There are, of course, moments in writing when even the most devoted cook stops cooking. Those are the moments that, in sex, are called “transporting” but in journalism are known as an empty fridge, an irritable family, and the beginnings of a first-name friendship with the woman who answers the phone at Empire Szechuan. When I am lost in one of those moments, I subsist on takeout and jasmine tea, or if takeout is truly beyond me—the doorbell, the change, the tip, the mismatched chopsticks, the arguments when I won’t share—on chili-lime tortilla chips and Diet Coke. If the hour is decent, I’ll mix a Bloody Mary or a caipirinha like the ones that the priest and I used to sneak in the kitchen of the parish house of Campos Elísios on evenings when the Seventh-Day Adventists would arrive at the favela in force, pitch a tent in a field, and call the poor to salvation through amps rented by the hour from a Copacabana beach band. But moments like those are rare.
My normal state when beginning a piece is panic, and by now my friends and family are able to gauge that panic by the food I feed them. This past spring, in the course of a few weeks of serious fretting over the lead of a story about an Afghan refugee, I cooked a small Thanksgiving turkey, two Christmas rib roasts, and an Easter lamb. I cooked them with all the fixings, from the corn-bread-and-sausage stuffing to the Yorkshire pudding and horseradish cream—though I stopped short of the Greek Easter cheesecake that three cookbooks assured me had to be made in a clean flowerpot. My excuse was that I’d worked through Thanksgiving and been snowbound in Berlin through Christmas, and, of course, it was nearly Easter when I began my holiday cooking. Easter, actually, went well. No one mentioned the fact that we were celebrating it on a Saturday night, or, for that matter, that at noon on Sunday we were due, as always, for our annual Easter lunch at the home of some old friends. But Thanksgiving in April brought strained smiles all around, especially since my next-door neighbor had already cooked a lovely Thanksgiving dinner for me in February. And while my first Christmas was a big success—one of the guests brought presents and a box of chocolate mushrooms left over from a bûche de Noël—my second Christmas, a few days later, ended badly, when my daughter suggested that I “see someone” to discuss my block, my husband announced to a room full of people that I was “poisoning” him with saturated fats, and my son-in-law accused me of neglecting the dog. But I did end up with a paragraph. In fact, I thought it was a pretty good paragraph. And I finished the piece the way I usually finish pieces, with notes and cookbooks piled on the floor, working for a few hours, sorting the Post-its on my desk into meaningless, neat stacks, and then heading for my big stove to do more cooking—in this case, to add the tomatoes to a Bolognese sauce, because my last paragraph was too tricky to handle without a slow, comfortable Italian sauce, and I’d been using Bolognese for tricky characters since I first tackled the subject of François Mitterrand, in a story on his inauguration, in 1981.
It seems to me that there is something very sensible about keeping your memories in the kitchen, with the pots and the spices, especially in New York. They take up no space; they do not crash with your computer; and they collect the voice that you can’t quite hear—in tastes and smells and small gestures that, with any luck, will eventually start to sound like you. I’m not in New York right now. The dinner I was cooking twenty-five pages ago—the clam-and-pork stew with plenty of garlic and piri-piri that I first ate in a Portuguese fishermen’s tavern near Salem, the day I tacked wrong and sailed my boyfriend’s sixteen-footer into a very big ketch and broke his mast and, with it, whatever interest he had in me—is not the dinner I am cooking today, at a farmhouse in Umbria. My stove is smaller here (though my pots are bigger). I do not write easily about myself. I am not as tasty or exotic as the characters I usually choose. My first attempt at anything like autobiography was a thinly disguised short story, and it was returned with the gentle suggestion that I replace myself with someone “a little less like the kind of person we know everything about already.” But twenty years later I did manage to produce a reminiscence of sorts. It was about my mother and my daughter and about being a feminist, and it ended where I am writing now, in Umbria, looking across a pond to a field of wheat and watching a family of pheasants cross my garden. It occurred to me, worrying over this ending—not quite a panic but enough of a problem to have already produced a Sardinian saffron-and-sausage pasta, a cold pepper soup with garlic croutons, nightly platters of chicken-liver-and-anchovy bruschetta, pressed through my grandmother’s hand mill, and twenty jars of brandied apricot jam—that I might possibly solve the problem by cooking the same dinner that I’d cooked then. It turns out to be one meal I can’t remember.
