pressed pork belly, stewed butter beans and fresh heirloom tomato sauce.”

The original Brunswick stew formula may never emerge. Two things are for sure: Different recipes will always stir a fuss, and wondering who is right is a mystery best served with big helpings of Brunswick stew.

“When I was a kid,” Casey said, “I didn’t know anything about it — except we cooked it and we loved it.”

Oh, take me where the sea oats grow

On hillocks of white sand

To happy hours in days of youth

In a place called “Promise Land.”

MOREHEAD CITY — That snippet of poetry by Betty Adams Holt appears on page 78 of the Morehead City community cookbook, A Little Taste of Heaven Since 1857. Readers needn’t know that Promise Land was the name refugees from storm-battered Shackleford Banks, what is now part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore, gave to a neighborhood in Morehead City. Holt’s poem instantly touches something deep inside anyone, something that stirs a certain familiarity with what Holt is talking about. Her words are an example of why this community cookbook stands out from the hundreds of others released in America each year.

Holt’s poem is among the writings, recollections, recipes and local history that Morehead City residents shared for a cookbook so genuine and engaging that Tabasco-maker the McIlhenny Co. in 2008 named it America’s best community cookbook.

Morehead City natives cherish their “Promise Land,” named as such because a small part of the place provided refuge from the harsh life fishermen and their families endured on nearby barrier islands. Storms convinced banks residents in the late 1800s to move to the mainland. Some floated their homes over on boats to an area historians believe is somewhere between present-day 10th and 15th streets in Morehead City.

The closeness of those tight-knit fishing families in a town that was founded a few decades before they arrived remains a Morehead City signature. Time has brought development, industry and out-of-towners. Yet, Morehead City retains a sense of heartfelt community and an enduring love and respect for history and previous generations that is evident throughout A Little Taste of Heaven Since 1857.

Each page is printed on a black-and-white photograph of Morehead City’s farmers market, which is North Carolina’s oldest curb market.

Chapters with the usual cookbook titles of Appetizers, Main Dishes, Seafood or Cakes and Pies open with black-and-white photographs of the town over time and accompanying historical tidbits. Most have to do with fishing. The railroad established the year of Morehead City’s founding in 1857 was named the Mullet Line for its copious fish freights. Seafood remains a major influence on the Carteret County town’s economy.

Fish and shellfish recipes cover 61 pages of the 360-page book. Some are contemporary, like Sonda’s Pan-seared Sesame Tuna. Others hark back to days when folks had to eat what they caught, for example the Stewed Conch recipe that instructs “Use a tea towel to cover the cleaned conch and beat it to a pulp.” That was how cooks years ago tenderized tough, chewy conch.

Readers can glean local food history from recipes and the memories that accompany some of them. Maude Willis’ recipe titled Nana’s Everyday Rolls comes with this anecdote: “Anyone who ever knew Maude Willis knew about her ‘Everyday Rolls.’ We got used to calling them ‘Nana Rolls.’ People who liked collards would always enjoy making a collard sandwich.”

Even the cookbook’s title is a tribute to the past. It comes from the town’s Centennial Jubilee in 1957 when Rhea Goodwin suggested the centennial slogan be “A little bit of heaven since 1857.”

“It seemed only fitting that our cookbook follow that tradition,” the committee of authors wrote about the title.

A Little Taste of Heaven Since 1857 was published in recognition of Morehead City’s sesquicentennial in 2007. Despite being in print for eight years, the tome is evergreen. The pages continue to evoke memories, curiosity and a desire to keep Morehead City’s small-town feel even in the wake of Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Panera Bread and Best Buy landing just minutes from the Promise Land. It is as if by never forgetting, nothing important will change.

“I remember…sitting on the porch on a summer evening, visiting, singing and telling stories,” Diane Davis Willis writes. “Flit guns and smoking oil-soaked rags to chase the mosquitoes away, kick the can under the street light, football on the corner lot, running home when Mother rang the cow bell.”

Daddy’s Stewed Conch

8-10 clean, small conchs, spilt

1 hunk of fatback

Water to cover

1 small bunch of green scallion tops

1 mallet

1 old tea towel

Use the tea towel to cover the cleaned conch and beat it to a pulp. Put it in pot with enough water to cover with the hunk of fatback, and then boil. Add water as it is boiled away until the conch is tender. Make dumplings (recipe follows) and after conch is tender, place dumplings in a ring around the pot on top of the conchs. Cook dumplings the last 10-12 minutes of cooking time. Scatter scallion tops on top just before done.

Dumplings

2 cups white corn meal

½ cup plain flour

1 teaspoon salt

Warm water

Use enough water to stick ingredients together.

Source: A Little Taste of Heaven Since 1857.

Sometimes even before sunrise on Saturdays when I was a child, my family of part-time fishers were on Onslow County’s New River headed to our favorite clamming hole. While one of us kids dug clams with my mother, another of us rode with Dad on a small skiff pulling a shrimp trawl, setting nets or looking for oysters. Once, we lucked up on shallows teeming with bay scallops.

No matter how tired we were at the end of the work day, enough energy always remained to fry up a batch of seafood fritters.

A mountain of the fluffy, fried pillows, golden brown and jammed full of chopped shrimp, scallops or clams, sometimes a combination, teetered on the same platter each weekend. What looked like enough to feed a crowd was quickly consumed by my family of just four.

My Italian mother, who knew little of cooking seafood until we moved from central New Jersey to the N.C. coast, based our fritter recipe on one she acquired from a Harkers Island friend named Roma Nelson Chadwick. Our neighbors were related to Roma, and sometimes we were invited to accompany them to “dinner,” meaning lunch, at Roma’s tidy Harkers Island home. Her small table, covered in the cleanest white cloth I’d ever seen, was a groaning board holding the weight of bread, collards, seafood, sweet corn, fresh tomatoes and, one day, clam fritters.

“What are those?” my mother said, zooming in on fritters that likely reminded her of the delicious things that come out of fry shops known as “friggitorie” in Naples, Italy, not far from her hometown.

Roma described a simple recipe: Stir together water, seasonings and self-rising flour in a bowl. Add chopped clams. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot oil. Fry until browned. Serve hot, cold or at room temperature.

And we did, by the dozens, as coastal N.C. families have done for generations.

I found a recipe almost just like Roma’s in Island Born and Bred, a community cookbook collection of Harkers Island recipes, lore and history. It contained scallops. Another recipe relied on the clams’ own juices rather than water to moisten the batter.

That Harkers Island “high tiders,” the name islanders give to folks born and raised “on the water,” regularly fry seafood fritters is no surprise. Nearly every culture has fritter-type foods, which date to the ancient Romans. The name fritter stems from the Latin frigere, which means “fry.” Some historians think fritters may have been introduced from the Middle East, by Crusaders returning to Western Europe, according to An A-Z of Food & Drink by John Ayto (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Besides being familiar, fritters are a delicious way to stretch food portions during lean times. No one complains about too little meat in a tasty morsel of deep-fried dough.

Roma showed my mother clam fritters. Back home, Mom decided to use the fritter recipe for shrimp and scallops, too. It became my job to make the batter. Even as a kid, I was never required to measure ingredients for this dish. The only instructions that mattered were: 1) Season well (Mom liked plenty of garlic, basil, paprika, salt, black pepper and a touch of cayenne or crushed red pepper in the batter), 2) Make the batter runny, just a tad thinner than pancake batter and 3) Use lots of seafood

I coarsely chopped the seafood, usually raw shrimp unless we had leftover steamed shrimp in the refrigerator.

I have since found various versions of coastal Carolina seafood fritters. Some call for milk, eggs or both. Recipes may contain a little onion or bell pepper, but mostly seasonings are salt and black pepper. It was Mom’s idea to bump up the spice.

Anytime someone in my mother’s neighborhood clique made a new recipe, they shared samples with everyone in the circle. Mom was no different. Before long, we had lots of neighbors stopping by for fritters once they saw our boat back on its trailer in the driveway after a day a fishing.

Eventually, Mom’s friends crafted their own recipe. We called ours “shrimp patties,” as if we had invented something completely different from a fritter. Of course, we hadn’t. When the hot fritters came from the frying pan, someone always mentioned Roma.

Scallop Fritters

2 cups chopped scallops

¾ cup self-rising flour

Salt and pepper to taste

1/3 cup water

Mix ingredients. Using 2 tablespoons of mixture for each fritter, fry in hot oil. Yield 14-16 fritters.

Note: Mix should be the consistency of thick pancake batter mix.

Source: Jan Gillikin for Island Born and Bred: A Collection of Harkers Island Food, Fun, Fact and Fiction, compiled by the Harkers Island United Methodist Women and available at Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center in Harkers Island.

The following recipes require cooks to use their intuition. Exact proportions are not given for some ingredients.

Fried Clam Fritters

1 quart shucked clams

1 medium onion, diced

Salt and pepper to taste

Flour

Gut clams; wash three times, chop fine. Add onions, flour, salt and pepper. Spoon out fritter and fry in heated oil in iron frying pan, until golden brown. Yield 12-15 servings.

Source: Nannie Raye Poole for Island Born and Bred: A Collection of Harkers Island Food, Fun, Fact and Fiction, compiled by the Harkers Island United Methodist Women and available at Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center in Harkers Island.

Conch Fritters

1 quart prepared conchs, ground in food processor

Flour

1 medium onion

1 small bell pepper

1 egg

Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Mix all ingredients, except conchs, to make batter – dicing onion and bell pepper. Add conchs and fry in heated oil until golden brown.

Source: Carmen Koonce for Island Born and Bred: A Collection of Harkers Island Food, Fun, Fact and Fiction, compiled by the Harkers Island United Methodist Women and available at Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center in Harkers Island.

Last of two parts

There are a number of important ingredients in a good fish fry. Let’s run through them.

Good quality fish is probably the most important ingredient. Take time to shop for the right fish with the best, fresh flavor.

To dip or not to Dip: In general, the fish cooks we talked to recommend dipping in a wet mixture of only for certain types of seafood, like fish or scallops, or if you like a thicker crust. Otherwise, it’s a good idea to rinse and moisten the filets with water and shake off, said Nick Wolosuk.

Breading: Try a North Carolina-based seafood breader, such as Moss’ or those from Atkinson Milling Co. or House Autry Mills. You can also try making your own breader. Use the recipe below as a guideline or make your own cracker meal with crushed saltines.  Whatever method you select, go for light seasoning that doesn’t overpower the fish and shake off excess breading.

Oil: This was one of the most widely differing points among the cooks. Some use regular vegetable oil, or peanut oil. Others use soybean oil or even lard, which has the longest tradition in coastal Carolina frying.  For deep drying, canola oil is hard to beat because it’s mild tasting and inexpensive. Butter isn’t a bad choice for gentle sautés. Olive oil, on the other hand, is not a good choice for frying because it will break down and smoke at lower temperatures than will other oils.

Cooking temperature/method: No matter the fat choice, cook the fish at a high temperature, of at least 350 degrees and up to 375 degrees. Most chefs recommend a deep fryer.  Submerging the fish in hot oil will seal the outside a golden brown and produce a flaky, moist inside. You can also pan-fry, but again make sure the temperature is hot and there is ample oil. Colder oil results in soggy, fatty fried fish.

Frost’s Fried Fish

4 fresh fish filets

1-2 cups cracker meal, ground fine

2 eggs, optional

½ cup milk, optional

Peanut oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse fish fillets and shake off excess water. If using the wet dip, mix together eggs and milk in a shallow dish. Place the cracker meal in a separate shallow dish. Salt and pepper the fish, and then dip fish in the egg mixture (if using), followed by the cracker meal. Shake off excess breading. Heat oil in deep fryer to at least 350 degrees. Drop fish pieces in hot oil and fry for about five minutes, or until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with additional salt and pepper and serve. Makes four servings.

Recipe adapted from Norwood Frost and Frost Seafood House.

Seafood Breader

½ cup all-purpose flour

½ cup yellow corn meal

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

½ teaspoon garlic powder

½ teaspoon onion powder

½ teaspoon paprika

Mix together ingredients and store in an airtight container.

Recipe adapted from Original Ocracoke Cook Book.

Pan-Fried Catfish

For those who don’t have a deep fryer, here is a recipe adapted from John T. Edgerton’s classic book on Southern food.

4 catfish filets, each about a ½ pound

Lard, for frying

Salt and pepper to taste

½ cup yellow corn meal

Lemon wedges

Rinse the fish fillets in cold water and pat dry with paper towels. In a heavy iron skillet, melt enough lard, or shortening, to reach a depth of ½ to 1 inch. Rub the fish with salt and black pepper and coat with white cornmeal, shaking off excess. When the fat in the skillet is hot, but not smoking, place the fish pieces gently in the skillet, spaced so as not to touch. Fry for about four minutes, until crisp and well-browned. Turn the pieces and fry on other side to same crispness. Lift the pieces out of the fat and place to drain on paper towels. Serve with lemon wedges.

Recipe from Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History.

First of two parts. 

The enduring appeal of fried fish is evident in its lifelong enthusiasts. Nick Wolosuk of Buxton Seafood, sells fish day after day on the Outer Banks, and his favorite fried fish is still his own recipe. And Andy Gaus has been working in the kitchen at Calabash Seafood Hut for 14 years, but still fires up his Fry Daddy at home on a regular basis.

Frying fish can seem deceptively simple. Take this recipe for Fried Drum from the Original Ocracoke Cook Book as an example: “Cut in pieces, salt and roll in corn meal; fry in hot oil ‘til brown.” That one sentence is the entirety of the preparation instruction. When it’s done right, you might think that’s all there is to it. But when it goes wrong, you wonder what happened. Even though there are few parts, each element – the breading, the oil, the fish, the cooking temperature – is important to the final outcome. Luckily, chats with a few North Carolina professionals are a good way to learn some secrets. Even if they tell you there’s not really that much to it, more questions and answers reveal there is often a specific process for their success.

In general, the rules are fresh fish, light breading, simple seasoning and hot oil.

Lard used to be the frying method of choice for fish. An 1872 Southern cookbook recommends cooking fish pieces in boiling lard. And that was how Stephen Holland learned, as well, when he dated the daughter of the owner of Faircloth’s, the classic seafood house in Wrightsville Beach. “I always had to wait for her to finish work, so her dad told me I might as well learn to cook while I was there,” he said.

After that start, he became the owner of Holland’s Shelter Creek Fish Camp restaurant in Burgaw, a remaining testament to the local popularity of fried seafood. “There aren’t many places like this left,” he said. He still serves thousands of pounds of fish, shrimp and oysters every week, with the help of people who have been with him many of the 34 years he’s run the restaurant that sits on the Northeast Cape Fear River. Holland has since moved from peanut oil to trans-fat-free soybean oil, because so many people are allergic to peanut oil, he said.

Lard is still a part of the recipe at some restaurants, though. Calabash, in the southern part of the state, is billed as the seafood capital of the world, serving up general portions of seafood in a laid-back atmosphere. Lundy’s Lard, a kind that is not hydrogenated, is part of the secret at Calabash Seafood Hut, said Gaus.

The Calabash style started to become well known more than 60 years ago. It’s one that’s emulated at restaurants throughout North Carolina and the South – and been lauded in publications such as The New York Times. The Calabash Seafood Hut, which was established in 1969, has a few other frying secrets, such as using self-rising flour, a simple salt and pepper seasoning and Carnation canned milk. What’s important, Gaus said — and the other cooks all agree — is the temperature. “You want to make sure it’s hot enough,” he said.

“I take my finger, coated with a little water, and test the oil,” said Wolosuk. “When its sizzles real good, you know it’s ready.”

The hot oil helps seal the fish so it cooks from steam and heat, and not oil saturation, which leads to soggy and unappetizing fish.

These professionals all use deep fryers as well. “There’s just more oil in it, so the fish is coated and completely covered,” said Norwood Frost of Frost Seafood House in Salter Path.

It allows for an evenly cooked fish. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years,” he said. “And I haven’t had many complaints.”

Frost also helps address the other issue in frying fish: the question on whether to use a wet dip, such as a mixture of egg and milk, when preparing the dish. Many cooks just rinse fish fillets, pat dry and then coat with a breader. Frost said that’s really all that’s necessary for most fried fish. “You might want to use a dip if you’re frying something like shrimp or scallops,” he said.

Of course, for those that like a thicker coating on fish, the wet dip before the breader is a good idea.

The quality of the fish, whether fresh or fresh frozen, is also more important to these cooks and chefs than the type of fish. Holland often pays specials attention to the paths the seafood industry takes, watching local flounder go to top buyers in Japan and noticing the increase of the price of oysters in the wake of the Gulf Coast oil spill. It all makes him especially careful of his sources, and the taste, of the fish he purchases. Wolosuk in Buxton relies on the seasonal catches to determine what fish end up on his plate. He likes drum and bluefish, and sometimes mahi mahi. There are many options here, just go for excellence, they say.

With good fish, you don’t want to overpower the delicate flavor with a lot of seasoning and spice. That’s why many of these cooks go for salt and pepper, and often little else. You can use many breaders, including cracker meal, but you might also want to look at breading mixes made in state. Wolosuk is a fan of Moss’ Seafood Breader Mix, from Buffaloe Milling Co. in Kittrell. Holland likes the products from Atkinson Milling Co., which was founded in 1757, in Selma. House Autry, based in Four Oaks, might be the most familiar to many fish-fry fans.

Keeping it simple doesn’t mean you can’t experiment. “You want something nice and mild,” Wolosuk said. “But believe it or not, a little paprika does wonders and gives it a really nice flavor.”

Others wouldn’t think of frying fish or seafood without a bit of Old Bay seasoning.

All of these cooks and chefs are quick to tout their credentials – usually in the form of how many hundreds of pounds of fish they fry each week and the number of years they’ve been doing it. So when you get your fresh flounder or spots, take their advice: keep it simple, but pay attention to the details.

Wednesday: Frying fish, step by step

Living on the N.C. coast taught me to love layer cake.

