Sampling the Foods of Alsace-Lorraine (France) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling the Foods of the Alsace-Lorraine (France) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of my favorite places to go out for a light lunch was Patisserie Bechler in Pacific Grove, California.

I called my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000) and told her how cute the decorations were at Bechler in addition to having nice food.

She gave me the go-ahead to write the article that follows:

Pastry Heaven

The stork on the roof of Patisserie Bechler signals your arrival at Pacific Grove’s own bit of Alsace off Highway 68.  The stork is a symbol of Alsace, France’s eastern region bordering Germany and the native region of pastry chef G. Bechler.

When you enter Bechler’s a wall mural depicting an Alsatian village with its steep, roofed homes held together with wooden beams greets you.  I am tempted to walk down the mural’s winding streets in search of shops selling the famous wines of the region like Riesling and Gewurztraminer and the region’s fragrant yet zesty cheese, Muenster.  Luckily, to find beautiful pastries all I have to do is look around Bechler’s.

Sometimes I have chosen to eat pastries with coffee in this room and just look at the adorable mural, because its lace curtains separating it from the main dining room remind me of being invited to a French friend’s house for a lunch.

While there, I like to leaf through wedding magazines and Bechler’s notebooks of cake creations he has made for film stars and opera stars.  I am reminded that the great chef Careme once likened pastry to the art of sculpture.

I usually eat in the restaurant’s main dining room when I go to Alliance Française lunches.

Alsatian charm permeates the room.  Most notably, Bechler has installed a two-tiered fountain with lion faces in the center of the room like the ones you find in Alsatian villages.

Arms from the town of Colmar close to Bechler’s village of Bergheim decorate the walls along with a picture of beehive signs like the ones that hang from buildings in Alsace.  Later, Bechler told me that the same beehives decorate shops in Germany.

“Alsace has been fought over many times,” Bechler told me.

“Now all we want to do is drink together,” he said.  I just smiled at him.

The menu reflects light French fare rather than hearty Alsatian dishes like choucroute (sauerkraut with assorted pork sausages).  Quiche, soups, and salad are the restaurant’s mainstays with daily specials adding variety.

Quiche is the specialty of Alsace’s neighboring region, the Lorraine, which also has a history of contact with Germany.

The name “quiche” actually is derived from the German word “kuchen,” meaning “cake” according to Jean Ferniot’s La France des Terroirs Gourmands.  It is worth noting that the “ch” in French is pronounced “sh,” making the French pronunciation of Bechler “Beshler” not “Bekler.”

The day we went, we ordered the salmon and spinach quiche and the spinach quiche.  Bechler’s creamy custard-like fillings always make the savory ingredients taste even better.

What I liked most about the salmon and spinach filling was that the chef had used enough salt in the preparation, so that the end result was not bland, but actually brought out the flavor of the salmon.

The same was true of Laurent’s spinach quiche.  The real test of a successful quiche lies in its crust.  Bechler’s crust is tender and perfectly absorbs the flavors of the ingredients.

My favorite dish at Bechler’s is the onion soup.  Julia Child once said, “It’s hard to imagine civilization without onions.”  Surely, she must have been thinking of onion soups like Bechler’s.  

This famous bistro dish gets its start by sautéeing onions in butter.  You add beef bouillon to these onions when they have become golden.  After this, you add toasted bread and place cheese on the bread.  Then, you grill everything for several minutes.

On other occasions, I have tried the restaurant’s pork pie.  This pork pie turned out to be a very sophisticated potpie.

The flaky crust melted in my mouth while the ground pork and onion interior made me eat more slowly, so it would last longer.

These foods are all good, but the real reason for going to Bechler’s is to sample the desserts.  One of my daughter’s favorites is the meringue cookies.  These cookies really do not have a lot of calories.  Laurent likes to indulge in chocolate eclairs.  Bechler’s version features a pastry cream rather than a chocolate filling.

I like the passion fruit mousse made of a thin, moist, layer-cake, which serves as the base for the mousse on top of which is a clear icing.   Bechler sets a raspberry in the center of this on white frosting.

Bechler looks as professional as his desserts when he comes out of the kitchen in his double-breasted, white chef’s uniform.

Bechler perfected his pastry making at the three-star Michelin restaurant, L’Auberge de L’Il before coming to the U.S. in 1984.