2002
“If she says ‘Yummy,’ it’s bonuses right down the line.”
FISHING AND FORAGING
“We don’t know what it is, but it’s fresh.”
“Dog meat has been eaten in every major German crisis at least since the time of Frederick the Great, and is commonly referred to as ‘blockade mutton.’ It is tough, gamy, strong-flavored.”
—Time, November 25th.
A MESS OF CLAMS
JOSEPH MITCHELL
Practically all the littleneck and cherrystone clams served on the half shell in New York restaurants come out of the black mud of the Long Island bays. They are the saltiest, cleanest, and biggest-bellied clams in the world. The most abundant beds are in Great South Bay and are owned by the towns of Islip and Babylon. Right after dawn every weekday about seventy licensed clammers from these towns go out on the Bay in a fleet of dilapidated sloops and catboats and spread out over the beds. They work over the sides of their anchored boats, using long-handled tongs and rakes; the clams are bedded in bottoms which lie under eight to ten feet of water. At noon the buy-boats of two clam-shipping firms—Still & Clock of Bay Shore and G. Vander Borgh & Son of West Sayville—go out and anchor near the fleet, and from then until 4 P.M. the clammers bring their catches to the buy-boats in bushel bags and sell them over the rail for cash.
One muggy day last week I made a trip to the South Bay beds with Captain Archie M. Clock, who commands the Still & Clock buy-boat. This boat is the Jennie Tucker, a battered, stripped-down, thirty-eight-foot sloop powered with a motor the Captain took out of an old Chrysler. Captain Clock and his partner, Louis Still, are members of families which have fished, oyster-farmed, and clammed on the South Shore since the middle of the eighteenth century. I arrived at their weather-beaten clam shed on Homan Avenue Creek in Bay Shore at ten in the morning and found Captain Clock on the narrow wharf at the rear. He was sitting on an overturned clam bucket, smoking his pipe. A man I know who runs a wholesale shellfish business in Fulton Fish Market had written me a note of introduction to the Captain, and I handed it to him. He read it, grunted, and said, “You picked a good day to see the beds. We’re going out a little early.” He motioned toward a bucket with the stem of his pipe. “Have a seat and make yourself at home,” he said. “Do you care much for clams?”
I sat down on the bucket and told him that one Sunday afternoon in August 1937, I placed third in a clam-eating tournament at a Block Island clambake, eating eighty-four cherries. I told him that I regard this as one of the few worthwhile achievements of my life.
“Well, you can eat yourself a bellyful today,” he said. “I feel like having a few myself. They tell me brewers sometimes get so they hate beer, and sometimes I get so I can’t stand the sight of a clam, but I’m real hungry this morning.”
The Jennie Tucker was lying alongside the wharf, and the mate, a muscular young man named Charlie Bollinger, was sloshing down her decks with buckets of water. “Give her plenty of water, Charlie,” the Captain told him. He turned to me and said, “You have to be double-extra clean when you’re handling clams. Let a few dead clams lie around and you’ll breed up a smell that’ll knock you off your feet.” He stood up, yawned, and went into a little office in the shed. When he returned he carried an armful of gear which included a lunch bucket, a tattered old ledger, and a green metal box.
Later I learned that this box contained the cash with which he would buy the day’s load.
“Everything okay, Charlie?” he asked.
“She’s clean as a whistle, Archie,” said the mate.