Back in New Jersey, where I was born to an Italian mother and Hungarian father, cake meant fancy European coffee-house style slices. Neatly trimmed, slim layers alternated with barely there butter cream. Frosting was for design, a sophisticated curl of dark chocolate ganache, scallops of hardly sweetened whipped cream.

Down South, our neighbors brought us ultra-tall, jumbo wedges of carrot cake, red velvet cake and a mound of pudding-soft orange cake and Cool Whip frosting they called “pig pickin’ cake.”

The flavors varied. One thing was always the same. Lots of frosting. Lots and lots and lots of frosting. When writer Misti Lee of Jacksonville and I decided to pen a book about Southern layer cakes, Misti, who grew up in Duplin County, put it this way: “The cake is just a vehicle to get the frosting into your mouth.”

Layer cake is my favorite dessert, and anytime I think about a slice, Linda Johnson comes to mind. “Miss Johnson,” as her culinary students respectfully called her (although she talked about her husband often), for years headed Lenoir Community College’s culinary program in Kinston, where I received much of my culinary training.

Miss Johnson was a born-and-bred Southern cook. She made biscuits every day and insisted eggs topped a true eastern North Carolina fish stew.

Her talk of layer cakes most mesmerized me. Once when I interviewed her for a story about Southern layer cakes, Miss Johnson sat at her kitchen table ticking off recipes and cake-baking tips as if she was reading them from a cookbook.

“Pans must not only be greased, but lined with wax paper, then greased again and dusted with flour,” she preached that day, as she had done so many times in class. “Layers should cool in their pans for 10 minutes before being turned onto a rack. When it’s time to frost, the first layer goes topside down on a plate and the next layer, topside up.”

“If it’s a pineapple cake,” Miss Johnson said, “then it’s got to have seven-minute frosting,” named for the time it takes to whip warm sugar syrup into egg whites, thus creating a meringue frosting as soft as the insides of toasted marshmallows.

Miss Johnson was a blend of food science and Southern flair. The science came from the home economics degree she earned at Meredith College and the 30 years she worked as a dietician. The rest she knew by heart. Her mother, aunts and grandmothers taught her how to cook.

“That’s where I acquired my skills in culinary arts,” Miss Johnson said.

At Grandma Smith’s house on the same nearly 300-year-old farmstead in Contentnea where Mrs. Johnson lived with her husband, daughter, two sons and grandson, a homemade sweet was served with every dinner. Aunt Mary Edna’s signature was spiced layer cake with cooked caramel icing. The most enviable treat of them all was Aunt Sudie’s Japanese fruitcake.

“Oh the fruit filling between the layers, between the light sponge layers, was absolutely heavenly,” Mrs. Johnson recalled.

Miss Johnson baked her first cake when she was in third grade. The boxed mix came with its own pan. By the time she was a teenager, everyone knew Mrs. Johnson for her chocolate layer cake with plenty of chocolate frosting and pecans sprinkled on top.

When she landed at Lenoir Community College in 1984, Miss Johnson established baking classes, often drawing on the expertise of her family and telling stories about their kitchens, where fresh milk, churned butter and home-rendered lard were pantry staples.

“There was always dessert at my grandmother’s house,” Miss Johnson said, “She kept cake in the freezer. You’d be able to go in and get a hunk, then you’d keep fanning it, hoping it would soon thaw.”

Grandmother Hart’s crowning glory, in Miss Johnson’s opinion, was angle cake with lemon filling. The white layers, Miss Johnson said, would “disintegrate on the tongue.” The masterpiece was always slathered with seven-minute frosting.

Miss Johnson died in 2009, and I miss her terribly. She was my best teacher of all time. Always encouraging, always smiling, always happy to talk food. Her stories and recipes continue to inspire my articles on Southern dishes. Her layer cake recipes are my go-to formulas. Even when I devise my own recipes, I always keep her definition of a true Southern layer cake in mind.

“A layer cake with a filling and a luscious icing – that’s a Southern layer cake,” she told me. “And it has to be sweet. It has to be ultra-sweet.”

Just like Miss Johnson.

Carrot Cake

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

2 cups sugar

1½ teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 teaspoons baking powder

4 eggs, slightly beaten

3 cups finely grated carrots

1½ cups chopped pecans or walnuts

1½ cups oil

2 teaspoons vanilla

Cream Cheese Frosting (recipe follows)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans.

Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and baking powder. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine eggs, carrots, nuts, oil and vanilla. Beat until well combined. Gradually add flour mixture and beat just until flour is incorporated.

Pour batter into prepared pans. Bake 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center of cakes comes out clean. Let cakes cool in pans on wire racks for 5 minutes. Remove cakes from pans and cool on wire racks.

Arrange one cake layer on a serving platter. Frost top with Cream Cheese Frosting. Cover with second layer. Frost sides and top of cake. Keep cake covered and refrigerated. Serves 12 to 14.

Cream Cheese Frosting

1 8-ounce package cream cheese

1 stick of margarine

1 16-ounce box powdered sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Bring cream cheese and margarine to room temperature. Place cream cheese and margarine in a mixing bowl. With electric mixer on medium speed, cream together cheese and margarine. Gradually add powdered sugar and lemon juice. Mix well. Stir in nuts. Spread frosting on cooled cake.

Cherished Christmas Cake

When Linda Johnson’s son Louie celebrated his eighth birthday, he flipped through an old cookbook and selected a recipe for vanilla layer cake with fruit filling and white frosting. His mother convinced him the cake should be four layers instead of two and slathered with extra frosting. Louie is an adult now, and his selection has become one of the Johnson family’s favorite holiday desserts.

For the cake:

1 cup butter

2 cups of sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 cup milk

3½ cups self-rising flour, sifted (see cook’s note)

8 egg whites

For the filling:

1½ cups golden raisins

1½ cup chopped red candied cherries

1½ cups chopped pecans or walnuts

1½ cup unsweetened, frozen shredded coconut

½ cup sherry

12 egg yolks, slightly beaten

1¾ cups sugar

¾ cup butter

½ teaspoon salt

For the frosting:

1½ cups sugar

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

½ cup water

4 egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla

Cook’s note: Mrs. Johnson liked to save a little time by using self-rising flour “whenever possible” for cakes, but she sifted the flour three times to achieve the light texture of cake flour.

Prepare the cake: Grease four 8-inch cake pans, line bottoms with wax paper, then grease and flour pans. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place butter in mixing bowl and cream using mixer set at medium speed. Add sugar and continue beating until mixture is light and fluffy. Add vanilla to milk in measuring cup. Alternately add flour and milk mixture to creamed butter, beginning and ending with flour.

In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold egg whites into batter.

Spoon batter into prepared pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool cakes in pans for 10 minutes on wire racks. Remove cakes from pans onto racks. Remove wax paper from cakes and cool cakes completely.

Prepare filling: Combine raisins, cherries, nuts and coconut in large bowl and drizzle with sherry. Set aside.

Combine egg yolks, sugar, butter and salt in a heavy saucepan. Cook on medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture thickens to coat the back of a spoon. Pour over fruit and nut mixture. Stir well. Cool completely.

Prepare frosting: Combine sugar, cream of tartar and water in a heavy saucepan. Cook over medium-high heat until syrup reaches 240 degrees (soft-ball stage). Meanwhile, beat egg whites until soft peaks form.

When syrup reaches the correct temperature, add it in a slow, steady stream to beaten eggs whites with the mixer running. Continue beating until stiff peaks form and icing is thick enough to spread. Add vanilla toward the end of mixing.

Assemble cake: Place one layer, topside down, on cake plate. Spread one-third of filling over cake. Place next layer topside up. Spread one-third of filling over cake. Place third layer, topside down, over filling. Spread remaining filling over the layer. Place last layer topside up. Frost sides then top of cake with icing.

Makes 12 to 14 servings.

Source: All recipes by Linda Johnson

You won’t find an entry for “collards” inside The Oxford Companion to Food. The alphabetical order where the vegetable would fit into the granddaddy of food encyclopedias asks you to “See kale.”

“Humph,” coastal North Carolinians would say. Kale and collards may be in the same cabbage family, but Tar Heels will tell you collards are not the same as kale. They might say collards should be “the new kale,” since collards taste better than wildly popular kale, especially how Southerners cook collards.

Some of them start by simmering a few ham hocks for a couple hours and then add “a mess of greens” to the pot. Others fry strips of fatback bacon in a big stock pot before adding collards and water. Either way, the monster leaves must be simmered for a couple hours to achieve the tender, dark green, just-bitter morsels and their intensely savory broth known down South as “potlikker.”

Ancient Greeks believed cabbages sprang from the sweat of a nervous Zeus as he was trying to explain conflicting prophecies. Despite collards’ link to the greatest of Greek gods, Greeks didn’t like cabbage. But the Romans did. Collards grew wild along the Mediterranean, and Romans probably spread them around Europe. By the early 1600s, British colonists were growing collards in what became the American South.

The vegetables took well to eastern North Carolina’s sandy soils, growing in fall, winter and spring. Collards don’t mind the cold. Southerners say collards taste best after the first frost. A bit of freeze tempers the vegetable’s distinctive bitterness.

African slaves working in the South created the collard greens stewed with pork that modern diners know and love. Cooks simmered the greens, among the few vegetables they were allowed to grow, with whatever bits of meat they were given, oftentimes pigs feet, ham hocks or chitterlings.

Today, collards are a definitive Southern food, but for the past few years, they’ve been showing up on menus at both casual and fancy restaurants across America. They might be braised with chipotle chilies or cut into thin ribbons and stir-fried with Asian seasonings. I think raw collard leaves make fine wrappers for sliced roast chicken and julienned carrots, cucumbers, jicama and sweet bell peppers, something akin to lettuce wraps.

One of the most popular salads at Lovey’s Market in Wilmington blends tofu and chopped, raw, organic collards and other greens in tamari vinaigrette. Near Wrightsville Beach, Port Land Grille chef Shawn Wellersdick uses words like “jazz” and “adaptable” to describe collards. His famous Redneck Eggrolls are filled with pulled pork barbecue and local collards. Wellersdick serves them alongside mango mint dipping sauce.

When collards are stewing, they send out a powerful aroma. Some people call it a “stench,” perhaps a remnant of anxious Zeus himself. Wellersdick, a Connecticut native, doesn’t mind the odor.

“To me it’s a smell that there’s a meal going on,” he said. “You know you’re gonna’ get supper.”

Collards here in North Carolina are sorta like ACC basketball. Every cook has an opinion about how best to cook them. This video shows a fairly standard Southern method, though we would quibble about adding sugar. Start with fresh collards, especially if picked after a frost, and there should be no need to artificially sweeten them.

Stewed Collards

2 pounds of collards, washed and thick stems trimmed

1/4 pound salt pork, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices (see cook’s note)

½ cup water or chicken stock

1 to 2 tablespoons rendered bacon fat

Sea salt

Crushed red pepper

Pinch of sugar (see cook’s note)

Cook’s note: Salt pork is salt-cured pork cut from the pig’s belly and sides. It is similar to bacon, but fattier and unsmoked. The leaner cuts are called here in the South “steak o’ lean.” Fatback is different from salt pork in that it is unsalted. Salt pork is available at most supermarkets.

Southern cooks might add a pinch of sugar to the collards while their cooking or near the end of cooking to help temper the vegetable’s bitter flavor. You don’t want to taste the sugar, so add pinch and taste to determine if more sugar is needed.

Procedure: Stack collard leaves, roll and slice into 1/2-inch-wide strips. Set aside. Place a stockpot over medium-low heat. Place salt pork in the pot and slowly cook until fat has been rendered and pork is crisp. Remove the meat or leave it in the pot. Add chicken stock to the pan and then the collards. When collards are just wilted, add the bacon grease. Season greens with salt and crushed red pepper to taste. Simmer collards, covered, until tender, about 2 hours.

Serves 4.

Lovey’s Tofu and Greens Salad

1/4 pound extra firm tofu

2 tablespoons tamari

½ pound raw collards, washed and torn into bite-sized pieces

½ pound raw greens, such as kale or turnips, torn into bite-sized pieces

2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar

1/3 cup tamari

1/3 cup olive oil

Fresh ground black pepper, to taste

1 cup thinly sliced red cabbage

Cut tofu into 1/2-inch thick slices. Cover with 2 tablespoons of tamari and marinate in the refrigerator for two hours. Press liquid from tofu. Place tofu on a baking sheet. Bake tofu in convection oven, preheated to 250 degrees, for 1 hour. Set aside to cool.

Place greens in a large mixing bowl. Combine rice wine vinegar and tamari in a medium mixing bowl. Slowly whisk in olive oil. Pour dressing over greens and toss. Carefully mix in tofu. Season with pepper. Refrigerate salad for at least 1 hour. Sprinkle red cabbage over salad and serve.

Serves 4

Flounder, grouper, snapper, mahi and tuna. Call them “The Fab Five Fins.” They’re the fish most people order at restaurants and seafood markets. Chefs and fishermen don’t get it. Ask them what kind of fish they eat and you’ll get a whole different list. The names of their favorites are familiar, but you might believe these N.C. species to be too oily, taste too fishy or look too strange.

One bite might change your mind.

Bluefish

“That’s my favorite fish,” says Royce Potter, a Southport commercial fisherman and seafood market owner.

Lots of anglers love to catch blues. Even the smallest of them put up a great fight on the line. But lots of fishermen toss them back into the water or, even worse, leave them on the beach to rot. The trick is to cook bluefish the day they are caught, Potter says. Wait any longer and the flesh becomes mushy. That’s why blues don’t show up at seafood markets. Potter likes poached filets flaked for fish cakes.

Nellie Myrtle Pridgen’s Fish Cakes

2 or 3 medium blues

2 or 3 medium potatoes

1 stick butter, melted

1 medium onion

Lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and mustard

Poach the fish until it flakes. Use the poaching water to boil the potatoes and onions. Skin and debone the fish. Mash potatoes and onions, and add to the fish with lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, mustard and melted butter. Make into patties or cakes. Put on cookie sheets and freeze. Put butter and yellow mustard on top before frying.

Source: Our State magazine, May 2009

Mackerel

Another sportfishers’ favorite that gets no respect in the kitchen. Naysayers claim oily mackerel are best used for bait. Chef Keith Rhodes of Catch restaurant in Wilmington disagrees. Like bluefish, mackerel are best ultra-fresh to avoid mushy meat. Also, trim off the unsavory dark red meat. Balance the oily flavor with an acidic ingredient such as citrus. Rhodes seasons half-inch mackerel steaks with garlic, jalapenos, fresh cilantro, olive oil and lime juice and then broils them in the oven.

“Delightful!” he says. “White sticky rice on the side. Very simple, very quick.”

Here’s another take on broiled mackerel.

Herb-broiled Mackerel Fillets

4 small Spanish mackerel fillets or king mackerel steaks

1/4 cup margarine or butter, softened

1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

1 tablespoon thinly sliced green onion, including tops

1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon (or 1/4 dried)

1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme (or 1/4 dried)

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/8 teaspoon paprika

Place fillets in a greased, broiler-safe pan, without rack, skin side down. In a small bowl, blend together margarine, parsley, green onion, tarragon, thyme, salt, pepper and paprika. Spread over fillets. Broil about 4 inches from heat until the fish flakes with a fork, about 8 to 10 minutes. Baste once or twice with pan juices during cooking. Serves 4.

Source: N.C. State Seafood Laboratory

Sheepshead

If you’ve fished or walked on a N.C. ocean pier, you’ve probably seen these fish circling the pilings. Sheepshead separate the novice anglers from the pros. Newbies keep dropping hooks near those sheepshead. The fish won’t take the bait. Look closely next time you see sheepshead at the market. Their hard mouths are lined with stubby teeth that crush the crustaceans and shellfish that sheepshead eat. When the fish are circling those pier pilings, they’re eating barnacles. That diet lends sheepshead a sweet, delicate flavor chefs adore. Sheepshead are not as mild as flounder, but not as pronounced as mackerel.

Raleigh chef and restaurateur Ashley Christensen, who owns the capital city’s famous Poole’s Diner, has pan-roasted sheepshead with brown butter and thyme. Broil them whole or cut filets into nuggets and then marinate the pieces for about an hour in the refrigerator. Afterward, dust them in cornmeal and deep-fry the fish to serve with a spicy dipping sauce.

You won’t find sheepshead in many fish markets. If you want a mess of these flavorful fish for dinner, you’ll probably have to go out and catch them. Bridge and pier pilings are favorite haunts because that’s where the crustaceans that sheepshead eat live. Catching them is one thing; cleaning is another. This video shows you how to clean your catch.

Mullet

Hardly a diner heads off to a seafood dinner hankering for jumping, or striped, mullet. Talk about a fish that takes the heat for being too oily. Yet, Swansboro in Onslow County serves hundreds of pounds of fried mullet at the annual Swansboro Mullet Festival the second weekend in October.

Mullet are especially easy to cook on the grill and delicious prepared that way. When you see them at the market, usually late summer to mid-fall, ask your fish monger to filet them but leave the skin and scales intact. No need to marinate these fins before grilling. Simply sprinkle them with your favorite seasoning blend. Try a blend you would use for beef. Place the mullet skin side down on a medium hot grill. As the fish’s oils drip on the hot coals, mullet take on a wonderfully smoky, meaty flavor that may remind you of steak.

Croakers

When spots show up in fall, they are the darlings of anglers as well as fried-fish lovers who flock to coastal N.C. restaurants boasting, “The spots are running!” Croakers receive less attention, but they taste just as good.

Both spots and croakers are members of the drum family. They’re about the same size, usually around 7 inches long and weighing a pound or two. A croaker lacks the spot’s signature, well, spot, that black dot near the gills. Croakers, however, have their own special characteristic: the croaking sound they make using their swim bladders.

