Whenever I have been in the presence of Zoe and Alex Sanders, the food has always been fabulous, the company unparalleled, the drink free-flowing and plentiful, and the conversation thrilling, heady, life-changing. As a couple, they have turned the dailiness of life into an art form and invited anyone who crosses their path to learn all its steps and secrets. As the College of Charleston knows, the now-retired President and Mrs. Sanders live out their lives at full speed, incapable of holding anything back. Both are fine cooks, and I have eaten like a deposed Italian king when I’ve found myself a lucky guest in their house. Zoe has as inimitable a reputation and mystique as a hostess as her husband does as an orator or storyteller or judge or educator. She is pretty, fiercely competent, fiery in her beliefs, and tenacious in her loves and enthusiasms.
Once, I sat with friends as Alex and Zoe fixed a fish stew that I remember being as good as any bouillabaisse that I ordered in the back-streets of Marseilles. The rouille they composed to top that soup in cloudlike dollops was a lovesong to garlic. I can summon up visions of past meals that have included ice chests loaded down with shrimp that had been swimming offshore that morning; oysters gathered during the last low tide; salads glistening with olive oil and darkened with raindrops of balsamic vinegar; fennel and red peppers blistered on the same grills where marinated flank steaks will follow; quail and wild rice swimming in gravy; sirloin steaks as large as my head hanging off serving platters; grouper and salmon and mahimahi coming off their bones in nuggets of white flesh that tastes like seaborne butter to the palate.
Both Alex Sanders and I have been accused of being prone to grotesque exaggeration in our careers, and there is great merit when that accusation is directed at Alex. But in my own defense, I can never convince people outside the South that I know someone as pointlessly colorful, outrageous, and bone-jarringly amusing as Alex Sanders himself. Alex helped me understand that the South I grew up in is so over-the-top and overbaked that I see myself as a shy minimalist trying to ink black-and-white woodcuts of my native land. Southerners all know that the South is too bizarre and out of control for its own good. I always find myself having to surrender some of the juice, hold back on the cayenne and Tabasco, for the sake of credibility itself.
When The Prince of Tides came out in 1986, I sat in the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York answering questions from a hostile reporter. As I dined on sweetbreads poached in white wine, I never thought I would be conducting much of the interview about Alex Sanders while a journalist skewered my brightest work.
“I found the white porpoise scene in your novel a little much,” she said, toying with her salad. Critics are mostly bulimic, rail-thin—no great appetites there. “Homage to Herman Melville. Right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “Alex Sanders told me the story.”
“Who is Alex Sanders?”
“The greatest of all South Carolinians,” I answered. “I thanked him in the acknowledgments.”
“You thanked everyone in the acknowledgments,” she said. “But there’s no white porpoise, right?”
“Wrong. I saw the white porpoise swimming in Harbor River when I was at Beaufort High School.”
I could tell she did not believe me, but she went on with the next question. “In your book you have a Bengal tiger at a gas station. How ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, eating happily “Another story from Alex Sanders. That was Happy the Tiger at an Esso gas station on Gervais Street in Columbia. I once fed Happy a chicken neck after I got my car washed.”
“Let’s go on,” she said, her voice skeptical. “The moving of the town? To make way for a plutonium plant?”
“Want to go to the town?” I asked. “It’s called New Ellenton.”
“You claim it’s true.”
“I could get you a radiation burn at the plant, if you’re so inclined.”
She looked over her notes, then said, “And you’re going to tell me Alex Sanders told you this story.”
“It’s one of his best,” I said.
“Do you pay Alex Sanders royalties?”
“If I were a good and decent man, I certainly would. But I prefer to simply rob him of all his material and take full credit for it. He does the same to me.”
“Do you ever have any ideas of your own?” she asked scornfully.
“Every once in a while I borrow from my meager pantry of ideas. But not often.”
“What does this Alex Sanders do? Is he employed?”
“He’s the chief justice of South Carolina’s Court of Appeals, and he teaches at Harvard Law School.”
She studied me for a moment, then said, “You’re exaggerating again.”
“Hotshot reporter like yourself could find out in a jif,” I said, my voice revealing my irritation.