“Let’s get going then,” he said. We went aboard and the Captain stored his gear in the sloop’s tiny cabin. The Captain was stocky, slow-moving, and sleepy-eyed. He was deeply tanned, but he had smeared some white salve on his nose and ears to guard against sunburn. He was roughly dressed; he wore patched pants, a blue work shirt, and a long-visored swordfisherman’s cap. He took the tiller, which he handled expertly, until we were well out in the Bay. Then he turned it over to Bollinger, got his ledger, and sat down beside me on the hatch. “The beds they’re clamming lie about four miles down the Bay,” he said, motioning with his head in the direction of Babylon. He opened the ledger and got a new page ready, writing down the names of the clammers. The wind from the ocean ruffled the pages as he worked. Most of the names he wrote down were old Long Island ones, like Doxsee, Ricketts, Baldwin, Crowell, and Tooker.
“Most of the clammers come from families that have been around this bay so many generations they long since lost track,” he said. “The bulk of them are of English descent or Holland Dutch, and there’s quite a few squareheads. They know the bottom of the Bay like they know their wife’s face. Clamming is back-breaking, but a man can get a living if his muscle holds out. I looked through this ledger last night and figured I paid one clammer eighty-some-odd dollars last week, but that’s unusual. Most of them average between five and ten bucks a day. It’s all according to how good a man can handle the tongs.”
He laid his ledger on the hatch, stretched his arms, and yawned. The morning had been cloudy, but the sun came out soon after we left the wharf and now it was burning off the haze on the Bay. After it had been shining fifteen minutes, we could see the striped Fire Island lighthouse and the long, glistening dunes on Oak and Captree Islands. I asked the Captain if any bayman can go out to the beds and clam.
“He cannot,” the Captain said. “He has to get a Conservation Department license that costs two and a half, and he has to be a resident of the town that owns the beds he works. A Babylon man can’t clam in Islip water, and vice versa. In fact, they’re always fussing among themselves about the division line. That’s a fuss that’ll go on as long as there’s a clam left in the mud.”
“How much do you pay for a bushel?” I asked.
“The price is based on the size of the clam and the demand in Fulton Market,” the Captain said. “Prices may fluctuate as much as fifty cents in a single season, but right now I’m paying the boys two dollars a bushel for littlenecks and a dollar and a half for cherrystones. That’s for the half-shell trade. For the big ones—what we call chowders—I pay a dollar a bushel.
“The bulk of the clams in South Bay are hard-shells—they’re called quahogs in New England. There’s a few soft-shells, or steamers, around the shores of the Bay, but we don’t bother with them. Most of the steam clams you see in the city come from New England. The hard-shell is the king of the clams. He can be baked, fried, steamed, put into chowder, or served on the half shell. I will say that the best chowder is made with a mixture of softs and hards. Out here we believe in Manhattan-style chowder, a couple of tomatoes to every quart of shucked clams. Our chowder clams are around four years old, a couple of years older than littlenecks. We truck our necks and cherries to dealers in Fulton Market and to restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and we truck the chowders to the Campbell’s soup factory in Camden, New Jersey. They take around fifteen hundred bushels of chowders off us every week.” He turned to the mate. “I’ll take her now, Charlie,” he said.
Soon after Captain Clock took the tiller, we approached the fleet. The little boats were laying with the wind and the tide about two miles southeast of Babylon. Captain Clock said the majority of the boats were anchored near the imaginary line dividing the beds, and that some were hugging it. “Human nature,” he said. “The boys from Islip just itch to work the Babylon water, and the Babylon boys think they could tong up twice as many if they could get over on the Islip territory.” A few of the boats carried two clammers, one for each side, but one man to a boat seemed to be the rule. When we were about fifty yards from the nearest clammer, the Captain ducked into the cabin and cut off the motor. Bollinger hurried to the bow and threw out the anchor.
“Now I’ll show you how to clam,” said Captain Clock. “We’ll tong up a few pecks for us to eat.”