The meat is tender with a mild flavor and color. Order them headed and gutted, but don’t ask market staff to filet croakers. The fish are too small for that, but they’re large enough that the meat easily pulls from the bone. Dust them with flour and pan-fry croakers or broil them in the oven.

How should you season them or any fish you’re unfamiliar with? “I tell people lemon, butter, salt and pepper when you don’t know any better,” Motts Channel Seafood owner Gene Long of Wrightsville Beach says, “and a little garlic.”

Years ago, I found myself standing in a Piggly Wiggly check-out line behind the owner of a popular country cooking restaurant in Jacksonville. She purchased just two ingredients: a mound of well-ripened bananas and boxes of Nilla Wafers, leaving no doubt as to what was on the dessert menu that day: ’nana puddin’.

Attend a family reunion, church supper, holiday gathering or funeral wake in eastern North Carolina you’re bound to see a big pan of banana pudding. The soft, sweet custard full of banana flavor melts its typical Nilla Wafer crust as quickly as it does Southerners’ hearts.

Try to forget instant pudding layered with store-bought vanilla wafers and frozen whipped topping. Yes, it tastes good, and it is an approved substitute among many Southern cooks, but it’s not real banana pudding.

Many eastern North Carolinians remember their grandmothers’ banana puddings as homemade baked custards wearing meringue crowns. The dessert is kin to British milk puddings of the 1800s.

Early in America’s history, importing bananas from the faraway tropics to American shores was an expensive undertaking. Around the 1870s, two American entrepreneurs focused on shipping bananas from the Caribbean to Boston, New York and New Orleans. A decade later, banana recipes showed up in American cookbooks. By the early 1900s, many listed banana pudding, a dessert that satisfied Southern sweet-tooths.

Around the 1950s, quick recipes using convenience products replaced meringue-topped, homemade banana puddings. After all, lots could go wrong with the old recipes. The custard might be soupy, the meringue spongy. Cooks embraced instant banana pudding in packages that required simply adding milk and stirring before pouring the mixture over packaged vanilla cookies lining a pan. The garnish? Cool Whip, of course.

Nowadays, easy banana pudding recipes rule, but every now and then, it’s nice to compromise with a past-meets-present version. Top it with fresh whipped cream instead of meringue if you’d like.

Old-fashioned Banana Pudding With Custard and Meringue

For pudding:

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

Dash of salt

3 egg yolks

1 3/4 cups milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

6 ripe bananas, sliced

About 18 vanilla wafers

For the meringue:

4 egg whites

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

6 tablespoons sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Prepare pudding: In a double-boiler over simmering water, mix sugar, flour and salt. Beat egg yolks and combine with milk. Add yolks and milk to sugar mixture, stirring constantly to blend well. Cook uncovered, stirring frequently, for 10 to 15 minutes, until mixture thickens. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

In a Pyrex loaf pan, spread one-third of the cooked custard. Top with one-third of bananas, then one-third of vanilla wafers. Repeat for two additional layers or more, if ingredients permit.

Prepare meringue: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixing bowl, beat egg whites until frothy with an electric mixer. Add cream of tartar. Continue beating until the whites stand in soft peaks that fall over when the beater is removed. Then beat in the sugar a tablespoon at a time. After all sugar is used, beat in the vanilla.

Assemble pudding: Spread meringue over the pudding, covering the entire surface and the edges of the pan. Bake for about 15 minutes or until meringue is slightly browned. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Serves 4 to 6.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

If someone on the North Carolina coast asks you if you want a “pamena” cheese sandwich, you’ve hit gold.

“Carolina caviar” and “southern pate” are other names for the preparation you are about to receive, assuming you are in your right mind and said yes to the offer.

“Pamena,” is southern for “pimento” as in “pimento cheese.” The recipe has gotten downright uppity at restaurants, supermarket cheese counters and the home kitchens of foodies who can’t let classics rest. In my mind, no version matches the South’s simple blend of mayonnaise, Cheddar or hoop cheese and sweet red peppers named pimento. Old-timers still call the combination “pamena” cheese.

I’ve seen pimento cheese containing fresh garlic, Jarlsberg cheese, Chinese hot mustard, ground ancho chili and wasabi. One recipe I found suggested a mix of Velveeta and Miracle Whip on tortilla chips instead of the old-fashioned pimento cheese sandwich on white bread.

Well, bless their hearts (translation: they have no idea what they’re doing).

Many a mama has made pimento cheese in eastern North Carolina. Tubs of old-fashioned pimento cheese are sold in country convenience stores and old-school grocers like Piggly Wiggly. A pimento cheese sandwich remains a quick, tasty, nourishing lunch for farmers, fishermen and road workers.

A lot of pimento cheese is found east of North Carolina’s I-95 and west, too, but it’s probably not a North Carolina invention.

A German man served beer and cheese spread at his Frankfort, Ky., saloon in the early 1900s. The South’s British ancestors are famous for potted cheeses. Some research claims that the first pimento cheese was like the stuff you buy in those little Kraft jars, all cream cheese and sweet red peppers prepared and packed in a factory.

Well, bless their hearts.

Southerners may have been inspired by all the marketing that surrounded early commercial pimento cheese in jars. If they were, I think they made pimento cheese better. They grated some of that big round of hoop cheese you still see in N.C. country stores and mixed it with sweet red peppers that grew so well in the South. Homemade dressing or the South’s famous Duke’s mayonnaise held it all together.

However it came about, pimento cheese is ubiquitous in the South and now more famous that those early commercial versions. At 95-year-old Robert’s Market in Wrightsville Beach, hundreds of pounds of true pimento are sold each week. You’ll find Robert’s pimento cheese at supermarkets like Harris Teeter, too.

Years ago, when the Robert’s spread was made by the loving hands of Mary Shepard, I talked with her about the recipe.

“You can’t have it,” Shepard said.

The secret formula is former market owner Eva Cross’ old-fashioned recipe, Shepard said. All Shepard would tell me about Robert’s pimento cheese was “it’s the real thing,” a mix of “the right mayonnaise,” good cheese, pimentos and “maybe a little something else.”

Shepard was well familiar with “the real thing.” The Brunswick County native grew up on a farm, where she learned to make pimento cheese from her mother, who she figured learned it from her mother.

Shepard wouldn’t give me that recipe either. She said she would pass it on to her children, although she didn’t have the recipe written down.

“I just know it by heart,” she said.

Old-fashioned Pimento Cheese

Based on my chat with Mary Shepard, I developed this recipe. The trick to pimento cheese is getting the correct ratio of cheese to peppers to mayonnaise. The mixture should be soft enough to spread but not so soft that it runs out the sides of your white bread sandwich, untoasted, of course. You may serve it on crackers, preferably Ritz. Bless my heart, I’ve even spread it on fried pork skins.

1 pound hoop cheese or sharp Cheddar cheese, orange not white

1 7-ounce jar chopped pimentos

Tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper or ground black pepper, to taste

1⁄2 to 2/3 cup Duke’s mayonnaise

Finely grate cheese and place in a large bowl. Gently stir in pimentos and Tabasco sauce or pepper of choice. Fold in mayonnaise. Stir until smooth, but do not mash. Mixture should have noticeable bits of pimento. Refrigerate three hours or overnight. Makes about 3 cups.

Source: Liz Biro

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

In the mid-1800s, Portsmouth Island’s heyday, nearly 700 people lived on the dot of sand, marsh and maritime forest between the mighty Pamlico Sound and the powerful Atlantic Ocean. Residents endured fierce storms, little fresh water and harsh growing conditions.

Yet, they considered living in such a beautiful place a blessing, and they celebrated their good fortune at Christmas.

Portsmouth Island, Core Banks, Shackleford Banks, Diamond City. These barrier island communities are long gone, but their holiday traditions ring in the hearts of islanders’ descendants now scattered among Carteret, Pamlico, Hyde and Dare counties.

Families celebrate on Dec. 25 but also on Jan. 7, a date called “Old Christmas.” The latter holiday traces back to the ecclesiastical Julian calendar that American colonies refused to abandon after Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 adopted the Georgian calendar.

No matter the Christmas date preferred, holiday time was always precious. Stories of past festivities are retold and recreated year after year.

Christmas meant faith and togetherness. Islanders cooked holiday meals with each other, sang carols, attended church programs and told the story of Christ’s birth on Christmas Eve. Presents were usually simple, homemade gifts – a cornhusk doll or a hand-stitched shirt. After gifts were opened, islanders walked to friends and relatives’ houses to share the day’s joy.

“Everybody loved Christmas,” the late Jesse Lee Babb Dominique recalled in 2004 at age 78.

“Everybody.”

The last person born on Portsmouth, Dominique lived on the island in the 1930s and ’40s. Back then, Dominique’s mother went into the woods to cut the family’s cedar Christmas tree.

“The yaupon bushes were filled with red berries at Christmas time, and my Aunt Elma used to decorate with yaupon,” Dominique recalled. “She’d put it in vases on the organ, at each end of the organ.”

Banks people fished and hunted, grew vegetables and trapped rainwater in cisterns. Sweet potatoes and collards flourished in the sand. “’Tater pies” cooled on planks hung from the ceiling or stretched between two chairs. Men folded the pies in half and ate them for breakfast with mugs of hot coffee.

Sweet and white potatoes landed in seafood and game stews. “You had the traditional oyster roast at Christmas, conch stew, goose, brant, loon,” historian Connie Mason of Morehead City said.

“There was no such thing as turkeys,” according to Karen Amspacher, director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center in Harkers Island. Her father lived in Diamond City, near the Cape Lookout light. “Daddy said he was grown before he ever saw a turkey.”

Cooking began the week before Dec. 25 on Portsmouth, Dominique remembered. Fresh ham, roast chicken, baked beans, potato salad, collards and rolls were on the menu. Seafood was less common, “you see because we had it all the time,” Dominique said.

Cream pies, coconut pies, pineapple pies, sweet potato and mincemeat pies along with pineapple, jelly and chocolate cakes, were all baked in kerosene cookstoves. Although she lived alone, Dominique’s Aunt Elma, nicknamed Addie, baked for a large brood.

“Addie would say, ‘Well I want to make sure if somebody comes in that I’ll have it so I can give ’em a piece of it,’” Dominique said.

“When you went to visit on Christmas you were always asked would you like a piece of pie or a piece of cake. And this is why they made so many. Because people did visit.”

At Dominique’s childhood home, guests arrived at 9 a.m. sharp on Christmas day. Before neighbors joined the family to open presents, Dominique and her sister scurried downstairs to check for “that round ball” in the end of their stockings. If it was there, Dominique said, “you knew he had come.”

The ball was an apple or an orange from Santa. “That was a big excitement to them – fresh fruit – because fresh fruit did not exist (on the island),” Amspacher said. “Ships wrecked offshore, and fruit washed ashore from them. That’s what Santa Clause would bring.”

Shipwrecks brought other treasures that became gifts: silk dresses, fine undergarments, shoes and exotic foods. Catalogs filled out the selection. Mailboats delivered orders.

Folks mostly received stuff they needed. Portsmouth native, the late Dot Salter Willis, once recalled that she so cherished the china-head doll Santa brought her one year that when she dropped the toy and its head shattered, her family conducted a funeral.

“Uncle David, he done the preaching,” she said with a chuckle when she told the story in 2004. “We had a whole service burying that doll and she’s buried somewheres on the Sheep Island,” an island where sheep grazed.

An old-fashioned Christmas spirit continues among coastal N.C. natives. No one lives on Portsmouth Island, but past residents’ descendants trek there to decorate the former community’s church, homes and graves.

Ocracokers attend community holiday gatherings. Walking to neighbors’ houses is still more appealing than opening presents. Homemade gifts and food hunted or harvested along the shore remain part of celebrations.

Karen and Gary Davis of Carteret County’s Marshallberg began camping on Shackleford at Christmas time when their sons, Zack and Ramsey, were toddlers. Karen Davis’ grandmother and great-grandparents lived at Shackleford. Gary Davis’ father camped and fished for a living on Core Banks.

During campouts, the Davises fish for trout and drum, collect shellfish and hunt ducks. They grill the fish, stew the birds with potatoes and cook clam chowder, all old-timey coastal recipes.

The Davis boys have carved gun racks, cutting boards, decoys and hair baubles to give as Christmas gifts. One of the first gifts Zack asked for as a boy was a coil of rope.

“It takes you back to your roots,” Karen Davis said of holiday trips to Shackleford Banks.

“You can smell the marsh and you can see the water and you know you’re back home,” Gary Davis added. “It’s like we’re going home.”

As Salter Willis said back in 2004, “Those who were living off (Portsmouth) usually came home (for Christmas).

 This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Hardly a cook on the N.C. coast gets through the Thanksgiving season without thinking about oyster stuffing.

The name itself evokes visions of plump oysters hidden in a fluffy blend of herbs, breadcrumbs and rich stock, a dish so luxurious it begs a silver dish rather than a place inside the holiday turkey.

Oyster stuffing is a Southern dish that sounds American. Pilgrims found oysters up to a foot long when they landed in the New World. Alas, nothing about Thanksgiving traditions seem to match true history, as is the case with oyster stuffing.

“While Native Americans may have combined oysters with grains and herbs we do not find evidence they used this combination to stuff fowl. Classic American oyster stuffing appears to have been a gift from our European forefathers,” according toThe Food Timeline.

“Culinary evidence suggests the French originated oyster dressings in conjunction with modern cuisine (17th century). This practice was adopted by the English and neighboring countries.”

By the 1700s, American cookbooks offered oyster stuffing recipes, the oldest of which were printed in the southern colonies. These days, oyster stuffing is most common in Cajun and Creole cuisine, where oysters are plentiful and much loved, but with so many oysters along America’s East Coast, the recipe found fans far north, too.

A recipe for “Roast Turkey” in the Boston Cooking School Cook Book that Mrs. D.A. Lincoln wrote in the 1800s directs cooks to add oysters to a stuffing of “soft bread or cracker crumbs highly seasoned with sage, thyme, salt and pepper” and moistened with melted butter, a little water and an egg.

Chopped salt pork is an option, Lincoln noted, but “stuffing is more wholesome without it,” she advised.

Her point is worth consideration. Surprising to diners who try oyster stuffing for the first time is how little flavor and texture the shellfish might provide. Their delicate taste and texture may get lost in the bread and, if stuffed into the turkey, overwhelmed by the bird’s flavor.

That’s not to say oyster stuffing is not due to the lovely oysters that go into it. If placed inside the turkey, the dish is called “stuffing.” If baked in a pan all its own, the recipe is called “dressing,” perhaps a better choice for this elegant dish. Plenty of oysters and their juices given a gentle turn into plain crushed crackers is a special treat never, of course, to be drowned in gravy.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Onslow County native Clennie Davis told me a story back in 2007, when he was 95 years old, about how his family in the early 1900s took a mule cart down a dirt road now known as U.S. 17 enroute to Wilmington, where they sold homegrown produce at the downtown curb market.

Davis and I were talking about muscadine grapes at his son’s vineyard in Jacksonville. I asked if anyone back then sold muscadines at the market. Not really, Davis answered, because most people grew their own grapes to eat and use for wine.

Some of them had wine houses, places where they prepared, stored and sometimes served homemade wine mostly to hardworking men who needed a break at the end of the day.

Muscadine winemaking was a simple affair, Davis said. The grapes were crushed, sometimes by hand, placed in a container or barrel with sugar and left to ferment for about a week, less during hot weather.

Occasionally, unstrained wine was served directly from the barrel.

His tales of wine-making and his family camping at Hampstead because they couldn’t make the mule cart trip to Wilmington grew my appreciation for the ruddy, thick-skinned grapes named muscadine.

Oenophiles abhor the “musky,” sugary wine the grapes yield. Wine shop clerks have hung up on me when I’ve called to ask if they carry muscadine wine.

To eat the grape is another chore. With your thumb and index finger you must squeeze the pulp from its thick skin. What comes out may remind you of allergy season, and hidden within are seeds as big as BBs.

But muscadines are worth the effort. They have a significant history beyond North Carolina, and it dates back much farther than U.S. 17.

The Muscadine Story

“The history of the muscadine is older than the state of North Carolina; it’s older than the history of this country,” Randy Drew said.

Like Davis and many other Eastern North Carolinians, Drew grew up with muscadine grapes. Raised in Duplin County, he picked wild grapes that still grow in coastal woodlands, watched his uncle make muscadine wine and often passed by vines growing at Rose Hill’s Duplin Winery, billed the world’s largest muscadine winery.

Drew, a Wilmington photographer and videographer, loves history. While researching the Civil War, he kept running into mentions and pictures of muscadine grapes. The more he saw, the more the grapes popped his cork. He ended up compiling a timeline tracking muscadines.

Drew has found reports of documents discovered in modern-day Morocco that mention 8th century boat trips from that country along what may have been the Gulf Steam to a place where travelers found grapes on the edge of waterways.

In 1524, explorer Giovanni de Verrazano wrote of wild vines along the Cape Fear Valley that would “without doubt” make good wine. A year later, explorer Ralph Lane reported to Sir Walter Raleigh that grapes along the Carolina shore were “of such greatness, yet wild, as France, Spain, nor Italy hath no greater.”

The scuppernong, native only to North Carolina, became America’s first cultivated grape. It was, of course, grown in North Carolina.

Drew’s research has taken him to Manteo’s legendary Mother Vine, a gigantic, centuries-old scuppernong vine that the N.C. Wine and Grape Council says is the nation’s oldest known grapevine and that some people believe is the source of all cultivated scuppernong vines in America.

“There is a reverence that you feel when you are not looking at the mother vine but standing under it,” Drew says. “It’s almost like being in a natural cathedral.”

By the early 1800s, Washington County had a successful grape-growing and wine-making operation. Scuppernong wine, Drew says, was among Thomas Jefferson’s three favorite wines, the other two being European. In 1840, North Carolina was the new nation’s top wine producer.

In a letter to a friend, Jefferson wrote that North Carolina’s scuppernong wine “would be distinguished on the best tables in Europe, for its fine aroma, and chrystalline transparence.”

