Shrimp Boil — The Recipe That Smells Like Every Good Memory I Have of the Lowcountry

My name is Naomi Blackwood, and I want to tell you about a pot of shrimp.

I want to tell you about this particular pot because it is the right place to begin, the way any honest story begins—not at the dramatic center but at the ordinary moment just before, the moment that holds everything else in suspension. Last Saturday I stood at the stove in my kitchen in Charleston with a twelve-quart pot on the burner and a pound and a half of shrimp still in their shells and I thought: this is something my mother would have made. And that thought, which I have had ten thousand times in my life, landed differently than it usually does. It landed like an arrival.

I am forty-five years old. I am the branch manager of the Charleston County Public Library’s main branch, which means I spend my days surrounded by other people’s stories and find, increasingly, that I want to write some of my own. I have two children—James, sixteen, who eats like a man twice his size and asks for seconds before I’ve sat down, and Carrie, thirteen, who last week informed me at dinner that she is “really interested in Japan,” with the particular emphasis of a child who has already made a decision she hasn’t announced yet. I have a husband, Robert, who is a real estate attorney and who sets the table without being asked and who is, after a difficult year that I may write about someday when I have better words for it, trying very hard to be worthy of the life we’ve built. We live in a house in the historic district that his family has owned for three generations. I have filled it with books. He has filled it with antiques. The house contains, at last count, more stories than either of us can count.

But I grew up somewhere else entirely.

I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in the parsonage next to Tabernacle Baptist Church, where my father, Reverend James Simmons, preached for thirty years with the conviction of a man who had no doubts about God and occasionally too many doubts about the people God had placed in his care. My mother, Carolyn, ran the household with the same quiet authority my father brought to the pulpit, which is to say: completely, and without apparent effort. She cooked for the congregation after every Sunday service. She cooked for funerals. She cooked for sick church members, for grieving families, for anyone who needed feeding, which in a church community is always someone. And then she came home and cooked for us.

My mother’s kitchen was not large. The parsonage was a modest house, and the kitchen had one window that looked out over the back yard toward the marsh, and on still summer mornings the salt air came through that window and sat in the room like a member of the family. Mama cooked Lowcountry food—she-crab soup, shrimp and grits, okra soup, red rice, Hoppin’ John—and she made it look effortless, the way people who have done something ten thousand times make it look effortless. She didn’t measure. She tasted. She adjusted. She said, “More butter, Naomi,” and “Don’t rush the roux,” and “If it doesn’t smell right, it isn’t right.”

I was a bookish child in a cooking family, which meant I learned the food the way you learn a language you hear spoken around you every day—not formally, not with instruction, but through absorption. I was in the kitchen because the kitchen was where my mother was, and I wanted to be near my mother. I watched her hands. I watched the way she moved. I didn’t know I was learning. I thought I was just standing in a room where someone I loved was doing something I didn’t fully understand.

The shrimp boil was summer food. Mama made it when the season turned, when the Beaufort shrimpers brought in the first big haul and the market on Carteret Street was full of shrimp still smelling of the creek. She’d boil them in a big pot with sausage and corn and potatoes and enough Old Bay to make your eyes water, and she’d dump the whole thing out onto newspaper on the picnic table in the back yard, and the congregation would gather around and eat with their hands while my father said a blessing that ran long because all his blessings ran long. My sister Joy would eat until she was pink-faced and laughing. I would eat and read simultaneously, a book propped against the edge of the table, until Mama said, “Naomi Ruth, put that down and be here,” and I would put it down and be here, and it was always worth it.

Joy is fifty-three now—wait, I keep forgetting, she’s still forty-two for another few months. She lives in Beaufort with our mother, who is seventy-three and still cooking, still tending the house next to Tabernacle Baptist. Joy has lived with Mama since she was eleven, since the afternoon she rode her bicycle on Route 21 and a car turned her childhood into before and after. She has a brain injury that will not heal, and she is, I believe genuinely, one of the happiest people I have ever known. She doesn’t grieve the life she didn’t get to have. She eats peach cobbler and laughs at the television and lets Mama brush her hair, and she tastes a shrimp boil the way I wish I could taste one—purely, completely, without the weight of everything else it means.

My father died four years ago. He collapsed at the pulpit mid-sentence on a Sunday morning and was gone before the ambulance arrived. He was seventy-two. He was the voice I heard when I needed guidance—sometimes stern, sometimes tender, always certain—and his absence is a kind of silence I haven’t yet learned to fill. He would have had opinions about this, about me writing things down and putting them somewhere for strangers to read. He would have said the Lord didn’t put me here to make up stories. I would have said, with the respect and exasperation I always felt for him in equal measure: I’m not making them up. These are true.

