Chef Bill Smith
From my grandmother's house, we could walk to the river and often did," Bill Smith says. "We always had some family who lived down there. I can walk there from my mother's house today."
It is Labor Day, and Bill Smith is describing his hometown of New Bern while eyeing the action at the downtown Durham bar Alley Twenty Six. A collection of colleagues, some of the area's best chefs, prepare tastings of recipes taken from Smith's new book, Crabs & Oysters. Despite the hectic scene around him, Smith, 66, is calm, as it seems he always is. Maybe not when he's in the kitchen of his Chapel Hill institution, Crook's Corner, on a hot and busy night, but he even downplays that idea.
"You want people to have a good meal," he says, "but it's not a refugee crisis."
Smith speaks his mind in measured tones, punctuated by a laugh that comes from the gut. Get him going on politics, his travels or a favorite band (Smith co-founded the Cat's Cradle), and fury, joy and reverie come throughmaybe not loud, but certainly clear.
This night, though, is all about the new book, his second, which is part of UNC Press' Savor the South series, a focused survey of southern cooking with titles like Shrimp, Okra and Sunday Dinners.
After you read Smith's contribution, it will be hard to imagine anyone else penning something called Crabs & Oysters. In his long career, first at La Residence and, since 1993, at Crook's Corner, his menus have almost always included one or the other. When crabs are in season, his social media feed (on Twitter, @Chulegre) essentially becomes a supply alert. And if you want to know exactly how a fried oyster should crunch, he's your guy. Smith is a two-time finalist for the James Beard Foundation's "Best Chef Southeast," a coveted culinary award. Crabs & Oysters, though, is a readable and intimate cookbook that doubles as memoir, as Smith draws inspiration from a childhood where both dishes were abundant.
"When we were growing up, crab was free food. You just went and caught them, and however many you had, that's how much you ate," he says. "If you got a lot, you made one thing; if you didn't, you made something else."
In New Bern, the waters once flowed much clearer, and the seafood was more essential to daily life. Today, the former colonial capital sprawls far beyond the confluence of the Trent and Neuse. The docks are full of sailboats and the occasional yacht. Tourists and the new convention center are the town's trade, while the recreational fishing fleet dwarfs what's left of the commercial boats.
This post-war transition had already started when William Bryan Smith Jr. was born into a family that called the river neighborhoods of New Bern home. Smith was the first of five siblings. He was named for his father, who was named for William Jennings Bryan, the firebrand populist and presidential candidate. The family was large and lively. In oyster season, they often gathered to feast.
"My father was a mailman, and he worked out of Pamlico County," Smith remembers. "People just gave him bushels of oysters all the time."
Smith grew up watching his mother, grandmother (a Cape Hatteras native) and aunts prepare meals. Blessed with an impeccable memory, especially when it involves food, he can recall events like his first oyster roast and meals from decades ago, right down to the ingredients. That includes his earliest adventure in cooking, a pineapple upside-down cake prepared over an open fire on a Boy Scout campout, and his first soft-shell crab, ordered by accident during an afternoon outing with family at a seafood spot in Sea Level in Carteret County.
"My Aunt Hi was sure I had meant deviled crabs, but I wouldn't change my order," he writes near the book's beginning. "To this day, soft-shell crabs are one of my favorite foods."
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Smith's first book, Seasoned in the South: Recipes From Crook's Corner and From Home, is a deep dive into Southern cooking and history. Crabs & Oysters is a fast read, however, packed with anecdotes, in which you can hear Smith's measured, playful cadence as he walks you through the dishes. The book is arranged from hors d'oeuvres to main courses, with diversions such as a section on less well-mannered gorging, titled "Out in the yard."
Excerpts from family and community cookbooks, including those of his grandmother and Aunt Dot, offer nods to classics like a traditional oyster stew that is almost entirely butter, milk and oysters. But this is not some overly nostalgic tour of Southern standards. There are more salsa than crabcake recipes (and only mayonnaise-based cakes at that) and no she-crab soup, an omission that elicited an objection from a Charleston friend.