And so it was. In 1900, North Carolina commercial winemaker Paul Garrett’s scuppernong wine, made at Garrett and Co. near Weldon, won ribbons at the Paris Exposition. Four years later, his scuppernong champagne won the grand prize at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis, despite international competition.

“The North Carolina wine industry is 100 years older than the California wine industry,” Drew noted.

Rise and Fall

While scuppernongs are native to North Carolina, muscadine grapes grow throughout the South. The range aided the wine’s advance. Even during Prohibition, Drew says, muscadine wine thrived among home winemakers, and Garrett sold wine-making supplies and kits.

Sweet wine was the preference of Americans, but as demand grew, muscadine wine quality declined. The wine was often blended or watered down, Drew said. Meantime, travel and overseas wars exposed Americans to European wines. As Americans become more affluent after World War II, they wanted dry, subtle French wines not the cheap jug wine that muscadine had become.

Muscadine wine may have fallen out of favor nationally, but local affection for the wine never wavered. It seems everyone has a muscadine story to tell.

When I told a friend in Warrenton that I was working on a muscadine article, he described an old recipe that calls for filling a glass wine jug two-thirds of the way up with whole grapes and then sugar to fill, he said. Cap the bottle, bury it under about a foot of dirt and leave it there for some months to ferment.

Even my Italian uncle took a stab at making muscadine wine. As we sipped his potent, syrupy brew after one of our regular, Sunday family pasta dinners, his sister-in-law, Dot Vanover, now in her 90s, told us how she and her siblings made wine when they were growing up on an Onslow County farm.

“We would take us a bucket of those grapes out to the woods and leave them there by a tree, and when we went back a week or two later we’d have us some wine,” she said. “And if my daddy found that bucket in the woods, he sure would give us a whipping.”

Comeback Trail

Muscadines made a comeback after studies found that they are high in an organic compound that lowers cholesterol.

Add fresh muscadine juice to any vinaigrette at the same time that you add the vinegar. The juice will lend sweetness and flavor. This heirloom tomato, muscadine  and pickled okra salad incorporated muscadines, pomegranate and molasses. It showed up at a past Culinary Adventures with Liz Biro cooking class with chef Tyson Amick at Aubriana’s restaurant in Wilmington. Photos: Liz Biro

Prohibition, competition, taxes and changing tastes decimated North Carolina’s thriving wine industry by 1968. A few years later, when state legislature cut winery licensing fees and the tax on native table wine, grape growers united and vineyards starting popping up in the now-famous Yadkin Valley. Viticulture and wine-making expanded again, albeit wines made from European grapes.

Muscadines eventually made a comeback, too, especially after researchers in the 1990s reported that red muscadine grapes contain a high concentration of an organic chemical compound named resveratrol. Studies show that resveratrol, found in the skin of red grapes and in red wine, helps lower cholesterol and may have anti-aging and anti-inflammatory effects.

The news gave layperson wine drinkers license to admit they preferred sweet wines, and muscadine vineyards started popping up along I-40 between Raleigh and Wilmington. The wines themselves became better too, ranging from super sweet to mid-sweet and semi-dry.

I told all of these facts and stories on food tours I used to lead in downtown Wilmington. Our final stop was always a cupcake shop, where I poured everyone a sample of muscadine wine. So many noses twisted. Some people couldn’t stand the wine’s distinctive aroma. But as I shared the drink’s history, faces softened.

I suggested that because muscadine wine is often so sweet, that it might be considered a dessert wine or used in a wine cooler with sparkling water and a squeeze of lemon, served on the rocks.

Use sweet red muscadine wine to cook your holiday ham, I advised. For generations, North Carolinians have put muscadine grape hulls in jam and pie filling. I see top chefs tapping muscadines more often, too, whether in fancy sauces or sophisticated desserts.

This fall, at acclaimed The Chef and The Farmer restaurant in Kinston, celebrity chef Vivian Howard offers wood-roasted trout with muscadine vinaigrette on the dinner menu. On her Public Television show, “A Chef’s Life,” she devoted an entire episode to muscadines.

“Too many times, muscadine growers have apologized too much. We apologize for the bitterness, our grape has big seeds or tough skin,” Drew said. “Don’t apologize for the healthiest grape in the world.”

A glimpse into the style of dress at the Lumina Pavillion at Wrightsville Beach in the early 20th century. Elegant attire suited fussy crabs minced Mayonnaire, creamed sweetbreads in casserole, soft-shelled crab au canape and roast Long Island duckling with kumquat marmalade. Photo: Wrightsville Beach Museum of History

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH — Seafood platters mounded with fried shrimp and fish, Tower 7 restaurant’s fish tacos and Roberts Market’s grab-and-go snacks seem forever woven into Wrightsville Beach’s dining culture, but forget tartar sauce, salsa fresca and tubs of pimento cheese 100 years ago.

Victorian ladies showed up to fancy dinners in lacy, white, cotton dresses. Their escorts wore tall, neck-binding collars, tailored jackets and shiny pocket watches in their fitted vest compartments.

The Wilmington Seacoast Railroad Co. began running its “Beach Car” in 1888.

Elegant attire suited fussy crabs minced Mayonnaire, creamed sweetbreads in casserole, soft-shelled crab au canape and roast Long Island duckling with kumquat marmalade.

Over the past two years, Wilmington historian Elaine Henson has felt among the diners. She researched the history of Wrightsville Beach restaurants for a July program that was titled “A Century of Dining at Wrightsville: 1880s to 1980s.” She gave the presentation at the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History, next door to the N.C. Coastal Federation’s new satellite office and coastal education center.

“It wasn’t like it is today,” Henson said of yesteryear dining. “Not at all.”

For starters, diners didn’t walk from their beach houses or drive their cars to restaurants. Before there was public transportation to the beach, visitors, in their snazzy clothes, rode little skiffs for their “excursions” to the shore.

The first restaurants debuted in 1884 at Seaside Park and Pine Grove hotels, on Wrightsville Sound. When Wilmington Seacoast Railroad Co. in 1888 ran its “Beach Car” from downtown Wilmington’s Front Street to what’s now Harbor Island, and tracks were extended across Banks Channel to the beach a year later, eating places emerged quickly to serve a mushrooming market.

Wrightsville Beach was incorporated 1899. By then, at least four hotels sat seaside. The circa 1892 Hinton’s Café, inside Ocean View Hotel, came first, Henson said. A September 1892 Wilmington Messenger article congratulated owners E.L. and J.H. Hinton, who Henson noted also ran accommodations in Wilmington and Carolina Beach, for “the unrivaled manner in which soft-shell crabs, deviled crabs, picked crabs, shrimps, pigfish, clam chowder, etc., has been served to the delegation of epicurean visitors to the seashore.”

Hotels were hotspots for guests and day visitors alike.

The Seashore Hotel prized itself for serving fresh seafood caught daily. After the Great Fire of 1934, the Seashore Hotel was renamed the Ocean Terrace Hotel. After more damage from Hurricane Hazel and another fire, it was replaced by the Blockade Runner in 1964. Photo: Wrightsville Beach Museum of History

Two hundred people attended the 1897 Seashore debut dinner featuring 32 selections including broiled summer trout with parsley sauce, pommes Parisienne, lemon pie and macaroons. An American history-themed 1916 Independence Day menu offered Plymouth rockfish with Lexington sauce, calf brains à la George IV and “revolutionary” crackers with young American cheese.

For $5, Hotel Tarrymore guests sampled “cuisine unsurpassed,” according to a 1905 advertisement. A humble-looking Tarrymore opened that year. By 1911, it grew grand peaks lit by long strings of electric lights. The kitchen served elegant French cuisine and local favorites like broiled Spanish mackerel, clam fritters, candied sweet potatoes and corn on the cob.

Running restaurant kitchens was not easy. Sans electric refrigeration, chefs required frequent train deliveries of ice and provisions. Cattle that supplied milk and meat grazed near the shore. A news report about one hotel fire mentioned yard chickens cooked by the blaze.

Sanitation was a challenge. The trolley line that opened in 1902 included a garbage car, Henson said. Flies, smelly ice boxes and water that tasted of decayed wood were among problems health inspectors found at one restaurant. On a 1919 night, a health inspector dining out was served spoiled fish and a fly floating in his iced tea.

Despite behind-the-scenes shockers, restaurants flourished and those in hotels inspired modern accommodations such as Blockade Runner. Built in 1964, the resort is about where the Seashore Hotel stood, Henson said. Blockade Runner’s early Ocean Terrace Room, which hosted dinner and dancing, served a 1965 Thanksgiving Day meal including a whole turkey “carved at your table, leftovers to take home,” for $2.95 per person.

The dining room’s Ocean Terrace name harked back to Seashore, which was renamed Ocean Terrace after it survived a 1934 fire. Fire hit again, destroying the renamed Ocean Terrace hotel in 1955.

Blockade Runner continues to honor its predecessor with its Ocean Terrace seafront rooms.

When authorities allowed cars on Wrightsville Beach in 1935, restaurant development surged and the quintessential fried seafood platter, so common today, made its lasting mark.

The Oceanic Hotel, built in 1905, was the most upscale hotel at Wrightsville Beach. It was the first stop at the beach for the trolley. The Oceanic had a restaurant with its own orchestra for the summer months. What you see in the photo is the hotel from the sound side with its romantic turret and spiral staircase. On the ocean side, there was an octagonal tea room right at the ocean’s edge. Photo: Wrightsville Beach Museum of History

The Neptune, now named King Neptune, on downtown Wrightsville Beach’s Lumina Avenue and, at age 67, regarded as New Hanover County’s oldest restaurant, featured seafood and steaks “cooked to a king’s taste.”

Marina Grill, opened in 1946 in abandoned World War II Marine Corps barracks on the Wrightsville Beach Causeway, won a seal of approval from restaurant reviewer Duncan Hines, then “the American authority on good eating” rather than the cake mix king. In 1947, a Marina “deluxe” two-course seafood dinner, with a choice of one entrée – shrimp Newburg, fried frog legs and shad roe with bacon among them – and fries, clam fritters and coleslaw on the side, cost $1.50.

“Oyster roasts,” places that served steamed and fried seafood in ultra-casual settings were popular too, as were guest houses where lodgers slept upstairs and dined downstairs. Even as far back as the late 1800s, women managed some of the largest and most popular establishments.

Here is one of the original boarding houses where people slept upstairs and dined downstairs. Photo: Wrightsville Beach Museum of History.

“It was one of the things a woman could do with a family if their husbands passed away,” said Madeline Flagler, Wrightsville Beach Museum’s executive director. “It was something you could do and do well and still have a real life.”

As beach life moved toward flip flops and ice-cold white wine, Wrightsville Beach restaurateurs went with the more casual flow.

The famous Lumina Pavilion (1905-1973) that early on staged formal ballroom dances hosted a grill and picnic tables. Nearby soda shops were favorite hangouts for teenagers.

Henson’s research and a lifetime of Wrightsville Beach memories uncovered a surprising number of food and drink places, including markets, “easily 100” over the century, she said.

Henson referenced residents and friends, old phone books, vintage post cards, newspaper reports and the collections of Wrightsville Beach Museum of History, the New Hanover County Public Library and historians Bill Creasy and Bill Reaves.

She and Flagler found no shortage of information – or interest.

“Different eating establishments are so much part of the culture here,” Flagler said. “You go to the beach, and you’re there all day, and somehow the food tastes better when you’re sunburned.”

American artist William Ranney painted his “Boys Crabbing” in 1855. Source: Google Arts Project

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

What do you need for a successful crab boil?

A dip net, a piece of string, a chicken neck and a nickname, that being “chicken-necker.”

It means you’re an amateur crabber, but who cares. Take your meager gear to a river, sound, creek or waterway on the N.C. coast for a few hours and you’re likely to catch enough crabs to feed a crowd.

“As long as we’re walking, we’ll be crabbers,” Barbara Thornton says.

The Ohio resident and her family visit North Carolina’s central or southern coast nearly every summer. Catching crabs, an activity better known as crabbing, is usually on the agenda.

Thornton and her late husband, John, learned to love blue crabs at steam shacks in Maryland, but the Ohio couple learned to catch crabs from an old salt on Oak Island.

A woman who lived next door to the cabin where the Thorntons stayed in the summer of 1974 showed the pair and their children how to tie a fish head and a small weight to the end of a long string. She took them to marshy, shallow waters at low tide and told them to throw the tied up fish head in the water while keeping a hold on the other end of the string.

When the string started to vibrate just a little bit, it meant a crab was nibbling the bait. From there, one Thornton pulled the string in slowly while another waited with a dip net. When the crab was visible near their feet, the netter scooped up the catch and dropped it in the cooler.

The family used fish heads until someone told them that chicken necks were better. Truly, a crab is not fussy, Cape Fear-area commercial crabber Scott Rader said.

Here’s the decidedly low-tech rig used by chicken-neckers: cotton string, a fishing weight and, of course, a chicken neck.

“A crab is like a buzzard,” he said. “It will eat anything.”

Chicken-neckers who crab the shallows use their coolers to gauge the tides. They arrive at low tide and set their coolers on a dry shore. When the cooler starts to float, it’s time to go home and eat the catch.

Back in the kitchen, the adventure isn’t over. Getting crabs into the steam pot may have some consequences.

“There were some fingers nipped,” Thornton said.

Long metal tongs are handy for mastering the little beasts. Keeping live crabs in a cold cooler will calm them, Radar advised.

While folks call cooking a mess of crabs a “crab boil,” the term isn’t accurate when it comes to preparing crabs, Radar said.

“You don’t want to boil them. You don’t want to cover them in the water,” he said. “Start the pot cold, steam them about five minutes, then let the pot sit for another 10 minutes. The meat will come right out of the shell. They’re perfect.”

The Thorntons layer crabs with Old Bay seasoning in a large stockpot with a little water, vinegar and beer in the bottom. They steam the crabs for about 30 minutes.

The crabs are placed in bowls and set on the table, where some members of the Thornton clan pick the back fin meat and leave the table after an hour.

“There’s always the handful of people who will stay at the table for hours,” Mrs. Thornton said.

Her husband was one of them, and he once explained why: “Some people just open the crab up and pick out the big pieces. They are the people who leave the table in an hour. I think the person who really knows them is in there picking out all the little morsels, just in a euphoria.”

Chicken-Necking 101

Get some string: Cut medium-weight cotton or nylon string into 15- to 18-foot lengths. Tie a 1-ounce fishing weight to one end of each piece of string.

Buy a pack of chicken necks: Tie a chicken neck on each piece of string near the weight. Tightly wrap the string around the chicken a few times, and tie tight knots to hold the bait. Crabs are strong. They’ve been known to pull a diamond right out of an engagement ring.

Hit the shallows: Crabbing is best at low tide, though you can catch at any tide level. Throw the baited end of the string as far into the shallows as possible or drop it off the end of a dock. Hold the string, loop it around your arm or tie it to a dock post. When you feel a nibble on the end of the line or the tied line is pulled out straight and tight, gently and slowly pull the line up. Pull too fast and the crab will flee.

Bring a dip net and a friend: When the crab is just visible beneath the water as you’re pulling the string, let your partner place the net in the water a good distance from the crab. The netter must be stealthy, quietly moving the net under the crab and scooping it up. Choose a dip net with a handle no more than 6 feet long. The handle must be long enough to reach below the crab on the line but short enough that it is easy to use.

Don’t forget the cooler: Turn the net over the open cooler and gently shake to deposit the crab into the box. If the crab becomes tangled, set the net down for a minute. The crab will settle. Alternately, don heavy rubber gloves and use your hands to remove the crab from the net. Grab the crab behind its flat paddle fins. Keep a loose cover over the cooler so the crabs can get air.

Know and follow the rules: Throw back small crabs and pregnant females. If a crab’s belly is swollen with an orange-yellow mass that darkens to black, the crab is pregnant.

North Carolina rules prohibit taking crabs less than 5 inches long across the pointed tips on their top shells. The size limit for females increases to 6¾ inches Sept. 1 to April 30. To learn how to identify male and female crabs, visit the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries blue crab page.

Chicken-neckers do not need permits. Individuals may take up to 50 crabs a day. If they are on a boat, the catch limit is 100 crabs per vessel per day.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

“If you like fried chicken, you’ll like soft-shell crab.”

OK, well, you might like soft-shell crab a whole lot better, but this is the phrase my mother and father used to entice people to sample pan-fried, fresh-from-the-water soft-shell crab.

Dusted with flour or dipped in the lightest batter, my folks sautéed the crabs until their lacy crusts turned honey brown, signaling the sweet, juicy meat within the papery shell was ready to eat.

Forget tedious hours hand-picking meat from hard-shell crabs. With soft-shells, you eat the whole thing.

My parents, brother and I found soft-shells while digging clams around Sneads Ferry. Now and then, the crabs would be hiding in the shallows. Just after molting, blue crabs lay low. Their new, soft shells make the normally formidable pinchers an easy meal for predators.

Sometimes, one or two soft-shells would end up in my father’s shrimp or fishing nets. Four crabs a day, no matter where they appeared, was a big haul, making soft shells a rare delicacy.

Whether prepared elegantly with asparagus and brown rice or merely slapped into a hamburger bun, soft-shell crabs are a delicacy of the sea.

If we landed just one, my father fried and plated it ceremoniously, placing the crab on the cleared dinner table. There the soft-shell sat as he described how delicious it would be. Our imaginations on anticipation overload, Dad carefully cut the crab into four equal parts. Each of us slowly savored our share.

Back then, soft-shells were a marvel in our Jacksonville neighborhood. Friends went crabbing, but it was the hard-shell crabs that hit their chicken-neck baits tied at the end of long strings. No one had ever seen a soft-shell crab.

