The Pat Conroy Cookbook by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online Page A

currants
    ½ pint raspberries
    1 pint bing cherries, pitted
    ⅔ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
    2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
    ½ lemon, juiced
    Pinch of salt
    1. Wash and trim the rhubarb and cut into ½-inch pieces; you should have 2 cups. Rinse the red currants and remove the stems. Place the rhubarb, currants, raspberries, and cherries in a bowl with the ⅔ cup sugar, flour, lemon juice, and salt.
    2. Preheat oven to 425°F. Proceed with the dough-rolling and pie-filling instructions for Gooseberry Pie (page 40). Roll the smaller piece of dough into a 10-inch round and cut into six 1 ¼-inch-wide strips. Weave strips on top of filling in a lattice pattern. Pinch the edges of the strips together with the edges of the bottom crust to make a decorative border. Sprinkle with the tablespoon of sugar.
    3. Place the pie on a baking sheet and bake on the bottom of the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until the lattice crust is golden brown.

    PEACH PIE Whenever I think of South Carolina peaches, I think of Dori Sanders, the novelist and cookbook author, who still sells peaches on the highway by her family farm in York County. Dori tells me that the peaches of York County are the finest-tasting in the world. I have not seen any conclusive proof that she is wrong, but I have tasted enough York County peaches to think she might be right. A ripe peach is a thing perfect unto itself, and the fruit is a tree’s way of expressing devotion to sunshine. In their season, I gorge myself with fresh peaches, which always make me happy that I found South Carolina when I was a boy, or that it found me.
    This peach pie is gilding the lily—the only natural way I know for peaches to taste any better than straight out of the orchard.
    • SERVES 8
    1 recipe Pie Dough (page 7)
    FOR THE FILLING
    3 pounds ripe, firm peaches (about 8 large peaches)
    ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
    2 tablespoons cornstarch
    2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
    1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
    Pinch of salt
    1. Peel, pit, and slice the peaches. (See page 157.)
    2. In a medium bowl, stir together the ½ cup sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest, lemon juice, and salt. Add the peaches and toss to coat them.
    3. Preheat oven to 425°F. Proceed with the dough-rolling and pie-filling instructions for Gooseberry Pie (page 40). Sprinkle with the tablespoon of sugar.
    4. Place pie on a baking sheet and bake on the bottom of the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until the top crust is golden brown.

H ome is a damaged word, bruisable as fruit, in the cruel glossaries of the language I choose to describe the long, fearful march of my childhood. Home was a word that caught in my throat, stung like a paper cut, drew blood in its passover of my life, and hurt me in all the soft places. My longing for home was as powerful as fire in my bloodstream. I lived at twenty-three different addresses as my father moved from base to base flying the warplanes that kept our nation’s airways safe. When asked where my hometown was, I answered in a complete silence that baffled strangers and embarrassed me. Because of the question, I knew it was an American’s birthright to have a place name on the tip of your tongue; all I could come up with were military bases like Cherry Point, Quantico, or Camp Lejeune, vast acreages of federal property that I roamed known by the anonymous and utterly demeaning military coinage—dependent. Though I had no home, I had a grotesque father who had once—flying low, counting body parts, arms and legs and torsos as they floated in the blood-red river below him—wiped out a battalion of North Korean regulars he caught fording the Naktong River. My father made his children feel like the survivingmembers of that battalion, and at times we envied those slain soldiers who did not have to grow up under his savage, tyrannical rule.
    Though my mother could do nothing to stem my father’s cruelty, she held out great hope for her children’s ardent wish to find a home. She