Instead, the two oyster cocktails are Micheladas. Visits to Mexico inspired the cucumber salad. One of the two crabcakes is in an Indochinese style. An example of such crosscurrents has been on the menu at Crook's Corner for much of the year, anyway; Smith's uses Maseca, a finely milled corn flour for tortillas, in his breading, not coarser and more familiar corn meal. That's the secret to his perfectly crisp fried oysters.
Smith says he sometimes gets flak from Southern food traditionalists for these moves. While he respects the past, he doesn't want to live in it. He writes that the cultural and the culinary are inseparable and that the South is more culturally diverse than before.
"That's the South now. That's us now," he explains. "Some people don't like that, but that's too bad, isn't it?"
Despite all the culinary flourishes and cultural twists, the dishes never overpower or disrespect the stars of the bookyes, a well pickled oyster can be explosive, but it's still an oyster. And though Smith incorporates ideas far from his eastern North Carolina roots, the book isn't a coastal North Carolina attempt at Iron Chef. His takes on the dressings, salads and condiments are distinct but not overly fussy, as though Smith understands the work that goes into the main dishes.
To that end, Smith's text is also highly practical. He offers basics on preparing seafood safely, making the perfect dark roux and step-by-step instructions for cleaning soft- and hard-shell crabs.
And his recommendations for an authentic oyster roast involve the same techniques he witnessed as a child when his father and uncles would get together.
"They were all in World War II," he says. "They had been through a lot. When they got together, they were out to have a good time. My dad's oldest brother, Alex, presided over the oyster roasts. He loved them. He had a permanent oyster pit. You would put corrugated metal over the coals, and then you'd throw the oysters on that and cover it with a wet burlap bag. That was my first memory of oysters. They were steamed, sort of semi-cooked."
As plentiful as they were when Smith was growing up, oyster harvests began to decline in post-war North Carolina. Hard weather, over-harvesting and damage to beds from heavy dredging led to a drop in harvests only now being reversed.
Last year, more than 130,000 bushels were collected, bringing in around $5 million. That's a far cry from the late 1800s, when the state was producing more than 800,000 bushels a year. Today, commercial oystering in the state is tightly regulated, and rebuilding the oyster beds is a priority. But rapid development on the coast and massive agriculture operations up river mean the beds are often closed after heavy rains.
If you're going to consume oysters, Smith says know your sources. Oysters involve more peril than crabs, he notes, "not only because they are eaten raw or partially cooked, but because of the filtering feature of their nature." To play it safe, Smith sticks to the old rule of only consuming them during months with an "r" in the name (that is, not May, June, July or August).
"I prefer them in colder weather," he says. "It's not true that you can't eat them all year long, but they do alter in the summer and spring when they're spawning."
In contrast, late spring and early summer is the blue crab's time to shine. Molting season, or when the hard shell is shed, means the whole creature is edible and less hassle to prepare. The rest of the year, when you are dealing with separating meat from the shell, it can be tedious and messy.
"Crabs," he confesses with a wave of the hand, "are a lot of trouble."
The bulk of Smith's recipe for soft-shell crab, perfected during decades as a regular item at Crook's Corner, is devoted to proper frying technique and the right amount of breading. While he does go into detail on the best techniques for picking out the sweet, tender crabmeat, Smith often takes the practical approach by recommending tubs of picked and processed crab. He even offers a guide to backfin, lump and claw meat and how they're best prepared.
Still, Smith encourages the use of the whole or halved blue crab and includes several soups and stews that take advantage of the range of flavors found under the shell. He tells of his grandmother's hard crab stew, which could only be eaten outdoors and was only prepared once or twice a year.
"Be warned," he writes. "You will be eating this stew mostly with your hands."
He intertwines the recollection with the recipe. You can almost hear the laughter, the banter of grown-ups and the wild joy of the feast as the kids gather around, the newspapers are spread out and another meal is ladled out down by the river.
This article appeared in print with the headline "Gather from the river"
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Photo by Alex Boerner
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