End of Article

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Traveling in Minnesota (USA) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Traveling in Minnesota (USA) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I have been on several trips to Minnesota throughout my life, beginning as a small girl and ending as a Youth Services Librarian in middle age.

On a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana with my father, we stopped in Brainerd, Minnesota, so I could go to Paul Bunyan Land.

There is a huge statue of Paul Bunyan that moves and talks to kids as they enter the park.

The “tall tale,” or American myth about Paul Bunyan and his ox named Babe was the he was the lumberjack, who cleared the forests from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

There were many small rides in Paul Bunyan Land that I liked, but one experience that marred my entire appreciation of the Park was a cruel, nickel game. 

For a nickel, you could prod a hen to play a piano with its beak.  When the piano recital was done, the hen would get a handful of corn feed for its efforts.  I knew that the hen was only fed when it played the piano.  (In 2018, I am sure this game is no longer there.)

I went back to Minneapolis-St. Paul for work when I helped put on the first Super Bowl in the Peoples’ Republic of China and did the public relations work for it.

I had a video of the game to show with Chinese announcers making commentary.  I had media kits available for conference attendees with all our PR clips for those people who wanted one.  Many international newspapers were unknown at the time.  We had access to them, because we had international newsstands in downtown Chicago.

I had a book by a University of Chicago professor that I let attendees look at about the different newspapers in the Peoples’ Republic of China.  Attendees wrote down the name of the book to buy in this new advertising market.  We had fun watching the video.  Minnesota is a football state, too.  The Vikings fans at that workshop wanted to get a winning football team to send to the Peoples’ Republic of China, too.

I gave them the names of my contacts at the Illinois Department of Commerce and the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service for information on how to set up trade delegations.  I told them my firm provided services like translation, interpretation, and production of marketing materials for businesses going overseas and showed them samples of our work.  (This is spiel.)

“The Chinese do not bow like the Japanese,” I said.  “They just shake hands, but you should present business cards with both hands to the Chinese with the Chinese-language side of the card facing up, so they can read it,” I said as I showed them how to do this.  (This is schtick.)

You can do little presentations like this to demonstrate what service firms do at a trade show.  This is what is called a nice take-away.

I told people I had studied Japanese, but had traveled to both countries.  I asked them, if they would like me to write their names in Japanese on the back of their business cards.  I knew the katakana alphabet for writing foreign names in Japanese quite well.  I wrote out names and the phonetic pronunciation of the character of the alphabet letter below. 

“Japanese is pronounced almost exactly like Spanish, so this is what your name sounds like,” I said as we went through the cards.

“The cards are presented in the same way as you do for the Chinese, but with bows.  You usually do three bows.  If you are the firm with lower profits, you bow first or if you are seeking sales from another firm, you bow first,” I said as I showed them how to do this.  (More schtick.)

Everyone at my stand would be practicing bowing and encourage other people to come over at look at what we were doing.

Finally, I would say, “I’d be happy to send you a free bid on translating your business card or any other materials you have in mind for marketing purposes.  We can do production work for any language in the world.”

I got requests for business card bids in several languages.  I had an envelope ready to keep all my business card requests in for quick response and a larger notepad of paper ready to ask people what other projects I might be able to provide a free bid on. 

I found out about all sorts of larger projects associated with the business card requests and asked if I could send in a free bid on those projects, too.  I did state on those written bids that the fees asked for were good for six months to one year.  After those dates had expired, I noted that we would be happy to submit a new bid.

One thing I learned in this sales job is that getting budgets for a project approved is hard and so is collecting the money that is due to you for completing a project.  If I volunteered to do a bid, I could find out a lot about getting paid (i.e. purchase orders, billing cycles – 30 to 90 days and so on). 

The added benefit of doing a free bid is that I learned to thoroughly understand the production process.  I went over similar work we had done with our production manager and went from there.  I would take my final bid estimate in to the production manager to look over before submitting it.

This trade conference was held at the University of Minnesota, which has nice gardens to walk through and is very clean or was at the time.  Minnesota is a state that has a large Scandinavian population.  (Scandinavians are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.  Finland is not related to these cultures linguistically or culturally.  It has a most-favored nation status with Russia for giving asylum to Vladimir Lenin.)

