Shell Games
Bonus: includes my "Food52 Genius" Crab Cake recipe!
[This piece was originally published in Edible San Luis Obispo magazine, and a shorter version also appears in Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival]
As a twelve-year-old only child, I followed my father like a puppy along the beach at the Hollister Ranch above Santa Barbara as he prised glossy black mussels from the rocks. Back at the rickety a-frame cabin, I perched on a stool as he dumped the mussels into a tall, dented aluminum pot, added a touch of wine, and clapped the lid on the top. A few minutes on the heat, gently jiggling the pan, he showed me, was all it took. Voila!, he cried, as he lifted the lid.
Miraculously to my wide-open eyes, the crusty and threatening bivalves had opened to reveal smooth, neon orange creatures who took to a bath of melted butter like it was their natural habitat.
The possibilities for shellfish and butter skipped ahead of me, crooking a finger back as if to say, this way lies your future. I collected volcano-like limpets and made them into tiny villages in the sand, with streets and salt-water ponds. The huge abalone shells we found had lost their inhabitants to eels, otters, and other natural causes but they made great ashtrays, ubiquitous in my Los Angeles childhood. That beach became mine, and dad my hero. Neither status was destined to last.
One such idyllic day was followed by a booze-fueled beach bacchanal that I didn’t fully understand until years later. All I knew then was that in the dark hours of the early morning, adults behaved like children, and children were, as usual, left to fill in the gaps. That night was the beginning of the end of my parent’s marriage and my life within a family of three.
I was left all alone with an angry woman who held an unassailable faith in her own righteousness and the sharp tongue with which to reinforce it. (She did, however, teach me how to make a mean cheese soufflé.) Only the abalone ashtrays remained, now clean and gleaming with the ocean’s iridescence, mute reminders of my father’s failings. Soon after, the Hollister Ranch was sold and there were no more sand-blasted, sun-kissed days of shell-fishing.
Thirteen years later, my dad and I sat together at a counter in a brightly lit hall. Vast, cavernous, bustling with diners from all points of the compass, Grand Central Station is a beloved landmark of Beaux-Arts architecture, and the subterranean oyster bar was and still is its most venerable eatery. At the age of 25, dad introduced me to oysters his way. His preference was for Blue Points, raw on the half-shell. “Do you DO anything to your oysters?” he’d ask the unsuspecting, his scornful tone and glare signaling disdain for anyone who added more than a spray of lemon.
But in those halcyon days of my young adulthood just after college, with the half-sisters elsewhere, it was for once just dad and me. At that bar, we rekindled a relationship that had curdled under my mother’s merciless gaze in the decade since their acrimonious divorce. He had escaped, cleaving to his East coast while I clung to my beloved West, where she was always inescapably present. But now I was a fully employed denizen of New York City, ripe with self-determination and eager to grow.
Under the disinterested eyes of the uniformed oyster wranglers at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, dad showed me his spiritual home. Not his true home, on the wrong side of Philly where the large, dirt-poor Quaker family famously subsisted on “pepper pot soup,” but the gleaming canyons of New York. Here, he had long ago cultivated and finally assumed the civilized life of a working actor. I suddenly saw him as a man made up of equal parts gravitas and corny humor, a man worthy of my respect as well as my love. It was a view that had long been obscured by the shadow of a self-involved woman.
I soaked up his wisdom, humor, and smarts like the bread we used to mop up our creamy and buttery oyster stew.
And here is my life-changing (I promise) Crab Cakes recipe on Food52, just in time for spring! The recipe also appears in the book “Food52 Genius Recipes,” by Kristen Miglore.
Four Tidbits For The Week of March 25
Brigit’s What I’m
CURRENTLY LOVING ➡️ All the hopeful lemons on the recently-disrobed tree outside my office window THINKING ABOUT ➡️ My next project: Memoir? Or fiction? LISTENING TO ➡️ The Cowboy Junkies