“You sound hostile.”
“You find me dishonest.”
“I’m skeptical,” she said.
“That makes me hostile.”
“Does the great Alex Sanders find you hostile?”
“He finds me perfectly delightful in every possible way,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I feel the same way about him. I’d rather spend an evening with Alex Sanders than anyone I’ve ever met. You’d feel the same way if you knew Alex. Everyone does.”
Again, her eyes went to her notes, and her hostility was like a condiment to the meal. She said, “Let’s go to the old chestnut. If you could invite any three people in history to a dinner party, who would they be?”
“Alex Sanders. Alex Sanders. Then Alex Sanders again.”
“You’re making fun of the question,” she said.
“I certainly am. You want me to answer Jesus of Nazareth, Genghis Khan, and Eva Braun. Something like that.”
“Something like that,” she said, then she looked around at the décor of the unsurpassable Four Seasons. “Why did you want to eat in a place like this? I find it pretentious.”
“It was recommended to me by Alex Sanders and his lovely wife, Zoe.”
The reporter rose up to shake my hand and said, in parting, “I haven’t believed a word you’ve said.”
I found this strange encounter in one of my journals and wanted to include it in this book because Zoe and Alex are unlike any two people I have ever met. They entered my life like two sharply tanged sorbets, coming in the middle of the meal to cleanse the palate and ready you for the feast that is on its way from the kitchen. Always, they have surprised me with their uncanny and inexhaustible generosity.
When I last saw Alex, he told me about selling a litter of Boykin spaniels from the back of a pickup truck to a group of rich Yankees at William Buckley’s house in Camden, South Carolina. Then he launched into one of the greatest love stories I’ve ever heard, about a shepherd in France who falls in love with a beautiful French reporter. The reporter climbs for six hours to reach the upper pastures where the shepherd tends his flocks in plain sight of the Alps. But I only hint at these stories with the hope that I live long enough to include them in future novels I have stolen from the brimming imagination of the greatest of all South Carolinians, Alex Sanders.
SOUPE DE POISSON Near the docks of Marseilles, in a restaurant that looked more dangerous than enchanting, I followed the maitre d’ to a small table with a starched, no-nonsense tablecloth; a glacial waiter moved toward my table. My guidebook said the restaurant served one of the best bouillabaisses in Marseilles, where the dish marked its provenance. I had eaten Zoe and Alex Sanders’s fish soup on two occasions—once in the mountains of Georgia at Joe and Emily Cummings’s house, and once in their own house in Columbia. I noted that these were two of the finest home-cooked meals I had ever eaten. This soup is celebratory and generous of spirit, and you fall in love with the friends who take the time to make it for you. It is a soup of great simplicity, yet the taste resonates along the palate.
I thought I was going to catch grief from the waiter for dining alone because Julia Child had forewarned in her book M
astering the Art of French Cooking that bouillabaisse was best made for a table of six. The French waiter asked me if it was my first time eating bouillabaisse in Marseilles, and I said in pidgin French that it was. “The bouillabaisse of Paris is not bouillabaisse,” he said in one of the only French sentences I’ve ever understood.
When he emerged later from the kitchen, I could smell the meal racing ahead of him in the air. He set it in front of me and told me to inhale the steam rising from the broth. The smell was clean and deep, as though I were living inside an aquarium. I took a spoon and made sure I shaved off the southern portion of the rouille, a piece of sole, the scented broth, and a piece of the toasted French bread at the bottom. It was good beyond my powers to dream.
France, ladies and gentlemen. France.
• SERVES 6 AS A FIRST COURSE
4 cups Fish Stock (page 12)
2 tomatoes, coarsely chopped
Pinch of saffron threads
3 pounds any combination of fresh fish, cleaned, skinned, and cut into large dice*
12 slices baguette, lightly toasted
Rouille (see below)
1. In a medium stockpot, bring the fish stock to a simmer. Stir in the tomatoes and saffron and continue to simmer until the flavors marry, 8 to 10 minutes.
2. Gently place the pieces of fish in the simmering stock and continue simmering until the fish is cooked through but still slightly translucent in the center, about 5 minutes.
