Shrimp for the Land-locked

Before bad financial times, I traveled spring and fall to the Gulf Coast. St. George Island. Cape San Blas. Cedar Key. Fairhope. Fort Morgan. I bought my shrimp at Billy's Seafood and from the Dall's truck and at Robinson's Seafood. This shrimp, except for Royal Reds, was straight off the boat and never frozen. The best one can buy. And superb eating. Between trips, I never bought shrimp.

Yet life changes, and the shrimp lover who cannot travel south will have to compromise. I began buying bagged frozen shrimp this past fall.I prefer it to the previously frozen, now thawed shrimp on ice. I have tried both frozen wild caught from the Gulf, and farmed shrimp from Asia. I bought my seafood at one of the better grocery chains in Nashville. And it pains me to write, because it is so counterintuitive, that the farmed shrimp was better. It came de-veined and passed the sniff test. It was sweet and juicy.

When I opened the bag of wild shrimp I smelled lost time. I washed them, then sauteed them in butter, clam juice, and cream. They still had a whiff to them. They were rubbery and tasteless. So I tried another bag. These were worse. They smelled rotten after I thawed them. But my porch possum did not turn up his nose at them.

I do not like food sauced with guilt, and so much of our food comes covered with it.
That includes farmed shrimp, which are accused of harboring antibiotics and chemicals and of ruining mangrove swamps. Yet look what has happened in our American Mediterranean- the Gulf of Mexico. Are our wild caught shrimp pristine? What has oil sludge done to them? And what will happen when radioactive waste rains down on sea and land, as it is already doing?

I am an agnostic, but I do believe that this is a fallen world. Look at the past year. Horrific flooding in this city-. of homes where homes should never have been. The Gulf oil spill. The contamination of Japan.

Weighty, forlorn thoughts , brought on by a bag of shrimp.

The Judge Cooks a Squirrel

The Junior League of Baton Rouge has a chapter in its "River Road Recipes II" called "How Men Cook". Its expert on squirrels is a Judge Fred A Blanche,Jr.

"I prefer young, tender gray squirrels over all other game", writes the Judge, and he includes a recipe for a brown gravy that he serves with it.

Perhaps the Judge's family liked squirrel as well, but I imagine that when the judge cooked it, it was in the company of other men deep in those woman-free havens of the fish camp and the hunting lodge. Men need a place away from women. That is why there are Moose Halls.

"Cut the squirrels into serving sized pieces", writes the Judge. I will have to take him on faith, since I am having trouble seeing how many pieces one squirrel could end up in. I doubt that tail or those ears have much meat on them. And would not the legs be tough from all that skittering and jumping? But perhaps the Judge and his companions find that his Milk Punch (half a gallon of ice cream, 1 quart of milk, a fifth of bourbon) makes any meal taste better.

I picture the Judge and his friends lakeside at Reelfoot Lake. I ,in fact, know of one male hideout there on Blue Basin Road. Someone who knows told me that this house is a club for rich city men who need to get away. I can see attorneys and doctors, and judges standing on its porch drinking how ever much they want and smelling squirrel or catfish sizzling in a 12 inch cast iron skillet. And maybe after dinner the men will play cards and dream out loud about well-trained retrievers and duck season.

Meanwhile, back at home, Mrs.Judge is enjoying her husband less time. Now she can go out with a friend to see a movie their husbands would hate. Or go to dinner by herself. Freedom for him is freedom for her.

I feel sorry for the sexes these days. We are too much in one another's company. I cringe when I hear a man telling people that "We" are pregnant. I squirm thinking of husbands in the delivery room. I wager most of them would rather be somewhere-anywhere-else. So I begrudge no man his lodge, his privacy, his fishing buddies, and his fried squirrel cut into serving size pieces and served forth on good old paper plates.

First Day of Spring

Gardeners define weeds as "plants out of place", and the purple robe spread over this field is one of our worst weeds- the Henbit. Obnoxious and ineradicable in lawn and garden, but a different plant entirely in an open field under a warm March sun. It is annual. It will soon yellow and mildew and die, and leave behind seeds by the millions. It is always in full bloom on the first day of spring.

A Visit to Nashville's West End

Let this city's rich have their ostentatious and empty-looking houses in Belle Meade and Forest Hills. Sensible and smart people will prefer the smaller, more human neighborhoods of the West End with its historic homes and its beckoning sidewalks.