These days, the soft-shell crab season’s arrival is indicated by more than May’s first full moon, the traditional marker for fishermen. The crabs show up on menus all over North Carolina, and diners know when they’re due. The soft-shell crab’s celebrity is thanks to fishers and seafood markets that some years ago predicted the sales growth potential for soft-shell crabs and put the word — and product — out.

Fishermen understood the market segment’s promise because they had eaten their share of delectable soft-shell crabs. As South River’s Rodney Cahoon once said, “When you take a crab hot out of the oil and put it right between a light bread biscuit, it’s a heck of a meal. You’ll feel like you died and gone to heaven.”

During May and June, soft-shell crab season peaks. That’s when maturing crabs that have outgrown their hard shells shed the too-small armor. For a few hours afterwards, the new exoskeleton, including that on the legs and claws, is soft.

Commercial crabbers might nab one or two soft-shells, but to get a load, they look through their hard-crab catch to determine which of the crustaceans are preparing to molt. They identify the “peelers” by looking at colors and other markings on the crab’s body. The secrets of identifying peelers have been handed down to fishermen through the generations, especially in northeastern North Carolina, where the soft-shell industry especially thrives.

The peelers go into large shallow tanks, where they are monitored around the clock. Some fishermen can estimate the exact hour when a crab will lose its hard shell. Time is short between molting and the crab’s new shell hardening. Immediately upon shedding, crabs are sent to market live, where chefs have a limited time to serve them, or the crabs are packed and frozen.

Frozen soft-shell crabs are washed, dressed and ready to cook after defrosting.

To prepare fresh soft-shell crabs, wash the body and then turn the crab on its back. Lift and remove what is called “the apron” from the crab’s underside. The apron is a rounded or T-shaped flap on the stomach. It lifts off easily.

Turn the crab back over and lift up the shell so that the grayish gills are exposed. Use a knife to scrape off the gills. The shell may be left intact or removed along with the digestive sac. Finally, remove the eyes and mouth by making one cut behind the eyes with kitchen shears.

From there, prepare to enjoy a Down East delight: that heavenly soft-shell crab sandwich Cahoon described. It’s classic in the eastern Carteret County fishing communities known as Down East.

Keep other preparations in mind. Marinate and then grill soft-shell crabs over a slow fire and at least 12 inches above the heat. Cut fried or grilled soft-shell crabs into bite-size pieces and add them to bisque.

Fried Soft-shell Crab

2 eggs

1 tablespoon of water

2 cups all-purpose flour

Peanut oil for frying

1 dozen soft-shell crabs, cleaned and dressed

In a large, shallow bowl, beat eggs with water. Place flour in another large, shallow bowl or plate.

Place a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Pour peanut oil into skillet, to a depth of 1 to 2 inches.

While oil is heating, dip crabs in egg mixture and then dredge them in the flour.

Fry crabs in medium-hot oil until crabs are lightly browned. Drain on paper towels. Serve immediately.

Down East Soft-Shell Crab Sandwich on Light Bread

1 package yeast

2 cups warm water

6 cups all-purpose flour

3 teaspoons salt

4 tablespoons sugar

4 tablespoons shortening

Fried soft-shell crabs

Sprinkle yeast over warm water and allow to sit for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl blend together flour, salt and sugar. Cut shortening into dry ingredients until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add yeast and water mixture and stir until dough is formed.

Turn dough out onto a floured pastry board and knead 8 minutes or until elastic. Cover dough and allow to rise in a warm place until doubled in size. Punch down and shape into rolls large enough to hold one crab each.

Place rolls on a greased cooking sheet and let rise until doubled, about 20-30 minutes.

Bake rolls in a 400-degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Cool slightly. Split rolls and place a hot, fried soft-shell crab in each roll.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

MOREHEAD CITY — Morning, noon, night or snack, a day in the Old South hardly passed without at least one biscuit.

Today, North Carolinians sit down at New South tables where biscuits no longer land at every meal, but a warm biscuit, golden buttery around a soft center, shaped by a loving cook’s hand, remains a much-desired serving of tenderhearted Southern hospitality.

“It’s how we define supper in the South,” professional baker and native coastal North Carolinian Mindy Ballou Fitzpatrick said. “When you have biscuits at supper, it gets people to come to the table and to sit down, and it gets them into conversations.”

Fitzpatrick hails from a long line of cooks who inspired her to launch Mindy’s Baked Goods, part of The Friendly Market local food, art and plant emporium her and husband, Matt, operate in Morehead City.

Fitzpatrick’s grandfather, William “Bill” Ballou, was a charismatic charter boat captain who in 1941 converted a downtown Morehead City fish house into Capt. Bill’s Waterfront Restaurant, still in operation, under different owners, and still famous for its “Down East Lemon Pie.”

Biscuits were the purview of Fitzpatrick’s mother, Betty Ballou, whose recipes inspire much of the cooking at Mindy’s Baked Goods and The Friendly Market.

“They were part of everything I did growing up just about,” Fitzpatrick said of biscuits. “They define a lot of who we (Southerners) are.”

The word “biscuit” traces to Latin words “bis” (twice) and “coctus” (cooked). In Europe, the word usually refers to cookies. As American breads developed, the word biscuit took on a different meaning in the South.

Historians say the idea for biscuits came with early European settlers to the New World. Dishes that could be made with ground wheat, water and some sort of savory gravy were simple sustenance pilgrims lacking established kitchens needed.

Mindy Ballou Fitzpatrick says there’s nothing like biscuits to get people to the dinner table and into conversations. Photo: Liz Biro

Also, soft wheat grew best in the South. Low-protein flour made from soft wheat produces the tender crumb mandatory for perfect biscuits. Biscuit recipes often call for bleached, all-purpose flour, cold fats, cold liquids and light mixing, all instructions suggested to keep proteins from banding together. Those bound proteins create gluten strands that make French breads and pizza crusts deliciously chewy but cause tough biscuits.

Risen biscuits showed up as early as the late 1700s, when pearl ash from fires was used as a leavener, Southern food historian John Edgerton wrote in Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

The American definition of “biscuit” was first noted in John Palmer’s 1818 Journal of Travels in the United States of North America, and in Lower Canada, according to The Food Timeline. By 1828, Webster defined biscuits as “a composition of flour and butter, made and baked in private families,” The Food Timeline reported.

Commercial baking soda and baking powder arrived in the mid-1800s, Edgerton found, but Southern cooks prepared more than risen biscuits. Beaten biscuits sans leavener appear true American creations connected with the mid-Atlantic and southern Appalachian regions.

“Long before soda and baking powder and yeast transformed the American biscuit into a soft and puffy bread, these queer, little, unleavened, hard biscuits had somehow found their way from parts unknown to the kitchens of the colonial South,” Edgerton wrote.

“Now just as mysteriously, beaten biscuits have all but disappeared.”

Edgerton noted their demise might have been due to the considerable time cooks spent beating or kneading air into the dough to make those biscuits light and fluffy. One old recipe calls for beating the biscuits at least 100 times, unless company was coming. Then, the biscuits would have been beaten many more times to ensure guests dined on the very best.

A dough-kneading machine patented in 1877 in New Jersey saved beaten biscuits from extinction, and they remained popular, especially for the upper South’s ham biscuits, which still show up in Virginia and North Carolina, Edgerton found.

For the most part, whether biscuits are beaten or risen, biscuit-making has almost become a lost art that many restaurant and home cooks seem happy to leave to processed food companies supplying frozen biscuits or pre-blended biscuit mix — just add liquid and stir.

The Friendly Market in Morehead City features Mindy Fitzpatrick’s baked goods. Photo: Liz Biro.

Conduct a side-by-side tasting of a from-scratch biscuit and a prefabricated one, and you’ll likely find that favorite, supposedly “homemade” fast food sausage biscuit is lacking.

“To me, the perfect biscuit is very, very light, fluffy, not too tall,” Fitzpatrick said. “I like when you open a biscuit and it has the little crevices where you can spread butter, and it kind of goes down and becomes part of the biscuit.”

Biscuits are not difficult to prepare. They’re worth the effort, especially in spring when North Carolina’s fresh berry season begins with strawberries and moves into blackberries and blueberries, perfect for classic shortcake. As summer arrives, fresh peaches replace berries.

No matter if biscuits are savory to serve alongside fried chicken or a little sweet to layer with fresh fruit and whipped cream for shortcake, the recipe is simple.

An easy biscuit formula starts with 2 cups of self-rising, unbleached, all-purpose flour and ¼ to ½ cup of lard or butter. Blend about 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar into the flour if you’re making a sweet biscuit for shortbread.

Using a pastry cutter, cut the fat into the flour until the mixture resembles cornmeal. Lightly stir in about a cup of cold milk or buttermilk.

Flour a board and gently roll out the dough, using an ultra-light touch so as not incorporate much more flour. Maintain a light dusting and touch to prevent sticky dough. As an alternate to rolling, flour your hands, pick up pieces of the dough and form them into disks about ¾-inch thick.

Either way, always handle gently. Overworking the dough leads to hard biscuits. If the dough seems too sticky, and you don’t want to risk rolling or handling, make what are called “drop biscuits,” which Fitzpatrick said was her mother’s preference for shortcake. Drop heaping tablespoonfuls of dough onto a pan.

Bake biscuits in a hot oven, 400 to 450 degrees, for 10-15 minutes.

Biscuit recipes are usually not exact. Humidity, the type of baking pan used (sheet or cast-iron skillet), the fat chosen, whether cooks prefer milk, buttermilk or high-fat cream and the brand of flour selected all affect the process and results. Those are not reasons to be intimated but rather to test what works best for individual cooks’ tastes, Fitzpatrick said.

“The first thing to do is not worry about the outcome,” she said.

“To me that the best part of being in the kitchen is falling into recipes you never expected and just discovering,” Fitzpatrick added. “Biscuits are fun.”

If biscuits come out hard or ugly, no worries. Put them on a plate and smother them with sausage gravy, a fSouthern specialty loved at breakfast and fine for dinner.

“The one thing about biscuits is they’re good at every meal,” Fitzpatrick said. “Everybody will come and eat biscuits.”

Karel Blaas of Wilmington turned North Carolina’s native oysters, top, into a creamy ice cream with fennel panna cotta and chocolate ganache cake. Photos: Liz Biro

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

WILMINGTON — Warm weather marks the end of oyster season on the North Carolina coast, which might cause ice cream-maker Karel Blaas to scratch his head and wonder why.

Blaas’ from-scratch ice cream, made with local ingredients, is known far beyond his downtown Wilmington-based Velvet Freeze shop. He’s played with lots of interesting flavors: herb concoctions made with leaves grown at Leland’s Shelton Herb Farm, bourbon bacon chocolate pecan and olive oil with toasted pine nuts.

Sometimes, restaurant owners ask for custom flavors, like the beer chocolate toffee ice cream Blaas recently churned for a commercial brewery.

One of the oddest ideas Blaas encountered was oyster ice cream.

The oyster ice cream flavor stemmed from a conversation between Blaas and Chef Mark Scharaga. Scharaga was planning a multi-course wine dinner at the Asian restaurant Tamashii, which Scharaga once operated in Wilmington.

Scharaga used local seafood at the restaurant, where Blaas had been supplying Asian-inspired ice cream flavors such as ginger apple and sesame honey banana. The two men were joking about off-beat flavors they could serve for the dinner’s dessert when oyster ice cream came up, Scharaga said.

“As crazy as I thought it was, it wasn’t really so far-fetched,” Scharaga said.

Oyster ice cream is popular in Japan, but when Blaas researched the idea, he was surprised by the American food history connection.

“People actually ate this,” Blaas said. “It was once a big deal in America.”

Ice cream, which probably originated in China, started appearing in American colonies in the first half of the 1700s, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Journal. The treat took off after Thomas Jefferson in the late 1700s sampled ice cream in Paris. Jefferson brought a recipe home, built an ice house at Monticello and then one at the White House when he became president, the Journal reported. On Independence Day 1806, Jefferson tasked a servant with making ice cream, starting a summertime tradition that probably earned Jefferson credit for bringing ice cream to America.

Vanilla, strawberry, raspberry and apricot were popular flavors. Coffee, tea, pistachio, spicy chocolate and parmesan cheese were other flavors. “Perhaps the strangest flavor is found in Mary Randolph’s cookbook—oyster ice cream,” the Journal reported.

Mary Randolph wrote The Virginia Housewife in 1824, one of that century’s most influential cookbooks and the first American cookbook with an ice cream section (by the way, Randolph’s son married Jefferson’s daughter). Her oyster ice cream recipe was really strained, frozen oyster chowder.

Karel Blaas churns up lots of unusual ice creams at his Velvet Freeze shop in Wilmington. Photo: Liz Biro

Historians claim First Lady Dolley Madison served oyster ice cream at the White House. Oyster ice cream is also mentioned in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

One story historians agree is a myth claims that oyster ice cream was George Washington’s favorite flavor.

Those early oyster ice creams were probably more savory than sweet, as Randolph’s recipe suggests. Blaas made his version sweet. He poached oysters in cream, added sugar and a couple other ingredients before freezing the blend.

The resulting ice cream provided enough oyster flavor to let diners know this was not Blaas’ usual rich, silky, oh-so-creamy vanilla. The ice cream, with a swirl of Texas Pete, was served with fennel panna cotta and chocolate ganache cake.

Blaas didn’t get another request for oyster ice cream, and Scharaga didn’t move much of it after the wine dinner. However, the men’s collaboration continues. Blaas scoops flavors these days at a new Velvet Freeze location in a space Blaas shares with the sushi take-out shop, Mega Maki. Scharaga runs Mega Maki with business partner Josh Thaxton. The shops are at 10B N. Front St. in Wilmington.

Make It at Home

Attempting oyster ice cream at home is not difficult. Simply do as Blaas did by poaching fresh shucked oysters in a vanilla ice cream base. The amount of oysters will dictate the intensity of oyster flavor. A chef at 54twenty Guestaurant in Hollywood, Calif., demonstrates a slow cooking process called “sous-vide” in an online video

Mary Randolph’s efforts were simpler, as evidence by these recipes, shown as written, from The Virginia Housewife.

OYSTER CREAM

Make a rich soup, (see directions for oyster soup,) strain it from the oysters, and freeze it.

OYSTER SOUP

Wash and drain two quarts of oysters, put them on with three quarts of water, three onions chopped up, two or three slices of lean ham, pepper and salt; boil it till reduced one-half, strain it through a sieve, return the liquid into the pot, put in one quart of fresh oysters, boil it till they are sufficiently done, and thicken the soup with four spoonsful of flour, two gills of rich cream, and the yelks of six new laid eggs beaten well; boil it a few minutes after the thickening is put in. Take care that it does not curdle, and that the flour is not in lumps; serve it up with the last oysters that were put in. If the flavour of thyme be agreeable, you may put in a little, but take care that it does not boil in it long enough to discolour the soup.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

When the late Southern food historian John Egerton asked the oldest resident of Georgia’s Sapelo Island about the fishing village’s seafood traditions, Annie Walker put her love for oyster stew in plain terms.

“I like bass, croaker, trout, yellowtail. And stewed oysters, now that’s a good dish,” she said, “a little bacon, a little flour, then your oysters, maybe some water, then season it with salt and pepper.”

The recipe Walker related for Edgerton’s book Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) doesn’t sound exactly like the buttery, milky, loaded-with-oysters soup most often presented as oyster stew in North Carolina – unless you consider the simplicity of Walker’s directions.

Coastal N.C. natives will put up with jalapenos in their pimento cheese and bourbon in their pecan pie, but when it comes to steaming bowls of oyster stew, only a few ingredients will do.

Since the Irish introduced oyster stew to America around 175 years ago, tradition has dictated its endurance.

Oyster stew evolved from soup made with a dry-preserved Atlantic fish named ling, present off Ireland. The Irish ate milk-based ling stew as a Christmas Eve, religious fast-day meal.

When the mid-1800s Great Potato Famine drove thousands of Irish immigrants to the United States, many of them settled along the East Coast. Their new home had no ling, but oysters were huge, plentiful and delicious. The Irish adapted, and since then oyster stew has pretty much remained the same: a blend of oysters, fat and liquid.

Matt Beckelhimer

Other coastal cooks stewing seafood along the shore likely added pork fat and water, as Annie Walker suggested.

“It is important to note that until recently (last half of the 20th century forwards), oysters were commonly consumed, especially by people living close to ocean shores,” according to The Food Timeline history research service. “They were plentiful and cheap. Not the expensive delicacy we think of today. Oysters were indeed expensive for inland folks, due to shipping costs.”

Today, North Carolinians often judge good oyster stews by the yellow patches of melted butter floating on a thin, nearly pure white soup loaded with fresh shucked oysters – no potatoes please. As oysters became luxury food, so did this basic soup.

Certainly, more than a few bowls of oyster stew landed on tables at downtown Wilmington’s historic de Rosset House. Dr. Armand John de Rosset III built the mansion in 1841 with the family’s penchant for entertaining in mind. The custom continues at the home, now the private City Club at de Rosset. There, chef Matt Beckelhimer combines his love of old-fashioned oyster stew with a few adjustments.

Reared in Richlands, a little Onslow County town, Beckelhimer hails from a family of fishers and farmers. He grew up eating salty Topsail Island oysters in his granddad’s oyster stew. Grandpa had a little secret Sapelo Island’s Annie Walker would have appreciated: Ocean water lent his stew extra sea-fresh flavor.

Beckelhimer respects that stew but has a few ideas of his own, too. Sometimes, he adds fresh fennel, chives, scallions or basil to the basic recipe. He described his fennel- and saffron-scented tomato-based oyster stew as “a cross between a paella and an oyster stew.”  Oyster corn chowder and a curry-seasoned stew made with coconut milk are his other ideas.

One thing is never negotiable: the oysters.

“I do like the Topsail selects,” Beckelhimer said. “I love those salty briny oysters,”

Traditional Oyster Stew

This recipe calls for paprika and fresh parsley, both of which would be considered optional, if not sacrilege, by lovers of traditional oyster stew. Some cooks would remove the oysters after the initial cooking, then return them to the pot just before serving to ensure the shellfish do not overcook.