On the way to and from the University of Minnesota, you cross the origin of the mighty Mississippi River.  I wanted to go on trips south and west of that river someday in the United States.

The third time I went to Minnesota was with my husband Laurent.  He had a district meeting with his job at the American Chamber of Commerce outside Minneapolis, Minnesota at the Izaty’s Resort.  My mother agreed to take of Florence for the weekend, so we could have a small vacation.

On Saturday, while Laurent went to his meeting, I drove around Lake Mille Lacs to Isles.  That name cracked me up in translation from the Frenglish name – Lake Thousand Lakes.  Obviously, the name referred to all lakes in Minnesota that were created when the last glaciers retreated.

A state park dedicated to Father Hennepin further attested to the French exploration of the area.  Most of the Europeans in this area, though, are from Scandinavia.  The Objibway are the Native American tribe that originally inhabited the area.

When I arrived in Isle, I immediately saw the Norskhaus craft store, but had to start my souvenir shopping at the hardware store, because that was the only place that was open.

I bought two fishing tackle that were made in Isle and some toys for Florence.

The toys I bought at the grocery store for Florence included:

-dominoes

-white chalk

-a pick-up sticks game

-a little handheld pinball game

I just loved getting toys like that when I was a child.  I looked forward to showing Florence how to play these items.

I saw that the Norsk Haus was now open, and I proceeded to walk across the street.  I walked into a party happening at 10 am in the morning.

About fifteen Norwegian matrons were gathered around a “Congratulations” cake.  The owner of the store was signing copies of her first book, which detailed her romance with an American that brought her to Isle.

She invited me to have some cake and tea and asked me where I was from.  I told her about my wanderings that had brought me to Wisconsin.

I told her I would like to write a book.

“Everyone’s life has drama in it,” she said.

Her encouragement persuaded me to buy a Norwegian book for Florence called The Tomten and the Fox.  The tomten looked like a Norwegian leprechaun, but instead of tricking people a Tomten helped them.  In this story, the tomten protected the chickens from a wily fox for a family, who did not know how hard he worked.

The visit to the Norsk Haus left me in high spirits.  I thought the next town named Onamia might hold some unsuspected treasure as well as and set off to that town bent on discovering more about Scandinavian life.

I was particularly interested in getting some books about the mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyan for Florence.  (I could not find anything, but luckily I could find copies of Paul Bunyan stories in the library in Wisconsin where we lived.)

Unfortunately, Onamia just had a grocery store.  I did check it for Paul Bunyan books, but they did not have any.  If I had been truly adventurous, I would have driven to Brainerd to see the Paul Bunyan amusement park again.

I drove back just about the time Laurent got out of his meeting.  We walked around the golf course and admired leaves on the trees and kicked red and golden leaves with our feet.  It was October, the air was crisp, and winter was on its way. 

Dinner that night was really great, because I did not have to cook it.  I do really like chicken and rice, but almost all hotels serve it in the upper Midwest as the “meat” option that does not offend diners.

We said grace before eating and had a motivational speaker talk during the meal.  He also gave a lot of organizational tips on how to run solo sales operations. 

I forgot the speaker’s name, but I have used a lot of his organizational tips like keeping a clean and organized work area, having lots of pens and paper, and keeping stationery on hand to write thank-you notes that you can put a business card in for follow-up.  No one writes thank-you notes anymore, so people who do this really stand out.

I have also gone to Minneapolis to obtain information about how to run Big Reads for the National Endowment for the Arts on Grapes of Wrath and Fahrenheit 451 when I was the Youth Services Librarian for Monterey County (California). 

We had an advantage in teaching the students of Monterey County about what was in these books by having actors from the Western Stage come in and do monologues about important points from the book after which I would go through discussion questions.

All in all, I have very good memories of my trips to Minnesota.  I would still recommend going there on vacation even though I have not been there in a awhile.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Spending Childhood Summers in South Carolina with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Spending Childhood Summers in South Carolina with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

I spent my childhood summers with my sister K. in Murrels Inlet, South Carolina.  My sister had an apartment on the property of one of our distant cousins’ summer homes on the inlet.  She worked as a printer during the week and on the sport fishing boats on the weekend as a licensed small boat captain, skipper, and mate.

My favorite part of summer was going out marlin fishing on the weekends.  My sister took care of a boat for a couple from Charleston, South Carolina, who rented it out for sport fishing.

