Column: Frogmore Stew serves as Beaufort's gift to mankind
Frogmore Stew, the humble shrimp dish born and bred in the backyards of Beaufort, just got invited into the dining room.
Southern Living magazine has a new cookbook out this week claiming to contain 221 of the South's most delicious recipes. Author Sheri Castle reviewed 45,000 recipes published for nearly a half century in the magazine to produce "The Southern Living Community Cookbook: Celebrating Food & Fellowship in the American South."
One of the best of all time is our own Frogmore Stew.
The recipe, originally published in 2003, is repeated in the October issue of the magazine "from the kitchen of Richard Gay."
It's less from a kitchen than from our boats, fields and smokehouses.
Gay's parents ran the Gay Fish Co. on St. Helena Island when a fleet of trawlers brought in enough to make the docks groan. It's not as busy as it was, but it's still run by Gay's siblings.
By the time the recipe hit the magazine, it had been 40 years since Gay added shrimp to a boiling pot at the Beaufort National Guard Armory one Sunday afternoon. It was a clean-out-the-kitchen dish at the end of a weekend of duty.
From that, Gay refined the ingredients to come up with something that now is as much a part of the Lowcountry as the slurp of an oyster.
It is shrimp, corn on the cob, slices of smoked sausage, and new potatoes boiled, drained and spread on a picnic table covered with Beaufort Gazettes. Blue crabs are optional, but forks are not. This is finger food, or maybe we should call it fist food.
Frogmore Stew is a filling thing. It's a social thing. It's about standing around big pots, telling lies over the hiss of propane. It serves a large crowd quickly, and has become folded into precious memories of dove shoots and family reunions. Thousands eat it each year at the Beaufort Water Festival.
The National Guard boys teased Gay into calling it "Frogmore Stew" because he was from the Frogmore community on St. Helena.
Non-purists call it Beaufort Stew, or Lowcountry Boil. Someone once asked: "What's the difference between Frogmore Stew and Beaufort Stew?"
"About six miles."
That reach has now circled the globe. Gay has stacks of newspaper and magazine clippings about it. He sat down to eat at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Mo., and found Frogmore Stew on the menu.
Gay says the most accurate version of his original recipe is in the 2010 book, "The Food, Folklore and Art of Lowcountry Cooking" by Joseph E. Dabney.
Gay now lives in Broken Arrow, Okla., where he recently served Frogmore Stew to a landlocked church group of 170 grateful people.
"Out here, we put king crab or snow crab in it," he said.
They don't get blue crab in a land so far from the creeks and rivers of home. And they don't get the succulent white shrimp that Gay used to pull aboard the 40-foot Edna Oliver shrimp boat his daddy gave him when he graduated from high school.
Gay is 75 years old now, and works 40 hours a week running the seafood department in a Sprouts Farmers Market near Tulsa. He likes to talk fishing and recipes with the customers.
Gay gave out thousands of copies of the Frogmore Stew recipe to customers riding that long ribbon of road from Beaufort to Hunting Island.
It may have helped sell some shrimp.
But one of the South's greatest dishes of all time is actually Beaufort's gift to mankind.
Follow columnist David Lauderdale at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale.
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This story was originally published October 14, 2014 at 7:29 PM with the headline "Column: Frogmore Stew serves as Beaufort's gift to mankind."