3. Put 2 slices of toast in each wide, shallow soup bowl. Ladle the soup into the bowls. Place a spoonful of rouille in the middle of the soup and serve. Pass the remaining rouille at the table.
Rouille
Use Homemade Mayonnaise (page 57) for the framework. Add 5 finely minced garlic cloves to the whisked egg yolks and a crushed small dried red chile when the mixture is transferred to the food processor.
GRILLED FENNEL AND PEPPER SALAD • SERVES 6 TO 8
4 fennel bulbs, cleaned, trimmed, and quartered
4 large red bell peppers, cored, seeded, and quartered
Olive oil
Coarse or kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper
Fresh mint leaves
Balsamic vinegar
1. Toss the vegetables in olive oil, add salt and pepper to taste, and marinate for at least 45 minutes.
2. Light a medium-hot fire. Grill the fennel, cut side up, for 3 minutes. Turn and grill for another 3 minutes, or until lightly charred. Grill the peppers for 2 minutes a side until lightly charred.
3. Arrange the fennel and peppers on a serving platter. Sprinkle with fresh mint. Pass balsamic vinegar on the side.
*Using at least four or five types of fish makes the soup more interesting: cod, mahimahi, tilapia, sea bass, grouper, halibut, snapper, trout, monkfish, catfish, or swordfish. Avoid strong-flavored fish like bluefish or mackerel.
There are austere rules in the writing of novels that vex the young writer every bit as much as the rules of finesse and discipline and cuisine vex a headstrong apprentice. Young masochists are drawn toward melodrama and coincidence; thus young writers and young cooks have much in common. As do older writers and master chefs.
I speak now of coincidence and the detached collisions of fate. In the early eighties, I spent an extraordinary week in New York City where I attended plays and thrilled to an opera with my agent, Julian Bach, having dinner at the Four Seasons afterward. Like a bird-watcher, I keep a list of great restaurants that I would like to eat my way through during my passage on this earth. I crossed off Lutèce and La Côte Basque on this journey, during which I presented the full outline of The Prince of Tides to my lovely editor, Nan Talese. But Julian Bach and Nan Talese were not coincidences, rather part of the natural architecture of my life.
On the Delta flight back home to Atlanta, fate cleared its throat as I heard a handsome young man in the aisle seat across from me whistling softly. I am not the kind of man who starts up conversations with strangers on airplanes and who then pulls out pictures of his children to show to any passenger within earshot. When I travel, I prize my anonymity and solitude and have no desire to be seated next to a compulsive chatterbox. The whistling from the right drew my attention, but it was the stack of cookbooks that riveted me. In a neatly stacked pile, the young man was looking up recipes from the very best cookbooks published in that year. These were on the cutting edge and the outer rim—it was long before the dawning of the era of the celebrity chefs and the Food Network, but that revolution was in the air. Already, extra virgin olive oil had started to appear in Southern supermarkets, bringing sex, at last, to Southern kitchens. Arugula, watercress, and daikon radishes were making shy appearances in produce departments in my part of the world, and Paul Prudhomme had already made his mark in New Orleans, initiating the era when you could not meet a redfish that someone had not blackened. In my hometown of Atlanta, the glittering era of Pano & Paul’s had begun, Buckhead began to strut with restaurants bucking for four stars, and I heard a Frenchman say you could get a better Russian meal at Nicolai’s Roof’s downtown location than you could in Moscow. Cuisine was breaking out all over the South, as luxuriant and uncontrollable as kudzu. The man across the aisle from me was about to change the history of his home state of Alabama forever.
“Sir,” I said, watching him scribble in his notebook, “those cookbooks you’re reading, they’re wonderful.”
“I think I just spent the best week of my life working in the kitchens of these four chefs,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can learn in just a week. My name is Frank Stitt, sir.”
“Mine is Pat Conroy” I said. “Are you a chef?”
“Yes, I am, though I’ve never run my own place,” Frank said. “I’m about to open a restaurant.”
“Can I ask where?”
“Birmingham, Alabama,” he said.
“It’s a wasteland for good food,” I said. “I was there a month ago.”
