For a tuna tutorial

National Review, June 22, 1992 by Digby Anderson

After revisiting the Holy City--Charleston--and other parts of the Southern seaboard recently, I have a suggestion for improving the food there. Now, before anyone gets red in the face, I said "improve," for much of what I was served was quite promising. But it could be better. What it needs is the importation of a few shiploads of Sicilians and Andalucians: not manacled, you understand, quite the reverse, granted a special exemption from health and other state regulations so they can get to work exploiting the wonderful raw materials--the shrimp, clams, oysters, crabs, rice, grouper, tuna--in cafes in every park and street corner.

For the South and much else of America has a problem. Those who eat out in restaurants or at friends' are caught on a fork of two extremes. There is plain food--freshly caught shrimp boiled, grouper grilled, undressed salad. With this, one has the option of adding fortunately separate but countless packets or buckets of unmentionable sewage dressings, disgusting garlic bread made with powdered garlic, drawn rather bad butter, house sauce which is mildly reformed ketchup, and various cheese biscuits. There will also be lots of ice about, usually under raw oysters and clams to ensure that one cannot appreciate the taste of the shellfish, and compulsory music of the sort pleasing to lower-class young persons. The cultured eater throws away all the garbage, sauces, dressings, and ice, sits as far away from the loudspeaker as possible, asks for and fails to get some decent bread and olive oil, keeps his salad back to have in the proper place after the fish, thereby confusing "Hi, I'm your server, Debbie--is everything okay?," but at least finishes up with very good shrimp and grouper at a very fair price. It's just that this aggressively plain fare gets a bit much after a dozen more such meals.

The alternative is far worse: more expensive and pretentiously, even revoltingly mucked-about food. I give you some gems taken from actual menus: dolphin with melon and pineapple; duck liver terrine with dried cherry, carmelized turnip compote; fresh Yonges Island spinach with apple vinaigrette, roasted pecans and blue cheese; Mesclun green house salad--sounds all right so far, but wait--with roasted--yes, roasted, really, I assure you, roasted--shallot vinaigrette; black-bean crepe with sauteed veal and pork in a light cream sauce on red pepper coulis and pepper relish; and my favorite, Dover sole with scallop mousse and basil mustard hollandaise.

Basil? Fine. A light mustard sauce? Possibly, but not of course with the basil. Hollandaise? Certainly, one of the best sauces, if made properly, so good it must stand on its own. But all three, and with scallops and whatever is in the mousse! However well executed, these recipes are in pathetically bad taste. Oscar Wilde's dictum about the sin of overdressing applies even more to food than to clothes. Only the most common people do it.

So if we are to do something about the problem, we have to forget the overdressed and work on the plain. Sicilians and Andalucians have similar raw ingredients though in nowhere near the abundance, and have evolved wonderful ways of cooking them. What they would do when they arrived is this. The Eyeties will immediately improve the bread and set to work on deliciously lightly fried fishes and shrimp. Out go the packets of biscuits and the garlic powder. The Andalucians will get out their planchas and set to work turning out wonderful shrimp grilled with a little lemon and olive and fresh garlic, clams with a drop of sherry or a pinch of pimenton. The salad will come washed but, more important, made with lettuce that tastes of something and dried and dressed with plain wine vinegar, olive oil, pepper, and salt. And what either could do with the rice--in risotti and what are incorrectly called paellas, is no one's business. They would, of course, be courses in themselves, not a sort of vegetable serving, nudged up against some boring watery squash and a pile of boiled corn all massing to flatten the taste of the grouper, tuna, or swordfish. They would serve real coffee, not brown water.

I must be fair and say there would be costs as well. They would get rid of the lower-class music but replace it with tedious castanets and wailings (in the case of the Andalucians). The service would be slower (good) but less efficient (bad). There might not be menus. And one should take care that they are not allowed to set up yet more full-scale "Italian" restaurants selling the dull diet so many in the U.S. do. What we want is the chaps who operate shacks on street corners or beach bars. If you can get them, what you can be sure of is that they will not muck the food about. That is not the Mediterranean way. The changes made to, especially, fish cooked there are small but of tremendous value.

It is this lesson that Americans, and indeed the British, have to learn, a via media--this column is always moderate--between plainness and pretentiousness. That, the Mediterraneans can teach. They will need to be given their head, though--no regulations, bureaucrats persecuting them for having used toothpicks and napkins on the floor, or imposing tyrannical smoking bans.