I took these photos on Whitland this past Friday. A friend and I drove down to an estate sale on that street, and it was a joy to be in a real neighborhood. The sale was in one of the larger, two story houses. We entered through the back, walking by Lenten Roses and Bergenia in bloom.

Only half the house was open. Next Friday the rest of it will be, and since that includes the kitchen, I will be returning. The estate belonged to a woman who had owned an art gallery. Her taste was relentlessly contemporary. I prefer the antique, and though the paintings and pottery and baskets did not appeal to me, I was stunned by the excellence of her library. For this woman and her husband were Readers. Books to the ceilings, covering the walls, inside the cabinets. Books on Judaism, on Tennessee history, novels by Bellow, Pym, Mailer,Cheever,Roth, Malamud. A study of the American character by Max Lerner. Biography, politics, coffee table books about Nantucket and country inns and Currier and Ives. And the art books- a small fortune's worth of books about Spanish Art,the Prado, Vermeer, the Impressionists, and five hundred years of Mexican art. And the estate sale people assure me there are hundreds of books in the other half of the house.

Many of the books came from the now closed Davis-Kidd Booksellers. And ironically, only a few days ago Borders, down by Vanderbilt, announced it was closing. The Borders in Brentwood is staying open, but the only stores left in the city are Books-a-Million in West Nashville and McKay's on Charlotte. And I must here confess I never went inside Borders, and I abandoned Davis-Kidd when it relocated to the Green Hills Mall. I avoided that mall's gridlock by clicking on Amazon.

And perhaps the day is coming when there will be no more bookshelves and no more book marks. We will read on a screen and perhaps be happy that we have less dusting to do. And what sad places our homes will become. For the soul of this house on Whitland was in its books, and in the humane and literate couple who lived there.

Estate Sale Cookbooks

I do not expect to find Julia Child or Richard Olney at Nashville estate sales, for either the heirs made away with them or the departed never owned them. I do expect diabetic cookbooks and weight loss cookbooks, but I am not interested in them. I want the Ladies' Auxillary ring binder cookbooks. Recipe collections from the United Methodist Church in Belle Meade. Anything the Junior League feels fit to print. He, or she, who comes upon "Charleston Receipts", "Nashville Seasons", or "The Cotton Country collection" has found a cookbook worth taking home. You shall never want for casseroles, and they will be the best that ever weighted down a sideboard-

Consider the two books pictured here.

"Doin' the Charleston", from 1982, is a tribute to that city's restaurants. If that was all this book was, it would be dated. How many restaurants live for thirty years? But this book has line drawings, and bits of history. And even better- a recipe for "Casserole of Drunken Fishes". French fish drink white wine, but in the South when fish drink, they pour themselves a bourbon. Happy swimming for the lobster, flounder, clams, snapper, and 8 shrimp in this recipe. This little book by Molly Heady Sillers was a bargain for two dollars.

"Tastes of Lace" is a book of recipes from the Ladies' Association for Christian Education in Atlanta. Its previous owner baptized it with butter and cheese bits - all over the appetizer section and the cheese ball and wieners in plum jelly recipes. It was a well loved book. Again, Two dollars. Yet what I like best are the first two lines of the homespun poem on the first page. Doggerel is no stranger to community cookbooks. Someone has always shoe-horned in a verse. But this is different:

"They talk about a woman's sphere

As though it had a limit".

Yeats could not have said it better.

A Quote and a Poetic Fragment

" I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".- Robert J Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission.


Not forever on earth: only a little while here.

Although it be jade, it will be broken.

Although it be gold, it is crushed.

Although it be quetzel feather, it is torn asunder.

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.


The poem above was by the Aztec poet-king Nezahualcoyotl, quoted by Robert H Gore in his book "The Gulf of Mexico".

The Estate Sale Diaries-

Although I had worked all night, I went to an estate sale last Friday morning. It was a modest sale, though there were dealers there for the furniture, which must have been valuable. I rarely look at furniture. My apartment is small, and even if I wanted something new I would not be able to carry it away. I look at kitchen wares, linens, prints and paintings, glassware, and garden ornaments. And the cookbooks. Always the cookbooks.

I always hope that the late owner was a traveler. A person who might pick up small local landscapes while on holiday in France or Mexico. Or even at craft fairs closer to home,for I am partial to the earnest work of amateurs.

And I also love old napkins and tea towels and tablecloths. Few buy them, since no one wants to iron, but what cachet they will add to a table-