“It won’t be a wasteland anymore,” Frank replied with a confidence that both surprised and delighted me.
“If you’re any good at all,” I remember saying, “you’re going to be a very rich man.”
Frank appraised me with care and then said, “I’m good. I’m very good.”
He said it with a measure of conviction and authority that carried much weight with me. Frank declared it like a man with keenly earned self-knowledge, an awesome respect for the art of cooking, and a firm knowledge of the great gift he was about to bestow on his home state. He spoke with enthusiasm about the chefs who trained him in France, and he was already comfortable speaking in the vocabulary and techniques of Escoffier, Joel Robuchon, and Alain Ducasse. I could not mention a restaurant that he did not have knowledge of. His long apprenticeship was now over and Frank Stitt was coming home to deliver the goods to Alabama.
The Highlands Bar & Grill changed the way the people of Alabama thought about food. It was a revolution in the center of a neighborhood that was going slightly to seed but was about to start its renaissance. The quality of its restaurants is an important gauge for a city to measure its call to greatness. Frank Stitt put Birmingham on the culinary map the day he opened his restaurant. Later I heard from a white-shoe lawyer in one of those Atlanta law firms with enough WASP names to start a hive that the Highlands Bar was better than any restaurant in Atlanta. That’s long before the kinks were worked out and long before Frank hit his amazing stride. I made it to the restaurant in the first six months of its existence and discovered that Frank Stitt was a far, far better chef than anyone who had ever crossed the Chattahoochee River from Georgia or entered the Birmingham city limits under the cover of darkness after a lost weekend in New Orleans.
Here is what you get in a Frank Stitt meal and what you get with every recipe in his magnificent cookbook, Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: the full measure and passion of a man on fire with devotion to his chosen work. He gives you all the artistry at his command every time you sit down for a meal, and he does not tolerate lapses in the kitchen o
r produce that is not the freshest available. I have eaten at the Highlands Bar & Grill over twenty times and have never eaten a single meal that was not superb—the restaurant remains the best reason to move to Birmingham that I can think of. I would call Frank Stitt the best chef in America, but that would cause undue jealousy in the ranks of other chefs whose powers of cruelty are exceeded only by genocidal despots and serial killers with bad tattoos. So let me simply state that I think that Frank Stitt is one of the best chefs in America, and America is starting to come around to my position.
I have watched with interest the growing reputation of Frank and his restaurant on the national scene. Whenever I go to Birmingham, I return to the Highlands or its sister restaurant, Bottega, where I look forward to the changes and improvements in the menu. Frank works miracles with pork, as I discovered when I ordered a tenderloin with a bourbon and molasses glaze that I thought was the best thing I ever put in my mouth. But I had said the same thing about the soft-shell crab with brown butter and bacon vinaigrette and, on the same night, the basmati rice salad with chilled crabmeat, crescents of avocado, roasted peppers, and slivers of olives and mushrooms folded into a lemon mayonnaise that was both delicate and fragrant. I could write poems about the seared duck breast and his Louisiana rabbit simmered in red wine. Even the lowly Southern dish of grits Frank uses as a palette that he fills with slices of country ham and tosses with wild mushrooms, with a dusting of Parmesan cheese, grated fine.
At the Highlands Bar & Grill, there is a sensibility at work in the smallest of details. When Frank offered me a watermelon margarita, I could think of no more nauseating a combination of tastes than a sweet fruit and tequila. Naturally, I was wrong and watermelon has seemed a noble fruit, as kingly as pineapple, since that encounter. Frank’s bar makes a better gin martini than New York’s Plaza Hotel, and his Chilton County Bellini is far superior to the one served at Harry’s Bar in Venice, where it was invented. You can enjoy those drinks at the best raw oyster bar outside New Orleans, where the Apalachicola oysters have been harvested from the Gulf of Mexico on the day you consume them. They are cold and salty and Gulf-born. Just when you think that an oyster on the half shell is the most perfect food on earth, Frank will present you with baked oysters with watercress and a bread crumb crust, or his oyster pan roast with crawfish and buttery croutons, or spicy baked oysters with caramelized onions, pan juices, and chiles.