She was the skipper on these boats, and I was able to go out as a mate-in- training while one of our friends captained the boat.  At the time, children could work in well-supervised capacities in family businesses.  Chinese restaurants have known this for years.

I sat up with the captain and learned the buoy system for how to get in and out of Murrels Inlet into the Atlantic Ocean.  The captain taught me how to read a tide table and run the sonar equipment to find pools of fish in the water below.

I also learned how to read a compass (“Point the boat west in an emergency,” he said).  I called the tackle shop in port on the short-wave radio.  They told me how to alert the Coast Guard, but only to do that in an emergency.

I was not allowed to touch the steering wheel, but I was shown other important equipment like the fire extinguishers, first aid kits, and the orange sea rescue donuts.  The captain told me, “If someone is drowning or thrown overboard, you have to throw the orange donuts out to them and pull them in.  A drowning person can pull you under with them in a state of panic.”

We set up the marlin fishing lines, which arch over the water.  Marlins are flying fish when they are caught and incredibly dangerous when they are brought on board a boat.

Marlins thrash around and flail their fins in and out when they land on a boat deck after reeling them in.  I had to sit in the captain’s chair when a marlin was caught.  People stuff marlins and put them on their walls as sport fishing trophies.  They stop fishing for them when they get one.

Once the marlin was caught for the sport fisherman, who had rented the boat that day, we would fish for our lunch or early dinner.

The fish off the South Carolina coast are very tasty – red snapper, grouper, and schools of shrimp.  We would grill these and make a cream sauce for them with sautéed peppers and tomatoes over Carolina rice.

K. would make some corn bread for me, because I did not like rice.  She also made me green beans and a salad of tomato and cucumber.  We had warm peach cobbler for dessert and vanilla ice cream.

During the week, I would go out on mid-size fishing boats (80 people) and larger boats (81 – 120 people).  These boats were rented out by corporations for what would be called “team building” decades later.

The passengers were almost all men.  I was allowed out there, because I had marlin mate training.  All of the boat captains and owners were our relatives somehow, too.

When I would go out on the boats, I would go around the boat and ask, if I could help bait hooks or string caught fish on lines to take to the scaling and freezing shops in port.

I told the passengers the names of several places they could go and get their fish prepared to take home.  The men caught sea bass.  Sea bass is a white fish that tastes good with the same sauce that you make for red snapper.

When the men would eat, I had to go up to the bridge and get cleaned up for lunch.  I got to eat my lunch sitting in the skipper’s chair on a tray.

Corporate teams always eat well, so I got to eat crab cakes; shrimp etoufée; steak and kidney pie (which I thought was just great); mashed potatoes with sour cream, butter, and chives; cheddar buns; and warm, peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream.  I drank sweet iced tea with this nice lunch.

I know I had to go up on the bridge, because the corporate teams might have been bonding with beer and bourbon. 

I also went out on the mid-size deep sea fishing boats.  These were roly-poly affairs.  The boats tilted to one side or another with the waves.

I helped with the baiting of hooks and taking fish off of hooks on this boat, too.  On one occasion, a shark that was just as long as the boat came alongside the boat and began hitting it, because we had fish lines going.

This was the era of the film Jaws so, I went below deck “right now” and put on a life preserver.  I sat next to the emergency exit by the lifeboats and put on a life jacket.

The captain shot the shark several times before it floated away from the boat.  Sharks swim in groups, too, so we quietly made our way back to port.  I took out a book and started reading it.  The mates told the team building guys to put on a life jacket like Ruthie and read something quietly.  They watched Jacques Cousteau growing up, too, and knew about sharks traveling in packs.

I considered those mid-size boats to be roller coaster rides.  You really should locate lifeboats and know where life jackets are when you go out in the open ocean.

I also went out on the tourism boats in Murrel’s Inlet and told ghost stories.  I loved reading ghost stories.  I would tell people, “If you see a gray man walking on the beach, a hurricane is coming, but you will be saved.”

I continued to regale passengers with this spooky tale, “We have lots of dog ghosts barking for their dead owners on plantations.  And, we have just tons of clanging bells announcing supper.”  The real tour operator would tell other stories, and I got to sit with the millionaires paddling around the South Carolina seashore islands.

