Troy Gilbert and Matthew Mayfield’s new 208-page full-color cookbook, On the Coast: Mississippi Tales and Recipes (Pelican Publishing, 2016), demands a trip to the Mississippi they paint (helped by artwork from Billy Solitario). Recipes old and young, sourced from across the state, are contextualized alongside explorations of the coast’s post-Katrina identity, its eclectic arts scene, and the literary nobility who paid visits. (Don’t you want to follow in the footsteps of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner? the book argues.) En garde, homebodies: with odes to chandeleur boats and Royal Red shrimp and accounts of hurricane hunting and the camouflaged flatboats of Thanksgiving morning, Gilbert and Mayfield will win the battle of “No, you come here.”
I’ll take them up on the adventure. I need to dig my feet into the sands of Horn Island (sipping the rum-soaked Peach Tickle), to climb aboard the Hatteras where the authors plotted their cookbook (there I’ll munch on Aunt Ginnie’s Cheese Straws). Most of all, I’ve got to get my hands on the book’s key ingredients—Mississippi gulf crabs, shrimp, and oysters (rare is the recipe that doesn’t contain just-caught seafood in the book’s first half, in which Boat Snacks precede Starters)—to accompany me home in an ice chest. How else am I to render true versions of the Vancleave Micro-Specials (poboys calling for one pint fresh Mississippi lump blue crabmeat, twice picked) or Charbroiled “Rocks” with Champagne Butter? (The Mississippi oysters are to be fresh, shucked, and on the half-shell.)
Yes, we’ve got gulf shores of our own in Louisiana, but if there’s a sense that these authors have left with me—aside from a slick dock beneath my feet and salt air tugging at my shirt—it’s that thick layers of culture have grown along these shores, like oysters on their rocky beds. I sure wouldn’t risk a substitute.
208 pages. $30. onthecoastcookbook.wordpress.com.
