Boiled Peanuts

When I was a kid, for a few years in time, my parents made a lot of money.

There is nothing presumptuous or inherently backward-looking in this statement, it is just a record of fact, but, well, there it is...for about twelve years during my childhood we were pretty wealthy.

During what me and my brother would come to term as the "fat years" later on, we (and by "we" I mean my parents, as I didn't have a cent to my name at the time) did a lot of things that people did who had money in the mid-to-late eighties. We bought a big house in a posh suburb in Connecticut, we joined a country club, I went to an exclusive Catholic school, my brother was sent to soccer camp in exotic locales...blah, blah, blah. For me, at the age of ten or twelve, money didn't mean that much as, with its occurrence, my parent's marriage deteriorated exponentially.

Still, the one thing that the "fat years" brought was something that remained in my soul as a love affair forever.

Namely, South Carolina.

The one really wise thing, to my mind, that my parents did was buy a small vacation home on Seabrook Island in about 1984. Seabrook Island was about a 45-minute drive from Charleston, South Carolina and there I had a horse, a huge yard to roam around in, and the best cooking I have ever tasted in my life.

I loved Charleston for all the things that Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia were not.

Charleston was slow, easy-moving, polite, and considerate to a fault.

My parents would come to a slow boil at the dinner table in some expensive restaurant when the main course took an hour to arrive.

My brother and me, however, loved this time.

No one cared if we ran amok through the restaurant and we were welcome in the kitchen.

A hurricane in the late 1980s destroyed our house in Charleston and, at about the same time, a hurricane descended on my parent's marriage so that was about the last I saw of the place for many years.

Actually, for about 23 years...until last weekend.

Chas and I were making a long road trip from Florida to New Jersey and I asked to stop there.

In the 23 years since I last spent time in Charleston, the thing that never left me was the food.

Granted, I am a northeast girl through-and-through but Charleston has some of the finest food in the country.

It is fresh, it is plentiful, and it is cheap.

I couldn't wait.

Chas, however, had his own ideas.

"I swear I don't like grits," he told me, early on. "I tried them once and they are just...nasty or something...how do you eat those?"

Granted, in Philadelphia, we eat scrapple.

For those of you not indoctrinated, scrapple is, as my friend Frank used to say, "the ears, nose, lips and delicate assholes" of a pig.

Hence, scrapple.

Scraps.

But grits seem to gross northerners out more than most other foods. AND we are known for eating "delicate assholes..."

Hence, my first breakfast in Charleston with Chas:

"Did you just order grits?" he asked.

Yep.

"Alright, I am game. Let me try," he said, while precariously dipping his spoon into the white mush in front of him.

He looked like someone had just emptied a diaper on his spoon.

"Nasty!!" he declared. "How can you eat that? It tastes like...I don't know...male product or something..."

"Have you had male product lately or should I be concerned?" I asked.

He looked flabbergasted and returned to his plate of French toast and eggs, thoroughly disgusted.

A few hours later, traveling up a back road in coastal South Carolina, I insisted we stop for boiled peanuts.

Upon returning to the car with them, Chas was a good sport and took a few bites.

"Sorry, Baby, this just isn't my kind of food. The dinner last night in Charleston was amazing but all of these weird Southern things...gritty male product and mushy peanuts...well, they just ain't MY thing..." he said.

Nevertheless, five hours later, after having stopped at every gas station and roadside stand from the South Carolina to North Carolina border, Chas was digging the boiled peanuts.

"They're growing on me," he admitted, cajun brine dripping from his lips.

Suffice it to say, Chas was not in protest when we stopped at the last town in South Carolina and bought over 10 pounds of boiled cajun peanuts to take home.

I am going to find a recipe for grits to get him into next.

The northerners and southerners have a lot between them besides a civil war and food is a big issue.

After so many years of international travel, it still amazes me that my own country has such prized yet disputed culinary styles.

I'm happy about it, though.

And I was certainly happy to see Charleston, South Carolina, again. It is truly one of the best places to eat (besides grits and boiled peanuts) in our fine country.

Chas snuck into bed tonight with a can of boiled cajun peanuts...

And I am sneaking out here to report how sweet it all is.

Bon Appetit, y'all.