During the week, I would spend most of my time swimming with our neighbor’s children and their mother supervising, who made comments as needed.  We would dive off the covered dock and eat bologna sandwiches down there and get nice tans.

When it was 4 o’clock, I would go to the restaurant next door and pick up dinner.  My sister would order dinner, and I would pick it up.

The restaurant was named Pittypat’s Porch.  It had Gullah owners.  (African-Americans who maintain African languages and customs and live on the sea islands off South Carolina and Georgia.)

My contact to pick up dinner was named Rooster.  We usually had simple food during the week like the following:

-shrimp étoufée, which we called shrimp Creole.

-fried sea bass

-deep-fried hush puppies (savory donut holes with scallions and red pepper) that we dunked in melted butter

-freshly made coleslaw

-lemonade

-small pieces of key lime pie or peach cobbler

I tried to read, but Big Sister would tell me to go swimming and get out of the house.

My sister had a wire crab trap down at the dock that I would check before I got dinner at Pittypat’s Porch.  If there were a crab or two in the trap, we would add that to what we would eat for dinner.

I was the one who would empty the crab trap.  I used ice cube tongs (alternative use of a Southern kitchen implement) to capture the crab and take it to the house.  I would chase my sister around with the crab snapping its claws while we were waiting for water to boil to cook the crab.

My sister would tell me, “Stop!  You little varmint!” and chase me around with an eggbeater.

When the salted water came to a rolling boil, we would drop in the blue-skinned crabs, watch them swim around, turn coral-red, and fish them out of the pot.  My Big Sister would make homemade mayonnaise to eat with them on toast.

I loved it when we got 3 or 4 crabs caught on one day.  My sister would make all of them and go out to her garden and harvest some stuff for dinner.  (I was not allowed in the summer pantry.  You can save a lot of money, if you know how to cook and can what grows in a garden.)  These were some of the items we could make out of the summer pantry:

-boiled corn on the cob

-coleslaw

-tomatoes and seeded cucumbers in mayonnaise

-sauteed zucchini or Italian squash

-lemonade

-banana bread or zucchini bread

-small pieces of peach cobbler or key lime pie

My big sister took me on some lovely excursions around Murrels Inlet.  One of the most famous places we went to is the Hermitage, a former plantation with lots of dangling, gray Spanish moss over its entry gate and lane leading up to the mansion.

The Hermitage Plantation, owned by the Flagg family, has a slightly spooky story associated with it.

There was once a young Flagg daughter named Alice, who married a man that her family did not approve of.  Her brother broke off her marriage and threw her wedding ring into the oyster beds with reeds in the inlet.  Alice died of heartbreak.

Alice’s ghost comes back at night and hunts for her wedding ring among the reeds in the oyster beds to this day.  (See the Hermitage website for more information.)

My Big Sister K. took me to Brookgreen Gardens after going swimming and sunbathing at the beach.  Four former plantations made up this garden.  One of the plantations was named Brookgreen.

There are sculptures of twisting, bucking horses worthy of Bernini all around the garden.

My sister bought a membership at Brookgreen Gardens, so we could go there after beach outings all the time.  The gardens are French style.

When our mother came down to South Carolina for her vacation, my mom, my big sister, and I would visit Charleston, South Carolina for a very touristy vacation.

Charleston was founded in 1670.  It has a French Protestant (Calvinist – Huguenot) Cathedral and the only Huguenot Congregation in the United States.  Other Huguenots went to London, Berlin, Switzerland, and the Southeastern United States when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed religious freedom in France.

There is a French quarter in Charleston, South Carolina, too.  We went to a restaurant called Porgy ‘N’ Bess.  The play Porgy ‘N’ Bess was the first African-American play.

The Charleston theatre crowd went to this theatre for pre-dinner meals before going to the Dock Street Theatre: the first theatre in the US with theatrical productions.  The French Quarter got its name from all the merchants located there.

There is an Episcopal Church in the French Quarter of Charleston, South Carolina, too, called St. Phillips.  The graveyard for this church is the final resting place for Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Another politician whose tomb is in the graveyard is US Senator John C. Calhoun.

The streets of Charleston are paved with cobblestones.  The oceanfront, two-storey homes are painted in pastel colors. 