Last Saturday I made the shrimp boil because it is June and the shrimp at the market were beautiful—wild-caught, heads on, the kind that still smell like the water they came from—and because James had a friend coming for dinner and I wanted to feed a sixteen-year-old boy the way my mother fed the congregation: abundantly, without ceremony, with the implicit message that there is always more. I spread newspaper across the big table in the backyard the way Mama used to, and I dumped the pot and watched James and his friend eat with their hands while Carrie ate precisely with a fork and made a face at the mess and then, when she thought I wasn’t watching, picked up a piece of corn and ate it the same way everyone else was eating. Robert poured himself a beer and leaned back in his chair and said, “This is exactly right,” and I knew he didn’t just mean the food.

I stood there in the early evening light—the particular blue light of a Charleston June, the light that softens everything, that makes the garden look like a painting and makes the people you love look the way you want to remember them—and I thought about Mama and her kitchen, and about Joy eating shrimp at the picnic table thirty years ago, and about my father’s blessings that ran long because he had a lot to be grateful for even when he didn’t act like it, and I thought: this is what I have. Not the life I planned, not the life I would have chosen at twenty-five with all my certainties intact. This life. The one with the newspaper on the table and the boy eating with his hands and the daughter who is already planning her escape to somewhere far away and the husband who said “this is exactly right” like a man who knows he almost lost everything.

This is exactly right. The soup would agree.

I am going to write about food here. I am going to write about cooking and memory and the Lowcountry and my mother’s recipes and what it means to stand in a kitchen and hear a voice that belongs to someone who is no longer in the room. I am a librarian. I believe in the preservation of things. I believe that stories, properly kept, outlast the people who lived them. My mother is still cooking in Beaufort, thank God, and her hands still know what to do, and I intend to record everything I can while I still can, because the day is coming when I will need to cook from memory, and I want my memory to be exact.

The shrimp boil is where we start. It is the taste of every summer I have ever loved.

The shrimp boil was never a question—it was always going to be this one, the dish that is less a recipe than a return, the thing my hands know before my mind catches up. After a week of carrying that much feeling, I needed a pot big enough to hold something other than grief, and I needed a task that my mother had already solved for me. Here is how she makes it, and how I make it now, and how I intend to make it for the rest of my life.

Lowcountry Shrimp Boil

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 30 minutes | Total Time: 45 minutes | Servings: 6

This is Frogmore Stew by another name—the same dish, the same tradition, the same pot that has fed Lowcountry families for generations. My mother made it on newspaper in the backyard in the summer, and I make it the same way. You can use a slotted spoon and a platter if you prefer, but the newspaper is part of the recipe. Use wild-caught shrimp if you can find them. Use kielbasa or andouille—something with smoke and weight. Don’t overcook the shrimp. Everything else is forgiving; the shrimp are not.

Ingredients

• 4 quarts water
• 1/2 cup Old Bay seasoning, plus more for serving
• 1 lemon, halved
• 1 large yellow onion, quartered
• 4 garlic cloves, smashed
• 1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes, halved if large
• 1 1/2 pounds smoked kielbasa or andouille sausage, cut into 2-inch pieces
• 4 ears fresh corn, husked and broken in half
• 2 pounds large shrimp, shell-on (31/40 count or larger)
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• Cocktail sauce, for serving
• Crusty bread, for serving

Instructions

1. Build the broth. Fill a 12-quart pot with the water. Add the Old Bay, lemon halves (squeeze them in before adding), onion, and garlic. Bring to a rolling boil over high heat.
2. Cook the potatoes. Add the potatoes to the boiling broth and cook for 10 minutes. They should be starting to soften but not yet done.
3. Add the sausage. Add the kielbasa pieces to the pot. Continue boiling for 5 minutes. The sausage will season the broth as it cooks—this is intentional.
4. Add the corn. Add the corn halves and cook for 5 more minutes. Taste the broth and adjust seasoning. If it needs more Old Bay, add it now.
5. Add the shrimp. Add the shrimp in a single addition. Cook just until they turn pink and curl, about 2 to 3 minutes. Do not walk away. Overcooked shrimp are a grief that lingers.
6. Drain and dress. Drain the pot through a large colander. Transfer everything to a newspaper-lined table or a large serving platter or sheet pan. Scatter the butter pieces over the top immediately, while everything is still hot, and toss gently so the butter melts and coats. Sprinkle generously with additional Old Bay.
7. Serve immediately. Put cocktail sauce and crusty bread alongside. Eat with your hands. Let people reach over each other. This is communal food, and communal food requires proximity.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 480 | Protein: 38g | Fat: 18g | Carbs: 42g | Fiber: 4g | Sodium: 1,380mg