4 tablespoons butter

1 pint standard oysters, undrained

1 quart milk

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

1/16 teaspoon paprika

4 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley

In medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add oysters and cook just until edges begin to curl, about 5 minutes. Add milk, salt, pepper and paprika. Cook over medium heat until thoroughly heated and oysters are done, about 8 to 10 minutes. Do not boil. Pour into serving bowls and sprinkle with parsley. Serve with oyster crackers. Serves 4 to 6.

Source: Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas (N.C. Sea Grant, 2003).

Carolina Oyster Stew

Spanish flavors and N. C. seafood soup cookery meld in Beckelhimer’s recipe. He hard poaches eggs in the soup, a favorite addition to fish stews made on the N.C. coast. Getting the eggs just right takes a little practice. Make sure the soup is not bubbling when placing the eggs in the pot.

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 large onion, finely diced

1 fennel bulb, finely diced

3 large garlic cloves, minced

1 16-ounce can San Marzano tomatoes

Pinch of saffron

18 ounces vegetable stock

2 large Russet potatoes, scrubbed, peeled and cut into small dice

2 pints shucked oysters with their liquid

4 or 5 whole eggs

Chili flakes, to taste

1 tablespoon fennel pollen (optional)

Garnish: Chopped flat-leaf parsley

Crusty bread

Heat oil in a large, heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onion, fennel and garlic to pan. Sauté vegetables until softened, 3 to 4 minutes. Add tomatoes, saffron, stock and diced potatoes. Increase heat, bring mixture to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 20 to 25 minutes, until potatoes are tender.

Reduce heat so that the stew nearly but doesn’t quite simmer. Add oysters with their liquid, stirring gently to distribute shellfish.

Bring soup back up to heat. Crack eggs one a time into a small bowl, and gently place each egg into the soup, slipping them in near the sides of the pot. The eggs should poach in the soup without breaking the yolk or spreading the white.

Continue cooking the stew 6 to 7 minutes, until eggs are cooked through and oysters are slightly curled around the edges. Season soup with chili flakes and fennel pollen. Ladle soup into bowls and garnish with flat-leaf parsley. Serve with crusty bread.

Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Source: Chef Matt Beckelhimer

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

If you asked her about her early days as a seafood education specialist for North Carolina Sea Grant, Joyce Taylor probably would have told the crab story.

Shortly after accepting the position in 1973, Taylor was tasked with teaching a blue crab cooking class in western North Carolina. She transported a bunch of the pinchers in the trunk of her car. They had to be alive, of course. Taylor was a stickler for using fresh seafood long before today’s “eat local” mantras.

As she made the long drive across the state, Taylor heard the crabs scurrying in their container, causing her to wonder how many would dance across the demonstration room floor at her destination.

Martha Giles, left, consults with Joyce Taylor in this 2012 photo. Taylor educated people throughout the state on safe ways to handle, prepare and store nutritious seafood. Photo: NCSU

No toes were bitten, and the lesson ended up one of many that launched Taylor’s reputation as North Carolina’s “Guru of Seafood.”

Taylor died this year, but the seafood bible she wrote with the help of coastal N.C. cooks endures.

Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas compiles not only dozens of recipes developed and carefully tested by Taylor and the team but details about North Carolina’s seafood history, the health benefits of fish and shellfish, aquaculture, seafood safety and how to handle, clean and store seafood — as well as kitchen tips and cooking tidbits like how to clarify butter.

Although Sea Grant did not publish the book until 2003, its content began in the early 1970s when the agency enlisted the seafood cooking wisdom of Carteret Extension Homemakers, an offshoot of Cooperative Extension programs that partner with county, state and federal governments to help people gain access to research generated by public universities. The idea was to share seafood research with fishers and seafood processors and help them market the catch.

In Morehead City kitchens, Taylor directed the mostly women, who had a lifetime of knowledge about the North Carolina’s traditional seafood cookery. Sea Grant asked Taylor and them to document those recipes but also to develop and test new ideas and techniques.

Besides creating gourmet dishes such as Soft Crabs Amandine or Flounder Filets with Black Butter Sauce, the ladies conducted various seafood experiments. No matter the recipe, Taylor made sure the seafood’s flavor was apparent. Hence, many recipes in Mariner’s Menu are no-fuss dishes with few ingredients.

The women also found ways to use bits of meat and bone leftover from filleting fish. They created fresh flaked fish, an alternative to canned products. They tested ways to freeze seafood to retain texture and flavor. Sometimes, the group worked on formulas for commercial food operations.

Their efforts were documented in various publications, including a quarterly newsletter titled “Mariner’s Menu,” edited by Taylor and distributed to 3,300 subscribers between 1990 and 1996.

Surprisingly, Taylor was an Asheville native who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Born in 1932, she didn’t reach the coast until the mid-1950s, when she came to Carteret County to work as a public school teacher.

Her first assignment with Sea Grant was taste-testing croakers and gray trout. Throughout her seafood career, she promoted other lesser-known species taken off the state’s coast. Many recipes are recorded in Mariner’s Menu.

“People have not been comfortable cooking seafood,” Taylor said in the book, distributed by the University of North Carolina Press. But after reviewing a simple recipe or watching Taylor prepare seafood at one of the many classes she conducted, landlubbers gained confidence with fish and shellfish cookery, no matter if it was familiar grilled grouper or unusual catfish stir-fry.

Like Taylor herself, “Mariner’s Menu” makes preparing seafood seem a breeze. Taylor said her knack for showing cooks the way came from her years as a teacher.

“I don’t think learning should be tedious,” she said. “I have a good time.”

Some Recipes

Taylor thought fresh, unpasteurized blue crab meat tasted best. Unpasteurized crab meat consists of fresh, cooked, picked and packaged crab. Highly perishable, it must be used within a couple days. Pasteurized meat is cooked and sealed in cans that may be kept refrigerated for several months.

Hot Crab Dip

1 pound backfin crabmeat

8 ounces cream cheese

1 tablespoon milk

2 tablespoons grated onion

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 teaspoon horseradish

¼ teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

Paprika

Remove any shell or cartilage from crabmeat.

Mix cream cheese, milk, onion, lemon juice, horseradish and white pepper in a medium bowl. Gently fold in crab meat. Place mixture in an 8-inch pie dish. Sprinkle with paprika. Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until bubbly. Serve with assorted crackers.

A “Mariner’s Menu” chapter is devoted to showing readers how to clean seafood. Drawings demonstrate techniques, including how to dress soft-shell crabs

Soft Crabs Amandine

6 soft-shell crabs, cleaned

Salt

Pepper

Flour

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

4 tablespoons butter

¼ cup almond slivers

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Sprinkle crabs with salt and pepper. Dredge in flour and shake off excess. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add 3 tablespoons of butter. When butter sizzles, place crabs top-shell-side down in skillet. Sauté until crisp and golden, about 4 to 5 minutes. Turn crabs over and repeat cooking time. Remove crabs to warm platter.

Heat the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter in the same skillet. Add almonds and sauté until golden brown. Stir in lemon juice. Pour over crabs. Serves 3.

Catfish Stir-fry

3 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon dry sherry

1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger

¼ cup minced green onion, including tops

2 teaspoons cornstarch

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

4 medium catfish filets, cut into 1-inch chunks

1 cup thickly sliced celery

¾ pound snow peas

1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms

Cooked rice (optional)

Combine soy sauce, sherry, ginger, onion and cornstarch. Set aside.

Heat 2 tablespoons vegetable oil in a large skillet. Lightly salt and pepper fish. Add to pan and stir fry until almost done, about 2 to 3 minutes. Remove fish with slotted spoon.

Add remaining 2 tablespoons oil and heat. Add celery and snow peas and cook vegetables 2 to 3 minutes. Add mushrooms and cook until tender, about 2 minutes.

Stir in sauce mixture and cook until thickened, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add fish to pan and cook until done, about 2 minutes. Serve over rice if desired.

Serves 8 to 10.

Source: All recipes from Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas 

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Could the humble sweet potato pie be the fuel that fired North Carolina’s tremendous fishing industry?

The rich, spicy treat these days may pop up most often at the end of holiday meals, but in years past sweet potato pie was the start of a hard-working fisherman’s day.

Carteret County natives especially like to tell the “potato pie” story. On brisk mornings, oftentimes before sunrise, strong men who worked the mighty sounds and Atlantic Ocean around Carteret’s barrier islands would wake up to sweet potato pie.

John Gerard, a famous English botanist and herbalist, wrote about sweet potatoes in his massive and heavily illustrated 1597 book on herbs and plants. The lowly sweet potato had found its way to the Old World after Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the new one, where the tuber was native.

A slice was not nearly enough sustenance for the tough labors of setting nets, raking clams or hauling fish by the hundreds of pounds to market. These men drank what amounted to soup bowls full of hot coffee with not two or even three slices of sweet potato pie.

They folded entire pies in half and ate them like breakfast sandwiches.

What today’s diners think of as dessert was true and established nourishment for those long-ago fishermen.

Ten years after Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to establish a settlement at Roanoke Island, England’s John Gerard wrote about the sweet potato in his 1597 Great Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, in which he suggested “that the sweet potato “comforts, strengthens, and nourishes the body,” Jennifer Harbster, a librarian for the Library of Congress, wrote in her November 2010 blog “A Sweet Potato History.”

When Christopher Columbus discovered sweet potatoes in the New World, Peruvians had been growing the tubers for thousands of years, and sweet potatoes were well established in South and Central America, Harbster found.

“Columbus brought sweet potatoes back to Spain, introducing them to the taste buds and gardens of Europe. Europeans referred to the sweet potato as the potato, which often leads to confusion when searching for old sweet potato recipes. It wasn’t until after the 1740’s that the term sweet potato began to be used by American colonists to distinguish it from the white (Irish) potato.” Harbster wrote.

Both white and sweet potatoes thrived in gardens in coastal North Carolina and on its barrier islands where fishermen lived. Sweet potatoes flourished in the coast’s hot, moist climate and sandy soils. Growers appreciated the plant’s lack of natural enemies.

Today, North Carolina is America’s No. 1 sweet potato producer, supplying about half the U.S. supply, the N.C. Sweet Potato Commission reported.

Coastal North Carolina residents growing sweet potatoes were also familiar with sweet potato pie, a recipe handed down from their English and European ancestors.

“Sweet potatoes are ‘New World’ foods, pie is an ‘Old World’ recipe,” according to The Food Timeline history research service. “Creamy recipes combining orange vegetables with sweeteners, spice and cream were known in Medieval Europe. Carrots were sometimes employed in this manner in England.”

Sweet potato pie came in 15th on the top recipe searches at Allrecipes.com. It is clearly a Southern favorite. Map: N.Y. Times

“The earliest references we find to potato pie in English cookbooks were printed in the 18th Century. They bear striking resemblance in both ingredients and method to pompion (pumpkin) pies of the 17th century.”

Early sweet potato pie recipes were included among savory listings. By the 1800s, sweet potato pie formulas were grouped with desserts, The Food Timeline reported.

North Carolina fishermen knew sweet potato pie could go either way. The pies they enjoyed were simple affairs of mashed sweet potatoes, milk, eggs and spices, providing plenty of protein from the milk and eggs and big doses of vitamin A and beta-carotene from the sweet potatoes.

No matter the recipe, cooks agree that perfect sweet potato pie is a balance of creaminess, sweetness and spices against a sturdy, savory crust. The filling is so smooth and flavorful, no ice cream or whipped cream garnish is required.

Southern journalist John Egerton, who passed this year just days before Thanksgiving, was an authority on Southern recipes and food history. His book, Southern Food (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) is an informative and delightful collection of facts, anecdotes, stories and recipes about the South’s varied menu.

This is the recipe Egerton included for sweet potato pie. He leaves it to individual cooks to blend the spice mix to their tastes. The recipe also lets bakers choose from different milk options. N.C. coast natives would likely choose canned evaporated milk or “sweet milk” (canned sweetened condensed milk), as that is the milk their ancestors relied upon in the days when fresh milk and cream were not readily available.

Sweet Potato Pie

Prepare a 9-inch, deep-dish or 10-inch regular pie crust. Boil 3 medium-to-large, scrubbed sweet potatoes until tender, cool them and then peel and mash enough to make 3 cups. Cream 1 stick of softened butter with 1 cup of firmly packed brown sugar (light or dark), then beat 3 eggs and combine with the butter and sugar mixture. Add ¼ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon vanilla extract and a combination of spices (cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, mace) totaling 1½ teaspoons. Stir in the mashed sweet potatoes. Add 1 cup of sweet or evaporated milk or half-and-half, beat the mixture well and with an electric mixer and pour into the pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes to 1 hour or until the center of the pie is firm.

— Source: “Southern Food” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) by John Egerton.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Fall’s first chilly nips trigger a smoky scent along North Carolina’s coastal back roads. The aroma rises from home fires, but not ones to keep warm. Embers coax the savory smell of an old-fashioned dish locals lovingly call “charcoal mullet.”

Anglers may consider striped mullets bait fish. Cooks pass them up for fancier fins, but many years before fried flounder and seared grouper become seafood-menu darlings, mullets cooked over a fire were the hot tickets.

Native Americans were roasting mullets when Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1584 reconnaissance party landed on Roanoke Island.

Connie Mason

Mullets were so popular and so abundant along the state’s shore in the 1800s that the 96-mile-long Atlantic and North Carolina railroad between Morehead City and Goldsboro was nicknamed the Mullet Line because it carried so many of the fish.

Back then, when striped mullets began their cool-weather-triggered movements known as “mullet blows,” inland farmers turned into part-time commercial fishermen, according to a report from N.C. Sea Grant. They knew autumn cold fronts combined with chilly northeast winds prompted massive mullet migrations southward. The men arranged seaside camps, where they stayed until they had netted thousands of fish during the two-to-three-month season.

Many mullets were salted, packed in barrels and transported out of state. Tiny Portsmouth Island, on the Outer Banks’ southern tip, was noted for particularly fine salted mullets. The fish’s roe, liver and gizzards were prized, especially by fishing families, who sustained life on spots and striped mullets, N.C. maritime heritage tourism officer Connie Mason, of Morehead City, said.

“Before Charlie The Tuna became the chicken of the sea, the mullet was the chicken of the sea,” she said.

Diners started bypassing striped mullets when new-fangled refrigeration systems allowed transport and storage of myriad fish. Over time, striped mullet, with its signature layer of white fat, visible on filets behind the pectoral fin, garnered a reputation for being too oily, too pungent and too humble for America’s newly refined seafood palate.

Today, striped mullet is favored bait for the more popular flounder, red drum and sea trout that mullets lay beside in seafood market coolers. When Brunswick County friends first asked Dave Beresoff, a commercial fisherman from New York, if he wanted to join them for a mullet barbecue, he replied, “Why would I want to eat bait fish?”

Native coastal Carolinians, however, still love striped mullets, preferring them stewed, pan-fried and, especially, cooked over hot coals. They even made a believer out of Beresoff, who came up with his own recipes for grilled mullet.

“Charcoal mullet is a thing of great pride” among coastal North Carolina cooks, Mason said.

To prepare charcoal mullet, the fish should be boned but not scaled, Mason explained. Lightly season filets with salt and pepper and then grill them scale-side-down just long enough to cook but not dry out the flesh, she instructed. The skin and scales act as a pan in which the filet cooks, and, later, as a container from which to fork up the delicious meat before the charred skin is discarded.

Much of charcoal mullet’s rich flavor comes from that white fat layer. Locals chastise the fish monger who tries to trim the fat, which keeps the mullet’s flesh juicy during grilling and seasons the fish as the melting fat drips onto the hot coals, producing a mouth-watering smoke.

Grilling mullet has long been a tradition in coastal North Carolina as this 1701 drawing by British explorer John Lawson attests. Drawing: UNC

With research showing fish oil’s many health benefits, the fat may be more palatable to diners who previously snubbed mullet. Four ounces of striped mullet contain 534 mg of omega-3 fatty acids, according to the web site Self Nutrition Data. Besides heart-health claims, omega-3s are said to lower triglycerides, reduce blood pressure, improve mood and aid joint health.

Some North Carolinians skewer whole, gutted mullets lengthwise on long sticks, even rebar, then insert the skewers’ bare ends into the ground, teepee style, around a fire so that the fish extend over the hot coals.

However striped mullets are “charcoaled,” the result is a juicy, meaty, firm-fleshed filet, Mason said.

“Flounder really only takes on the flavor of whatever you cook it with; mullet stands on its own,” she said. “It has a flavor, a wonderful nutty flavor.”

As Brunswick County resident Sandra Robinson said when she grabbed a fork and dug into striped mullet from the grill at her local fish market: “Flounder cannot hold a candle to that!”

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Before today’s professional chefs created the likes of pecan-crusted flounder filets, chipotle honey-glazed grouper and seared sea scallops laid on dollops of every sauce imaginable, there were onions, potatoes, salt, pepper and a little pork fat. Those five ingredients were the mainstays of coastal North Carolina seafood preparations.

As far as locals were concerned, the less you did to fish, shrimp, crabs, oysters, clams and scallops, the better.

What is the point of fresh seafood if it doesn’t taste like fresh seafood has long been the reasoning of fishing families living along the Carolina shore. Their no-frills clam chowder, basic drum stew with cornmeal dumplings and plain, broiled mullet paired with fresh watermelon are the sorts of recipes that might have been lost in the current era’s sea of foodie creativity had it not been for Coastal Carolina Cooking.

The book compiled not only traditional N.C. seafood recipes, but all manner of native fare as well as resident cooks’ stories and tips. Despite being published 27 years ago by the University of North Carolina Press, Coastal Carolina Cooking remains a lively and practical reference and one that no American food history buff should be without.