There are horse-drawn carriages.  When mom is on vacation, both my big sister and I got to go one the full tour of Charleston in a horse-drawn carriage.  The streets stay clean, because the horses wear leather diapers that are regularly cleaned between rides.

We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast run by an English lady in the French quarter.  We had a substantial English breakfast and did an afternoon tea complete with the three-tiered tea stand that the English use.

“Walking tourism today,” mom said after tea.  We took a ferry out to Fort Sumter, which is where the first shots of the Civil War started.  My Big Sister K. has books about Civil War battles, which I was allowed to read on Sunday with her.  We had one with us and walked around the fort identifying things.

Fort Sumter is a pentagon-shaped fort well inside the Charleston Bay.  There are four forts located around the island that are well hidden – Moultrie, Johnson, Castle, and Pinckney.  Any ship that attacks Fort Sumter should, in theory, not be able to escape from the fire of those forts.

The only reason that Fort Sumter was lost to the North I think is that not every commander was loyal to the Confederacy.

Louis XIV wanted a similar fort island defense built in Poitou (home of many Huguenots) to protect against English invasion.  His chief engineer Vauban advised him against it.  The kind of fort Louis XIV wanted was built eventually – Fort Boyard of French television fame.

Back in South Carolina, mom drove K. and I to Pawley’s Island where Alice Flagg’s grave was.  K. told me that if you walk around Alice’s grave 13 times backward at midnight, Alice will come out and grant your wishes.

Then, we drove down the Atlantic Coast to visit the sea islands.  Gullah women sell hand-woven baskets, textiles, hats, and food products along the seacoast highway.  Our mom stopped and bought baskets and hats for K. and me.  (2018 note: There are now Gullah-owned restaurants along the coast.)

When our mom left, K. and I would go back to regular time.  I went to Vacation Bible School and studied the life of Old Testament Joseph.  I won a Bible for doing all the work.

Murrels Inlet is also close to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  K. would drive me up and down the Strand with music blaring, so I could wave at people walking along the street and yell out to them, “Cool shirt!  Cool hat!  Cool sunglasses!”  I went on the roller coaster several times with K., who showed me how to hold my arms up on the way down on the roller coasters and just yell away the fear.

As summer wound down, I was allowed to read some of Big Sister’s books:

-1984

-Animal Farm

-Clockwork Orange

-Cybernetics (I actually brought this book with me from home.  We have three generations of female, newspaper printers in the family, so we keep up with all new technology.)

Since I had been a good kid, I got to visit one of our rich cousins who lived in Hilton Head, South Carolina.  I think my Myrtle Beach antics helped him sell some real estate there.

This relative played golf and loved Hilton Head for this reason.  There really was nothing to do on Hilton Head except buy merchandise and play golf.  I emptied the golf kingdom of sand dollars while K. and our cousin talked on the beach front terrace of his home.

K. told hime, “Ruthie wants you to sell sand dollars and make money.”

Sand dollars are red and hairy, fresh out of the water.  You have to dry them in the sun and then scour them to get the hair off.  Finally, you soak them in bleach to turn them white.

You can charge $5 for them at beachfront stores in places like Myrtle Beach.  Our rich cousin looked at the hairy, red sand dollars lying on his fancy terrace and was not sold on the idea.

Kathy took out some pristine white sand dollars and some that had been spray painted gold to illustrate what they looked like as a final product.  They were both laughing about what people would buy in Myrtle Beach.

Our rich cousin shared his wealth.  We ate fillet mignon, Duchesse potatoes, coleslaw (I asked for it), and German chocolate cake for dessert.

My good-bye to my South Carolina summer vacation was always a restaurant outing to Pittypat’s Porch.  Rooster would dress up in a crisply, ironed shirt with a bowtie and be our waiter.

The food was the same as what I go out the backdoor everyday, but I got to rock on the front porch and look out over the oyster beds with the reeds while we waited for our table with its red-and-white checked tablecloth.

I loved shrimp Creole.  They gave me a lot, because they knew I was going home to Detroit, Michigan where even frozen shrimp is expensive.

All the cooks, busboys, waitresses, and hostesses came to see me and give me hugs. The fishing boat captains, who were eating dinner at different tables, came over to us and told me, “Study everything and especially learn math and science, mate.”

They gave me a little compass as a going away gift to always be able to find True North for directions without a map.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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