Eating (6 page)

L
ong Island, whose clean waters supplied our lunch, stretches some 130 miles at exactly ninety degrees from New York City, ending in a split tail, its flukes known locally as the North and South Forks. Walt Whitman, who was born on the Island, compared it to a whale, its blunt head pressed up against Manhattan to the west and its forked tail marking the entrance to Long Island Sound. If you look at a map, you will see at once what he meant. Of the two forks, the South has always been the more prosperous, and with the coming of the railroad from New York in the 1890s, the more fashionable as well. The prosperity is the result of the retreating glacier at the end of the last ice age, some ten or twelve thousand years ago, when the melting ice exposed the rich compost amassed as the glacier, like a giant push broom, scraped its way south from what is now New England to the sea. The terminal moraine, a
ridge which marks the southernmost reach of the glacier, runs down the spine of the South Fork from east to west. The outwash plain of rich topsoil sloping down from the moraine to the sea—even today, after nearly four centuries of aggressive cultivation—produces miracles summer after summer. You can stand on the beach and see the thick layer of black soil where it has been eroded by the sea, sandwiched between its top layer of grass and bottom layer of white sand.

The rich soil and the even richer whale fishery, oyster beds, and waters teeming with finfish, lobster, and crab, to say nothing of waterfowl, must have seemed like paradise to the Kentish settlers of the South Fork in the seventeenth century. The bounty shipped by these settlers to the Indies from the port of Sag Harbor, where I live in an old Federal house surrounded by trimmed boxwood and old perennial gardens, made them rich. They named their villages after the English places from which they had come: Riverhead, Wainscott, Southampton, Maidstone (which the Americans changed to East Hampton after the Revolution; amid Sag Harbor’s old houses this can still seem like a recent event). Some descendants of these early settlers still live and farm here. But it was the railroad speculators, promising their hapless investors that Montauk, the fishing village at the tip of the South Fork, would become the western terminus of transatlantic sea routes, who brought the train to eastern Long Island, and with it New York’s summertime plutocracy, as well as many artists, from Thomas Moran
to Willem de Kooning, drawn here by the company of their fellow artists and by the tender light and air. The autumn pumpkins and the cornstalks, the long white stretch of beach against a green sea through a scrim of mist, the true red of a hefty September tomato still warm from the sun, the gleaming bass and the swordfish at the Seafood Shop are the scenery of my Long Island days, but even after forty years I don’t feel quite real here, for the lakes and dark forests of Maine are the default landscape of my soul.

In 1912, the fantasy of a deepwater port at Montauk and a fast ride by rail into New York sank along with the
Titanic,
which had been rumored to inaugurate the long-awaited Montauk terminus. But by then the railroad had already made the South Fork of Long Island a fashionable resort, edged by miles of magnificent beachfront, part of the strand stretching from Montauk west to Coney Island, at the entrance to New York Harbor.

I have offered this brief history of Long Island to locate, for readers who may not be familiar with this part of the world, the old whaling port of Sag Harbor, which I consider my home, and which was settled three centuries ago as the sheltered, deepwater port for the prosperous towns of Southampton and Maidstone, before it became East Hampton. It was on a Sag Harbor whaler that Queequeg, Melville’s Polynesian harpooner in
Moby-Dick,
stowed away, hoping to become a Christian
and return to convert his royal Polynesian family. But after coming ashore at rowdy Sag Harbor, he decided to take a look at Nantucket, then chose to remain a pagan. This louche reputation lingered well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1970s, the
East Hampton Star
seldom referred to Sag Harbor without a condescending snicker. Though this fertile end of Long Island has now been wantonly overdeveloped, there is still enough protected farmland left to supply the surviving hedge-funders and investment bankers in their beachfront palaces with magnificent tomatoes, sweet corn, greens, peaches, and apples well into autumn, when the billionaires straggle south, leaving the gleanings of their summertime abundance to the Canada geese who strut across the abandoned golf courses and pick the harvested fields clean.