In the early, 1980s, authors Nancy Davis, who worked in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill development office, and Kathy Hart, a writer who was with North Carolina Sea Grant, set out to chronicle “the traditional cooks and cooking of the North Carolina coast.” They traveled from the northern hamlet Maple, near the Virginia state line, to Holden Beach at North Carolina’s southern tip. The women spoke to cooks who recalled old times as far back as the turn of the 20th century.

“Food is central to the family in coastal North Carolina,” they wrote. “The aromas of frying bacon or a simmering stew signaled the beginning and ending of each day when all the family gathered at the table.”

Mild seasoning was born of place as much as preference. Hart and Davis noted that many families combined farming and fishing. Often, recipes called for corn, cabbage, figs, berries, collard greens, potatoes and sweet potatoes, which all grow well in North Carolina’s sandy coastal plain. In the early and mid-20th century, if people went to the store, it was for flour, sugar, coffee or tea, perhaps a piece of pickled pork, although families raised livestock and birds. They hunted, too.

Much food was stewed or baked, no-brainer methods that imaginative home cooks today might be surprised to discover produce rich flavors. Popular stewed or “stew-fried” dishes began with cooks frying a few pieces of salt pork until the tasty fat was rendered and thereby available to season the dish. From there, seafood and potatoes or sweet potatoes could be added to create tasty, one-pot meals. Alternately, whole fish were baked in the oven with potatoes and onions, perhaps garnished in summer with fresh tomato slices.

Modern cooks might pass on such humble fare for company, thinking the recipes would not be impressive enough. In fact, no-fuss clam bakes, oysters roasts and fish cooked over hot coals were the choices for long-ago get-togethers. Vera Gallop of Harbinger told Hart and Davis about one such regular event.

“During the fall mullet runs, Vera’s neighbors would assemble for a community treat — a mullet barbecue. The mullet were staked and placed over hot coals. While the mullet cooked, the neighbors enjoyed fellowship and the view of the sound.”

Gallop, like all the book’s subjects, shared various food stories and cooking tips. Some dishes recalled the game that men hunted when they weren’t fishing.

Maple resident Katherine Taylor’s recipe for roasted coon emphasized removing the scent glands from under the animal’s front and back legs before parboiling and then rubbing the coon with sage before the final roasting.

Jeanie Williams of Manteo advised that the cooking time of roasted swan would depend on the size and age of the bird. “You can tell the age of the bird by the number of pin feathers it has,” she said. “Younger birds have more pin feathers.”

Bear roast, fried squirrel and venison ham recipes make interesting reads, but most Coastal Carolina Cooking formulas are worth trying: clam fritters, duck and wild rice casserole and breaded and fried whole, dressed blue crabs, for instance.

Certain deep-rooted cook’s tips are constant. Sneads Ferry restaurateur Percy Jenkins “dredges his shrimp twice before he fries them because he says that helps them retain more moisture.” Hart and Davis wrote. After Georgie Bell of Harkers Island rendered the fat from salt pork for her clam chowder, she “likes to eat the fried meat as though it were fried pork skins.” Letha Henderson of Hubert said “sassafras tea is a good blood cleanser.”

Hart and Davis included timeless information about judging, purchasing and handling seafood along with historical nuggets about fishing, ingredients and coastal communities.

Of course, the book’s caring cooks didn’t forget dessert. They made fig puddings, stacked layer cakes with homemade jelly and stewed Muscadine grape hulls or picked hickory nuts for pie filling, among various other sweet treats in the book.

“Many a girl’s first date was a fudge party or candy pull supervised by her mother,” Hart and Davis wrote.

The stories and recipes in Coastal Carolina Cooking stir yearnings for family, close friends and the ever- receding “good old days” no matter if readers hail from city or countryside. By the end of the book, each chapter’s cooks, depicted in illustrations, feel like family. As Hart and Davis wrote, “These are special people, and they are what make this book more than a compilation of recipes.

“It’s a taste of home.”

 This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

The crew at Catch show off the grouper they caught on a charter  boat that the restaurant hires several times a year for its employees. The fish were likely served at the restaurant that night. Photo: Catch

WILMINGTON — Catch seafood restaurant in Wilmington sports a logo portraying what looks like a grouper preparing to bite a giant hook. The depiction gives diners a sense that the fish they are eating is fresh from the water.

The notion is accurate, but some evenings, the snapper, grouper, mahi and wahoo customers tuck into might have been caught by the chef who cooked it.

In all likelihood, the waitress, the maitre d’ and one of Catch’s proprietors reeled in a few of the fins, too.

Many times a year, Catch owners chef Keith Rhodes and his wife, Angela Rhodes, treat their staff to deep-sea fishing trips. The journeys, like a different sort of excursion the crew has enjoyed at Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla., were intended as a way to reward employees for their hard work, aid team building and just have some fun.

Boat days have since become a means of directly connecting the Catch staff to the seafood that has made the restaurant famous.

“When one of our servers goes to a table and tells someone that the fish is fresh-caught, they can say it with confidence and know that it’s true,” Angela Rhodes said.

Most Catch fans know chef Keith far better than Angela Rhodes. The celebrity face of the restaurant, Chef Rhodes has appeared in numerous newspaper and magazine articles as well as on the Bravo TV program “Top Chef: Texas.”

Chef Rhodes has long tapped local fishermen and seafood markets to source fresh, local fish for imaginative presentations that have grabbed the attention of celebrities — Rhodes gave actress Gwyneth Paltrow a private cooking lesson in summer 2012 — and the James Beard Foundation, which in 2011 nominated Rhodes for Best Chef Southeast award.

Chef Keith Rhodes and his wife, Angela believe in serving the freshest fish in imaginative presentations. Photo: Catch

Angela Rhodes usually works the office and dining room, leaving ingredients and cooking to her husband. When the couple’s friend, charter boat captain Johnathan Mallette of Sneads Ferry, asked if they would be interested in a fishing trip aboard his Pura Vida boat, docked at Sneads Ferry, the Rhodeses said yes.

Rhodes discovered he lacked the sea legs necessary for the rolls and tumbles of deep sea waves. Catch employees and Angela Rhodes, especially, took to the vessel, growing their trips from 2011 plans for once-in-a-while getaways to the many outings Angela Rhodes gladly arranges each year.

Some workers had never been fishing. Others had only seen fish at markets. Either way, team members’ excitement is obvious in dozens of photographs they take to show off their hauls to family and friends.

Back at Catch, following fishing trips, employees buzz with anticipation for service. “Had so much fun deep sea fishing,” server/hostess Elizabeth Ann Taylor said. “A couple mahi, a huge red grouper, good-size black grouper, lots of snapper and trigger.”

In the kitchen, cook Steve Young, one of the best anglers on the boat, helps Rhodes fashion the fish into specials and menu mainstays — perhaps pan-roasted wahoo atop pink-eyed peas stewed with country ham. Creole-seasoned hollandaise and then tiny Swiss chard to garnish the dish. Lately, Catch has featured cornmeal-dusted grouper filets crowing succotash featuring late summer corn, tomatoes and okra, all finished with a dab of lemon saffron aioli

The super-fresh fish staffers snare not only help inspire creative preparations, but they also give everyone on the payroll, a deep respect for all the seafood that they work with every day and an appreciation for the work that professional fishers do to supply that seafood, Chef Rhodes said.

“It’s definitely something special here,” he said. “When you eat here, you eat a lot of love.”

Black Grouper Filet with Succotash and Lemon Saffron Aioli

For the aioli:

1/2 teaspoon fresh saffron

1 tablespoon hot water

Zest of 1 lemon

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 cup prepared mayonnaise

For the fish:

1 cup cornmeal

1 teaspoon white pepper

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon Old Bay seasoning

2 4-ounce, 1-inch thick black grouper filets

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 tablespoon butter

For the succotash:

1 tablespoon butter

1 cup fresh corn, cut from the cob

1/2 cup sliced cherry tomatoes

1/2 cup fresh okra thinly cut on a bias

1/4 cup fresh, sliced scallions

1 teaspoon fresh thyme

1 teaspoon basil cut into chiffonade (thin strips)

To finish the dish:

½ cup fresh, small arugula leaves

Prepare the aioli: Steep saffron in hot water for a  few minutes. In a small bowl, whisk together saffron and its liquid with lemon zest, lemon juice and mayonnaise. Set aside for 30 minutes to let flavors develop.

Prepare the fish: In a glass pan or wide, shallow bowl, whisk together cornmeal, white pepper, kosher salt and Old Bay seasoning. Dredge fish in cornmeal mixture, lightly coating filets. Set aside

Place a heavy, medium-size skillet over medium-high heat. When pan is hot, add vegetable oil. Place filets in pan and cook fish for a minute or two, adjusting heat to medium. Add butter to pan. Cook fish another minute, until browned. Turn over filets and brown the other side and cook through. Remove fish to a dish and keep warm.

Prepare the succotash: Place a medium-size skillet over medium-high heat. Add butter to the pan. Add corn, tomatoes, okra, scallions, thyme and basil into the pan. Saute the mixture for a few minutes, until vegetables are crisp-tender.

Plate the dish: Divide succotash between two plates, spooning the succotash into neat mounds. Top each portion of succotash with half the arugula. Top each portion with fish. Spoon about 1 tablespoon of aioli on top of the fish or swirl on the plate alongside the succotash and fish.

Makes 2 servings.

Source: Catch owner/chef Keith Rhodes

 This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

A lacy, crisp, brown crust embracing sweet, tender seaside freshness. Fried shrimp is perhaps the most beloved seafood dish on the N.C. coast.

When hot summer temperatures summon swimsuit-clad crowds to the beach, fried shrimp are what shore-goers crave after playing in the waves.

Many head to seafood houses, grand restaurants boasting all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp specials or the lightly breaded morsels called “Calabash-style” fried shrimp.

Despite fried shrimp’s simplicity preparing them at home is an intimidating thought. The process, however, is not difficult, and the results are oh so satisfying.

“It’s savory, it’s salty, it’s sweet all at the same time. Once you start eating them, you can’t hardly wait for the next bite,” professional chef Eric Gephart said.

Eric Gephart

Gephart is the lead instructor at The Chef’s Academy cooking school in Morrisville, but years of living and cooking on the N.C. coast gave Gephart the same appreciation for fried shrimp had by generations before him.

Deep-frying food dates back to the ancient Egyptians, and ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed shrimp, but, according to The Food Timeline history research service , “16th century Portuguese cooks may have been the first to deep-fry batter-dipped shrimp. The recipe was inspired by Catholic dietary regulations requiring the abstinence from meat during certain days.”

Portuguese missionaries probably shared fried shrimp recipes with the Japanese, who may have named their fried shrimp specialty tempura after fast days described in Latin as the quatuor tempora, The Food Timeline cites from the book “Food” by Waverley Root (Smithmark, 1980).

As settlers populated the New World, fried food made its mark in America, especially in the 1900s. Although some coastal N.C. natives refused to eat shrimp, considering them akin to insects, fried seafood was popular in the South. In in the mid-20th century, Calabash became the place perhaps most famous for fried shrimp.

Locals tell of a stormy night in the 1940s when then-radio-star, James Frances Durante, better known as singer and actor Jimmy Durante, and crew were stranded in Calabash. Durante, Calabash lore claims, loved the town so much that he returned often,  and he ended his radio and television shows with the line “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are,” a tribute to a Calabash cook named Lucy Coleman at Coleman’s restaurant, still in business today.

Durante later claimed Mrs. Calabash was a nickname for his wife. No matter. The town’s fried shrimp caught on and continues to inspire professional cooks like Gephart.

The Hillsborough native grew up vacationing on the Carolina coast. Dad would take the family directly to fishermen to purchase fresh seafood. After training at the acclaimed Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Gephart moved to Wrightsville Beach, where for a time he owned a highly regarded seafood restaurant named Buoy 32.

Gephart relies on the Calabash style, understood among chefs and diners to mean lightly breaded.

Most important, Gephart said, is using wild, fresh-from-the-water shrimp. “They’re just so darned sweet,” he said.

The chef prefers smaller shrimp for frying. He thinks they’re more tender and taste better than larger shrimp. At the market, ask for 21-to-25-count shrimp, meaning a pound contains 21 to 25 shrimp. Plan on a quarter- to a half-pound of shrimp per serving.

Smaller shrimp may eliminate the need for “deveining,” the removal of the gritty, black intestinal tract that runs down a shrimp’s back, Gephart said. The “vein” is less apparent in small shrimp.

Gephart briefly marinates shrimp bound for the frying pan in a combination of buttermilk and hot sauce, which add flavor and whose acids tenderize the shrimp, he said. He lightly dusts the shrimp in a combination of flour and cornmeal or flour and commercial seafood breader. Gephart likes North Carolina’s House Autry brand. Too much breading masks shrimp’s flavor.

“You want to be able to see through the breading and see the actual shrimp,” he advised.

Fry shrimp in a heavy, deep cast-iron skillet to retain heat, Gephart suggested. Use canola oil, as it can stand high heats for long periods of time, he explained. Invest in a deep-fry thermometer, available at cookware stores and some supermarkets, as the oil should remain at 375 degrees during frying.

Keeping the stove free of splatters is impossible; frying on a gas cooker outside avoids an indoor mess.

Just a few minutes of frying are required to cook shrimp through. Because shrimp cook so quickly, a helper is handy. As one person removes cooked shrimp from the hot oil, another person breads and adds shrimp to the hot oil.

Once finished, fried shrimp make a delicious soft/crisp element on sandwiches, salads, pasta and risotto, but Gephart doesn’t let his creative chef side get the better of his fried shrimp.

“I just set them out on a big platter,” he said, “with a little tartar sauce.”

Final of two stories

“Severe reactions include nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, tremors, abnormal heart rhythms, weakness, shortness of breath, seizures, decreased blood pressure, fainting and paralysis. Death may occur.”

But that’s only if they sting you.

Those symptoms are listed by Atlantis Charters Diving and Fishing Adventures in Atlantic Beach as a warning for divers encountering lionfish. Poisonous, stinging spines and the swiftness at which this invasive species has populated North Carolina waters make lionfish a menace.

With careful handling, lionfish have a mild flavor similar to that of pink snapper. Photo: Discovery Diving

When lionfish are dressed and cooked, however, the only danger is eating too many.

“They remind me a lot of trigger fish,” Bistro By the Sea restaurant owner Libby Eaton of Morehead City told the Charlotte Observer of lionfish’s delicate taste when she helped arrange the inaugural “If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Eat ’Em” lionfish spearfishing tournament off Morehead City (see June 24 Coastal Review Online for the first story in the series).

The April 2013 event encouraged divers to hunt lionfish and featured the catch’s tasty rewards.

Native to the South Pacific and Indian oceans, lionfish were once mere saltwater fish tank curiosities, especially in America. The white-and-maroon-striped fish were first sighted off North Carolina in 2000. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that lionfish showed up off the U.S. East Coast in the 1990s.

Lionfish have since established themselves from North Carolina to Florida, even down to South America and north to New England, NOAA discovered. Many researchers blame the aquarium trade for the lionfish invasion.

How lionfish populations exploded so widely and rapidly is an ongoing debate, but researchers agree the invasive species’ numbers will continue to grow, posing harm to humans and marine environments.

Lionfish stings threaten divers and swimmers. Plus, “Not only are they voracious predators that out-compete many other species for food resources, but they also have few known natural predators of their own,” NOAA reported.

Although lionfish are venomous, their meat is safe to eat.

Despite their great numbers, lionfish are difficult to find at retail markets. Mainly taken recreationally, the best way to source them may be by getting to know divers or bottom-fishing anglers. Lionfish rarely bite a hook; most are speared or trapped in hand-held nets, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission advised.

Diners who get lionfish will be rewarded with moist, mild-flavored meat that recipe testers for the N.C. State University Seafood Laboratory found to be similar in texture and flavor to pink snapper.

Southeast coast divers encounter so many lionfish that many of them have contributed recipes to various publications, including the Lionfish Hunter Website, which boasts the “largest collection of lionfish recipes anywhere.”

Also, look for the “Lionfish Cookbook” by chef Tricia Ferguson and REEF executive director Lad Akins.

REEF, or Reef Environmental Education Foundation, is a Key Largo, Fla., grass-roots, non-profit organization of recreational divers committed to ocean conservation. Proceeds from the cookbook’s sales benefit REEF.

Cooks dressing fresh lionfish must watch the fish’s spines. Touching them is OK, but if the spines pierce the skin, their toxin is released, Akins warns in a “Changing Seas” South Florida Public Television series video demonstrating how to trim, skin and filet the fish .

Lionfish may be baked, broiled, sautéed, battered or breaded and fried, served raw or prepared as ceviche.

Diners who would rather leave the cooking to professional chefs may find local restaurants that serve lionfish, said Amanda Miller, founder of Dock to Door Seafood, a wholesaler focused on sustainable and unconventional species.

Miller sourced lionfish once from Haag and Sons Seafood in Oak Island.

“It’s very difficult and very dangerous to harvest, so it’s hard to get any on a regular basis,” Miller said. “I only got 50 pounds once, and two restaurants purchased all 50 pounds and are ready for more.”

“I’ve had some people say ‘They’re so weird-looking. How do you eat that?” Miller said.

Consider these recipes:

Broiled Lionfish with Garlic Basil Butter

Broiled Lionfish Photo: North Carolina Sea Grant

For the Garlic Basil Butter:

½ cup margarine or butter, softened

1 teaspoon pressed garlic

1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh basil

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1/8 teaspoon salt

For the fish:

6 small lionfish fillets

2 tablespoons margarine or butter, melted

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Prepare Garlic-Basil Butter: In small bowl, combine margarine, garlic, basil, lemon juice and salt. Allow to stand for 1 hour for flavors to develop.

Prepare fish: Place fillets on lightly greased broiler pan. Brush with melted margarine. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Broil about 4 inches from heat until fish flakes easily with a fork, about 4 to 5 minutes. Brush warm filets with Garlic-Basil Butter.

Serves 6.