He rolled up his shirtsleeves and picked up a pair of tongs, an implement with two sets of teeth fixed to the ends of two fourteen-foot handles. He lowered the tongs into the water, which was nine feet deep, and pushed the opened teeth into the mud; then he brought the handles together scissors-fashion, closing the teeth. Just before hauling the tongs over the rail, he doused the closed teeth in the water several times, washing out the mud. He opened the teeth on the deck and out dropped a dazed spider crab, two bunches of scarlet oyster sponge, a handful of empty shells, and twelve beautiful clams. The shells of the clams were steel blue, the color of the Bay water.
“A good haul,” he said. “I got four cherries, two necks, two chowders, and four peanuts.” He said that a state law forbids the sale of clams less than an inch thick and that such undersized clams are called peanuts. He tossed the peanuts and the crab back into the water. Then he put the tongs overboard again. He sent the teeth into the mud seven times and brought up forty-three clams. Then he laid aside the tongs and got two clam knives off a shelf in the cabin. He gave me one and we squatted on the deck and went to work opening the cherries. When the valves were pried apart, the rich clam liquor dribbled out. The flesh of the cherries was a delicate pink. On the cups of some of the shells were splotches of deep purple; Indians used to hack such splotches out of clamshells for wampum. Fresh from the coal-black mud and uncontaminated by ketchup or sauce, they were the best clams I have ever eaten. The mate sat on the hatch and watched us.
“Aren’t you going to have any?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t put one of them goddamn things in my mouth if I was perishing to death,” he said. “I’m working on this buy-boat ten years and I’m yet to eat a clam.”
He scornfully watched us eat for a few moments; then he went into the cabin and came out with a portable radio, which he placed on the cabin roof, and tuned in on a news broadcast. While the Captain and I opened and ate clams we looked out at the fleet and watched the clammers. The Captain said that a clammer works both sides of his boat until the tongs start coming up empty; then he lets out slack in his anchor cable and drifts into unworked territory. “Most of them are patient,” he said, “but some will be lifting and dropping their anchors all day long. When a man does that we say he’s got the runs.” The fleet was made up largely of catboats stripped of their rigs and powered with old automobile motors. The majority of the men were tonging, but here and there a man worked with a rake. The Captain said that rakes are used only on stretches of soft bottom. “The handle of a rake is twenty-two feet long,” he said, “and it takes a Joe Louis to pull it.” Some of the clammers were stripped to their belts, but most of them worked in their undershirts. Occasionally a man would lay aside his tongs or rake and squat in the bottom of the boat and bag up his clams. Captain Clock said it is customary for the clammers to sell their catches in the early afternoon hours, so the shippers will have time to cull and barrel the clams for trucking in the evening.
The Captain and I were finishing the last of the forty-three clams when a whistle in Babylon blew for noon. “We better eat dinner, Archie,” Bollinger said. “They’ll start bringing their loads over pretty soon now.” Intent on his last clam, the Captain nodded. Bollinger brought out their lunch buckets and a thermos jug of iced tea. I had bought a couple of sandwiches in Bay Shore and I got them out of my raincoat. Bollinger tuned in on a program of waltzes broadcast from a Manhattan hotel. We sat on peck baskets in the hot sun and ate and listened to the walt
zes. We were drinking tea out of tin cups when the first of the clammers came alongside. Bollinger jumped up, tossed the clammer a rope, and helped him make fast to the Jennie Tucker. The clammer was a small, spry old man in hip boots.
“What you got?” Captain Clock asked him.
“Nothing to speak of,” he said. “Just a mess of clams. I been scratch-raking off Grass Island. I got two bushels of cherries, a bushel of necks, and two bushels of chowders.” Gripping the bags by their ears, he passed them to Bollinger. Captain Clock took a five and two ones out of his cashbox and handed them to the clammer, who carefully placed them in an old-fashioned snap purse. Then he picked up two conches from the bottom of his boat and tossed them to Bollinger.
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