Sag Harbor, its old houses jammed side by side on crooked streets and occupied now mainly by writers, editors, and philosophers, has been spared this overdevelopment, for there has been almost no open space here to build upon since the nineteenth century. For years following the decline of the whaling trade and the failure of all but a handful of industries, Sag Harbor fell silently into decrepitude, too poor even to demolish its fading old houses and commercial buildings. Most of these sturdy structures have now been artfully restored, so that visitors interested in vernacular styles of American domestic architecture will find here a living museum of Federal, Greek Revival, as well as a rare
Egyptian Revival church, Swiss Cottage, and other Victorian styles, inhabited not by bewigged actors in period costume but by actual dogs, people, and children.

A century ago, families would take the train out to Southampton for weekend duck dinners at John Duck’s famous restaurant, a short walk from the depot. Never a favorite of the seasonal nobility, John Duck’s was patronized by the local burghers and known not so much for its ducks, which were still roasted in their own fat rather than with the fat extruded in the current fashion, but for its addictive coleslaw, which was served as a kind of amuse-bouche. John Duck’s is now out of business, but the composition of its coleslaw continues to intrigue local cooks.

One day last summer, at Halsey’s farm stand in Watermill, as I waited to be served, I was wondering aloud to a friend whether to buy yet another cabbage and try once again to solve the mystery of John Duck’s coleslaw. “I know the recipe,” conspiratorially whispered the farm-stand proprietor, who had been following our conversation. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” She darted away to her house to retrieve her recipe box. “Look through it,” she said, “and you’ll find it.” And so I did.

John Duck used an old fashioned cabbage grinder that quickly and accurately reduced the vegetables to a confetti-like but still-crunchy texture. A carefully managed food processor produces similar results, batch by batch.

Remove the outer leaves and core from a medium head of green cabbage. Cut the cabbage in quarters, and each quarter in three chunks. Put as much as will fit easily in a food processor, and process off and on four or five times, until most of the cabbage has been ground to the size of confetti but no smaller. Empty the ground cabbage into a bowl, remove any large pieces, and add them to the next batch. Cut a bell pepper in chunks, and chop a carrot and two stalks of celery coarsely, and run them quickly through a food processor, retaining as much texture as possible. Cut an onion separately by hand into very small dice, but be careful not to add too much or it will overwhelm everything else. For a medium cabbage, mix one cup of mayonnaise—either Hellmann’s, to save time, or homemade sweetened with a third of a cup of sugar and diluted with enough milk to melt the sugar and thin the mayonnaise without making it watery. Or substitute buttermilk or plain, unstrained yogurt for milk. Then mix all the ingredients with a teaspoon of caraway seed, add salt very carefully, a few grains at a time, and a few splashes of white vinegar to taste. Chill it for an hour or so. The result will be first cousin to John Duck’s, but creamier and crunchier.

I like to serve this coleslaw with Sal Iacono’s two-and-a-half-pound chickens, cut in eight pieces, which I marinate in Lawry’s Seasoning for a few hours, dip lightly in flour or Wondra, shaking off the excess, and fry the drumsticks and thighs first, then the breasts and wings, in vegetable oil at 350 degrees in a cast-iron skillet, taking care that the oil is
not so deep as to cover the chicken, which I turn several times, so that the skin does not blacken where it touches the pan. The chicken is done when the internal temperature reaches 135 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, after about ten minutes for the legs and thighs and a minute or two longer for the breasts. For three-and-a-half-pound chickens, the legs and thighs will take a little longer and the breasts not so long. Don’t try this with factory-raised chickens. They will be dry and tasteless.