Source: Mariner’s Menu blog, N.C. Sea Grant

Ruby Red Grapefruit Lionfish Ceviche

Ruby-Red Grapefruit Lionfish Ceviche Photo: exoticbbq.com

4 Ruby Red grapefruits

2 oranges       

4 limes

3 lemons

4 tablespoons simple syrup

1 lionfish filet, cut into medium diced           

½ red pepper, cut into small dice   

¼ bunch cilantro, chopped fine

1 Ruby Red grapefruit, segmented   

1 orange, segmented

Juice grapefruits, oranges, limes and lemons and strain juice into a large glass or stainless steel bowl, being sure to strain seeds and pulp from citrus juices. Stir in simple syrup. Add lionfish, peppers and cilantro. Stir mixture, cover bowl and refrigerate about 3 hours or until all fish has turned white.

Add grapefruit and orange segments to mixture. Spoon ceviche into a chilled glass serving bowl or into chilled individual glasses or glass bowls.

Makes 2 appetizer portions.

Source: Chef Drew Hedlund, Fleet Landing restaurant (http://www.fleetlanding.net/) in Charleston, S.C., for Guy Harvey Magazine.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Blue crabs’ pugnacious and cannibalistic traits are forgotten when golden-brown crab cakes land on the menu.

Blue crabs’ lives are tales of violence, cannibalism and pain — until their story turns to crab cakes.

The live crustaceans’ toothy claws can bloody a finger in a single bite. Big crabs make hardy meals out of their smaller brethren. A crab even gnawed mighty Hercules’ pinned foot as the Greek god battled to save the world from the nine-headed serpent Hydra.

“A crab is like a buzzard. It will eat anything,” Scott Rader, Cape Fear-area commercial fisherman, once said.

All that ferocity is forgotten when meaty, golden-brown crab cakes land on the menu.

“Every bite is a delight,” Jeanne-Darc Wehbe said of the fat crab cakes she and her husband, Tony, prepare at their Pelican Seafood market and café on Long Beach Road, between Southport and Oak Island.

Like most crab cake lovers, the Wehbes offer firm instructions for perfect crab cakes.

“One hundred percent North Carolina, fresh crab meat — no filling,” Jeanne-Darc said.

Despite the blue crab’s fierce appearance and aggressive nature, its scientific name, Callinectes sapidus, taken from Latin and Greek, means beautiful or savory swimmer. The crustacean’s characteristic sweetness and tender, juicy meat are what crab cake fans have always been after.

The engraving shows the second labor of Hercules: slaying the Lernaean Hydra. Note the crab clutched to his left foot.

American crab cakes date back to colonial times. They’re a spinoff of English meat cakes, food historians say. Cooks then, as now, liked crab cakes because they tasted good. Recipes took off in the 1800s. By the 20th century, “crab patties” and “crab croquettes” became known as “crab cakes.”

A 1685 recipes calls for nutmeg and almond paste. Later formulas suggested a hollandaise-like sauce, but mostly throughout time crab cakes remained simple, highlighting the meat’s sweet flavor.

Cheaper, less attractive claw meat makes delicious crab cakes, noted Joyce Taylor, author of Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)  Claw meat’s brown tint and slightly coarse texture is less apparent in a crab cakes. Still, body meat, either top-of-the-line lump crab or the slightly lower-grade backfin meat, supply a sweeter taste and much finer texture.

Whatever grade is chosen, select fresh, unpasturized crab meat, Taylor advised.

Unpasturized crab meat consists of fresh, cooked, picked and packaged crab meat. Highly perishable, it must be used within a couple days. Pasturized meat is cooked and sealed in cans that may be kept refrigerated for several months. Taylor thinks unpasturized, fresh crab from a reputable, local source tastes better in crab cakes.

Her other advice mimics that of the Wehbes: Don’t add too much filler, whether bread crumbs or cracker meal, and don’t muddy the crab’s flavor by overseasoning.

Taylor’s recipe, named Deluxe Crab Cakes, contains just 1½ tablespoons of cracker crumbs to a pound of crab.

“The only problem with this recipe is it has so much crab meat it’s hard to keep them (crab cakes) together,” she said.

Gently forming the cakes aids the shaping process, and refrigerating them briefly before frying helps the cakes stay together in the pan.

A little seasoning is OK. Fresh parsley has been added since the 1600s. A touch of lemon juice balances the crab’s richness, as Taylor’s crab cakes prove. Fry crab cakes in neutral-flavored oils, as butter will overwhelm their savor.

Wilmington chef Keith Rhodes of Catch restaurant in Wilmington favors fresh ginger over lemon juice to zest his crab cakes. In 2011, Rhodes won the N.C. Seafood Festival Cooking with the Chefs crab cake contest in Morehead City.

The competition, judged by diners and professional cooks, gave Rhodes the opportunity make the statement dreamed about by seafood restaurant chefs and home cooks alike: “Come try our award-winning crab cakes!”

Chef Keith Rhodes’ award-winning Carolina crab cake with Texas Pete aioli.

Deluxe Crab Cakes

1 egg beaten

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

½ teaspoon dry mustard

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/8 teaspoon Tabasco sauce

½ teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

1 pound unpasturized lump, claw or a combination of both

3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

1½ tablespoons fresh cracker crumbs

Vegetable oil for frying

Lemon wedges

In a medium bowl, whisk together egg, mayonnaise, mustard, cayenne pepper, Tabasco sauce and white pepper. Add crab meat, parsley and cracker crumbs to the bowl. Gently toss mixture together using a fork.

Shape mixture into 6 to 8 patties, each about 1 inch thick. Wrap the patties in wax paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Place a heavy, large skillet on the stove over medium-high heat. Pour oil into the pan to depth of about ¼ inch. Remove crab cakes from the refrigerator. When oil is hot, add crab cakes to the pan, working in batches if necessary so as not to crowd the pan.

Fry crab cakes until golden brown on one side, about 4-5 minutes. Flip cakes and fry the other side. Drain crab cakes on a paper-towel-lined platter. Serve with lemon wedges.

Serves 6.

Source: Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) by Joyce Taylor.

Carolina Crab Cakes with Texas Pete Aioli

1 pound N.C. jumbo lump crab meat

½ tablespoon minced fresh ginger

1 teaspoon each of sea salt and white pepper

1 large egg yolk

2 tablespoons mayonnaise

6 saltine crackers, ground to a powder

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and shape mixture into 3-ounce cakes. You should get about 5 cakes per pound of crab meat. Place a large sauté pan over medium heat. Add about 1/3 cup of soybean oil. When oil is hot, add crab cakes and cook 4 minutes per side until toasted brown crust appears. Remove crab cakes from pan. Drain on a paper-towel-lined platter. Serve with Texas Pete aioli.

Makes 5 crab cakes.

Texas Pete Aioli

1 cup mayo

1/3 cup Texas Pete hot sauce

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp white pepper

½ tbsp honey

Whisk all ingredients together in a medium bowl. Makes 1 cup.

Source: Chef Keith Rhodes, Catch restaurant, Wilmington.

This is part a monthly series about the food of the N.C. coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. The series covers the history of the region’s food, profiles the people who grow it and cook it, offers cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and passes along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

Gray or brown. Dark spots. Big bone. Yellow belly. Pointy spines. Full of hot air. Also known as Sugar Toad or Blow Toad..

Every description of the pufferfish works against its culinary appeal. Give this ugly, little saltwater swimmer a chance and it will please the palate.

Forget fugu, that toxic Japanese puffer best known for providing sashimi lovers with what may be their last meals. The northern puffer (Sphoeroides maculatus) roaming N.C. waters in winter and spring is non-toxic. The firm, tender, white meat along its stiff backbone tastes so much like chicken that the fish’s other nickname is sea squab.

“Give ’em a chance,” Kendra Bailey Morris, cookbook author and Southern cuisine authority, says.

Morris didn’t always take her own advice. Fishing off the mid-Atlantic, where pufferfish appearing from spring to fall are called “Sugar Toads,” Morris hooked puffers but never put them on the stove.

“We would catch them, kind of rub their bellies and puff them up, and they would float away,” Morris recalls.

The Sugar Toad’s ability to inflate is a defense mechanism that makes the slow-moving fish appear menacing. The image wards off predators, but pufferfish are adept hunters themselves. Using their strong, beak-like mouths, they break into shellfish and crabs, a diet that lends wonderful flavor to pufferfish meat.

When Morris finally tasted flour-dusted, fried pufferfish at a Virginia seafood dive, she was smitten.

“You just pick them up by the tail, and you eat them like a piece of fried chicken,” Morris says. “The meat is really sweet and delicate. I think it’s really one of the better tasting fish — if you can get past the name.”

Sugar Toads, Honey Toads, Toadfish, Blow Toads. No matter what pufferfish are called, Morris has only seen them fried, but the fish adapts to various recipes.

“The flavor profile on it is phenomenal,” chef Kyle Lee McKnight of contemporary American restaurant Highland Avenue in Hickory, says.

At his previous post, fine-dining Manna restaurant in Wilmington, McKnight sautéed locally sourced pufferfish filets in brown butter. Last September, he served pufferfish with parsley, capers and the German noodle named spatzle. That same month, McKnight taught a pufferfish cooking class in which students prepared sautéed pufferfish with roasted pumpkin.

Chef Kyle Lee McKnight has taught classes on how to cook puffers. Photo: Liz Biro

Campers out on the beach at Cape Lookout like to marinate cleaned puffers in Italian dressing for a couple of hours. They then throw them on the grill for 3-4 minutes each side or until the meat is flaky and brown. They look like roasted chicken legs.

Pufferfish may be an option for raw fish dishes, too.

“If it’s super, uber fresh, with a nice Spanish olive oil, a little cracked sea salt, fresh lime juice, dill,” McKnight says.

Delicious as they are, pufferfish pose challenges, mainly finding them for sale. Because they are ugly, small and provide little meat, few fish markets carry puffers.

Friends of commercial fishermen, especially crabbers, may get their fill of pufferfish. Pufferfish often end up in crab pots. A friend of a commercial crabbers provided McKnight, a local foods devotee, with his ample 2012 pufferfish stock in Wilmington.

Morris has seen puffers sold at Virginia fish markets but not in coastal North Carolina, where Morris plans to relocate soon. She suggests Carolinians call fish markets, especially those that carry blue crabs, and order pufferfish in advance.

Also, ask the fish monger to dress pufferfish.

“It’s actually a pain to clean,” McKnight warns. “You have to chop the head off, peel the skin off, then you have another membrane you have to take off.”

Despite difficulties of finding and preparing pufferfish, McKnight says even at his new, inland Highland Avenue restaurant, focused on homegrown fare, he’ll try to source N.C. pufferfish again.

Morris won’t abandon Sugar Toads, either, and thinks they’ll gain popularity. When Morris in 2011 wrote about the fried Sugar Toads she first had at Arnest Seafood in tiny Manquin, Va., for her Fatback & Foie Gras food blog, the post got more hits than any other.

She’s also seen fried Sugar Toads more often in fancy Virginia restaurants. For a time in 2010, even the highly regarded Oceana restaurant in New York City served “chicken-fried blowfish.”

As Morris writes at Fatback & Foie Gras, “Sugar toads. They’re not what you think…”

Some Tips on Catching and Cleaning Blow Toads

By Frank Tursi

As Liz notes in her article, seafood markets rarely have blowfish. Eating them, then, also requires catching them. Fortunately, they readily take a hook and are easy to clean if you know what you’re doing.

Found all along the East Coast and down through the Gulf of Mexico, northern puffers appear as water temperatures drop in November. You can catch them sporadically throughout the winter, but the early spring blow bite is one of the first signs of a new fishing season.

Fishing for puffers is pretty straightforward – a simple, two-drop, monofilament bottom rig that you can find at any bait-and-tackle shop on the coast, long-shanked #4 or #6 hooks and two to four ounces of weights, depending on water conditions. The long-shanked hooks are important. Blowfish have small, but powerful, hamster-like teeth to crush crustaceans, their favorite food. Using long hooks decreases the chance that the fish will cut the leader above the hook.

Attach all this to a light saltwater rod and reel. Blowfish rarely get over a pound. So leave the heavy stuff at home.

Bottom-feeders, blows prefer small crabs but are ferocious predators that will eat just about anything. Small pieces of shrimp and squid are common baits. So are the mole crabs that inhabit the swash zone in the surf. I’ve even caught them on small, curly-tailed grubs.

Fish off piers, around boat docks and in the ocean near shore. If surf fishing, cast just beyond the first line of breakers. Puffers are likely cruising along the bottom, looking for morsels stirred up by the waves.

There are no size or creel limits, but let the little guys go. There’s just not a lot of meat there. And don’t be a pig. Two or three medium-sized fish a person is gracious plenty for a good meal.

Pliers used to skin catfish make the job of cleaning puffers a lot easier.

You’ve caught a mess. Now what?  Relax. Cleaning puffers is easier than it looks. A rubber or fish-cleaning glove, a serrated knife and wide-grip pliers used to skin catfish are essential tools. Hold the head of the puffer with your gloved hand and squeeze gently. The fish’s gills will pop out. Make your cut at the top of the head just behind the flared gills. If the puffer is of any size, it will take some pressure to saw through the backbone. Continue the cut but don’t cut through the skin on the fish’s belly. Leave it intact. Grab the exposed meat along the backbone with the pliers and pull the skin away from meat with the gloved hand.

Here’s a video of a guy who knows what he’s doing.

Trim the blood sac and whatever entrails are still attached to the meat. On larger blows, you can cut the two strips of meat from the backbone with a fillet knife to make sea squab fingers.

This is the first of a monthly series about the food of the North Carolina coast. Our Coast’s Food is about the culinary traditions and history of N.C. coast. We plan to write about the history of the region’s food, profile the people who grow it and cook it, offer cooking tips — how hot should the oil be to fry fish? — and pass along some of our favorite recipes. Send along any ideas for stories you would like us to do or regional recipes you’d like to share. If there’s a story behind the recipe, we’d love to hear it.

By Liz Biro

Fresh from the water, dropped into a pan and seasoned with salt and pepper.

Ask a native coastal North Carolinian what’s the best way to cook fresh seafood and this is the recipe you’re likely to get.

With the elaborate dishes that inventive chefs create at hundreds of restaurants lining the N.C. shore these days, it’s hard to remember why simple, traditional seafood recipes like roasted oysters or mullet and sweet potato stew endure — until you sample their pure, delicious seafood flavor.

Letha Henderson in the cookbook Coastal Carolina Cooking (University of North Carolina Press, 1988) remembered fondly her father boiling shrimp “just like they came out of the river with a pod of red pepper and some salt.” The Hubert woman told of fuss-free dipping sauces: melted butter or black pepper-spiked vinegar.

The dish seems primitive compared to sautéed shrimp that Chef James Rivenbark of Wrightsville Beach’s South Beach Grill layers with herb-crusted eggplant, Tasso ham and fire-roasted red peppers. He naps the stack in roasted garlic, boursin and asiago sauce.

At the Outer Banks’ colorful Port O’ Call restaurant, a flounder filet might arrive stuffed with “crab meat imperial” and finished with sherried lobster cream sauce.

The late Mabel Smith, a Salter Path native, crowned flounder with all kinds of sauces, too, when she cooked in famous Carteret County restaurant kitchens such as the former Ottis’s Fish House in Morehead City. But Smith thought the best flounder recipe was her mother’s combination of fish baked with potatoes and onions.

Mom added only one garnish: “She would take a real pretty tomato and lay about three thin slices on top,” Smith said

Coastal North Carolinians’ preference for modest seafood meals dates back to the Algonquin tribes that populated the Carolinas’ shores for thousands of years before settlers arrived.

Those Native Americans in the mid-1500s offered Spaniards who landed at South Carolina fresh oysters steamed over an open fire until their shells popped. The cooking method never went out of style, as evidenced by the dozens of “oyster roasts” staged every fall and winter in North Carolina’s coastal plain.

Settlers who later lived on remote barrier islands relied on what they could catch, what they could grow and Motherland cooking styles, said Kathy Hart, co-author with Nancy Davis of Coastal Carolina Cooking.

Hart and Davis interviewed native cooks all along the state’s coast to document traditional recipes. Baked and stewed seafood dishes incorporating potatoes and onions came up a lot, including “baked flounder” like Smith’s mother made.

Fishermen were also farmers, Hart notes. Potatoes and onions thrived in the coast’s sandy soils and were familiar vegetables.

“They were isolated for many years, so they didn’t have access to things like fresh herbs,” Hart said of barrier island residents. “Plus, a lot of them were Scottish-Irish immigrants, so they were used to using those (potatoes and onions).”

Seafood offerings did not start to change until the 1970s and ‘80s, when a huge influx of tourists and new residents altered the culinary landscape. With more foodwise and affluent visitors arriving each year, chefs responded with increasingly daring dishes, author Elizabeth Wiegand wrote in The Outer Banks Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from North Carolina’s Barrier Islands (Globe Pequot, 2008).

“Early Bankers didn’t eat deep-water fish like grouper or dolphinfish (mahi), but rather fish from the sounds, like drum and mullet, and they had ample supplies of oysters, clams and crabs. They considered shrimp a nuisance, a ‘bug,’ which they traded on the mainland as fertilizer for sacks of corn…,” Wiegand wrote.

The dividing line between humble, traditional seafood recipes and over-the-top contemporary ensembles is easy to see. Disparate palates, however, always agree on the formula for one dish: crab cakes.

No matter if they’re served in a five-star restaurant or dockside seafood shack, the crab cakes that English settlers introduced to the colonies should be so meaty that the cakes hardly hold together.

That’s the advice of Joyce Taylor, author of Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Seasonings in her Deluxe Crab Cakes — dashes of cayenne, white pepper, dry mustard, Tabasco and parsley — hardly seem deluxe. The flavor of the crab is what should shine, Taylor said.

One sweet bite and tasters ask if Taylor has added sugar to the formula.

“Nope,” she said beaming. “That’s the crab meat.”