Sal Iacono, in his white apron and farmer’s rubber boots, was an East Hampton institution; he died in 2008 at seventy-nine. His widow and son now carry on the business. Long before the term “free range” was invented, Sal’s chickens were running this way and that outdoors in good weather in a half-acre pen, and when it rains they file two by two into their spacious henhouse. Since the 1950s, when he inherited the farm from his father, he had raised his chickens on a simple diet of corn without chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, or anything else in a clean henhouse, and he sold them the day after they were killed. The chickens are the widely grown Cornish Cross, so what gives them their intense flavor and delicate texture must be their diet of unadulterated grain, their freedom to wander outdoors in search of food, their freshness, and perhaps the clean East Hampton air—in other words, their freedom to live like other birds. Whatever the reason, they are unlike any other chickens I have ever tasted, including the celebrated blue-legged
poulets de Bresse
of France. Sal himself was as cheerful and easygoing as his chickens must
have been to produce such flavor and texture, an honorable and humorous man, without pretense, who made a fine product, gave good value, enjoyed his work and his customers, and in his humble shop played tapes of the music to which he (and I) came of age many years ago.

Lately, Peconic Bay scallops, which used to grow in our bays like weeds, have been severely depleted by an invasion of algae. Now they seem to be returning, not yet in their former great numbers but enough to inspire hope that the worst is over, though another “brown tide” is moving ominously through the bays. These scallops are so sweet and tender that I like to eat them raw, lightly marinated in lime juice, with a few shreds of raw onion and some finely diced chilis. Most people, however, prefer them sautéed or fried.

To fry them I heat a half-inch of extra-virgin olive oil in a ten-inch cast-iron skillet until the oil begins to shimmer. Then I dredge a handful of scallops at a time in corn flour and discard any excess by tossing the scallops, a few at a time, in a colander, batting the colander firmly with my hand, and with tongs or a slotted spoon I lower the scallops carefully into the oil, so that the oil doesn’t splash and the scallops don’t gang up. They will brown quickly, and as soon as they do you must remove them from the oil and drain them on paper towels. Offer these to guests with drinks before dinner, three to a serving, with a wooden toothpick and a touch of cold mayonnaise thinned with lemon juice. Or serve them
as a first course with andouille or chorizo sausage in small chunks warmed through in the same pan.

Sometimes I accompany fried scallops with fried calamari. I use the smaller ones, which I cut in quarter-inch rings, trimming the heads by cutting off the eyes. I dip them in milk and then in a mixture of Wondra flour and corn flour. After shaking off the excess, I fry them in olive oil at about 350 degrees for a minute or two, until they brown slightly. Then I drain them on paper towels, salt them, and serve them at once, while they are still crisp. They are much more delicate than the heavily breaded restaurant versions, but the delicate batter won’t stay dry for long, so don’t fry more at a time than your guests can eat in five minutes. Most fish markets sell squid already cleaned. If yours doesn’t, simply separate the head and tentacles from the bodies, then remove the transparent cartilage from the body, remove the pinkish skin, rinse out the body, and proceed as above. Do not leave the calamari in the oil for more than a minute or two or they will become mushy. The aroma of squid frying in olive oil reminds me of seaside lunches at Amalfi. You may also grill very small calamari, bodies split lengthwise, flattened out, patted dry, and seared in a ridged grill pan, quickly, on high heat until the grill marks begin to appear.

Another, rather rich way to serve bay scallops for six as a first course at dinner, or a main course at lunch, is simply to poach a pound of bay scallops in a stick of hot butter with a whole garlic clove, sprinkling them with a few leaves of finely chopped rosemary—just a
hint, since rosemary is very strong. Meanwhile, boil a pound of fettuccine, preferably fresh, and when the pasta is al dente, lift it out with tongs or a pasta fork and add it to the scallops with half a cup of heavy cream, a cup of fresh-grated Parmesan, a few grains of sea salt, and a sprinkling of white pepper. This simple dish—essentially fettuccine Alfredo with scallops tinged with rosemary—is wonderfully comforting, especially for long-distance bicycle racers in need of carbohydrates. If the pasta seizes up, add a cup or so of pasta water.

Another version of this dish, which I learned from the late Pierre Franey, is to use shucked and chopped cherrystone clams instead of scallops, and add a good handful of chopped basil and some fresh-ground black pepper to the fettuccine, which I boil in water mixed with claim juice. I omit the Parmesan. This dish is so rich that I seldom make it now, but when I do I serve only a generous forkful in a large pasta bowl to each guest as a first course.