THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506020284
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Coastal Journal
SOURCE: Mary Reid Barrow
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
My body's internal clock face is encircled with seafood and vegetables instead of numbers.
It ticks throughout the year and the alarm is set to ring a sensory alert as each local delicacy comes into season.
With the first full moon in May three weeks ago, the alarm set off a craving for soft-shell crabs. Blue crabs traditionally shed for the first time of the year after that full moon. As the moon triggers the crabs to shed so it must trigger my body clock because I've had a hankering for soft-shells ever since.
I have eaten them for two weekends in a row and haven't had my fill yet. Earlier in May, the same urge kicked in for local strawberries. And as the desire for soft-shells begins to wane, I know a sweet corn/warm ripe tomato passion will arise.
I must have inherited this food clock from, my grandfather. He lived in Richmond, where I grew up, and was raised in Norfolk, but he had his roots in old Princess Anne County. This ancestral gene, I believe, is known as a good old Princess Anne County food gene.
I remember his garden, almost an acre in size, in the middle of Richmond. There he grew all summer long the wonderful vegetables I associate today with our pick-your-own farms down in the ``county.''
His Richmond landscaping also included several huge fig bushes, which I don't recall growing in anyone else's yard then. In August we picked figs and ate them still warm from the sun and grandma made fig preserves for the winter.
Scuppernong grape vines trailed in and out of an arbor covering a walkway between the pen where Jake and Chinquapin, the hunting dogs lived, and my grandma's pretty boxwood garden on the other side. I learned young that when one said ``sweet,'' they meant as sweet as a scuppernong grape for there's nothing sweeter in this world.
Grandpa's love of the food of his roots was a year-long affair. His internal food clock, like mine, never stopped ticking. In the fall, he would go fishing for another tidewater delicacy, rockfish.
We had a summer cottage near Deltaville, but fall was grandpa's favorite time there because the striped bass were plentiful. I remember riding with him in his little skiff up the Piankatank River to the hole where the rockfish were supposed to be. I'd sit for hours, bored, as he slowly trolled the area. But to this day, my internal clock rings rockfish alarms in the fall.
At Thanksgiving and Christmas, Uncle Ben, who lived down here, would bring bushels of Lynnhaven oysters up for the holidays. Grandpa, Uncle Ben and others, mostly male as I recall, would sit out on the back porch cracking open the giant Lynnhavens.
They'd slide the oysters right from the shell, one by one, into their mouths and swallow them just about whole. If an oyster contained a tiny pink oyster crab, Grandpa would let the delicacy crawl across his tongue, before chewing it up.
It's a wonder I ever ate an oyster. But I'm sure there was something far behind my control that compelled me to take up oysters later in life. It must have been that Princess Anne County food gene passed down from Grandpa.
In late winter and early spring, his passion was for shad and herring roe. When the shad and herring started running up Virginia rivers to spawn, Grandpa had herring roe and scrambled eggs most mornings for breakfast and shad roe and bacon whenever he could get it in the evenings.
Neither are particularly appetizing to a youngster, but I was destined to find roe delicious, too, as time went on. A soft-shell crab is not an easy food to eat for the first time either but thanks to Grandpa's gene, I managed to suffer that initial bite and was hooked.
Now I have it all - his food clock and the home of his roots - and there's nothing better as summer's coming on. ILLUSTRATION: Staff file photo by DREW C. WILSON
Extreme efforts are taken to keep soft-shell crabs alive. In this
picture, they were stacked back to belly until they were cooked.
by CNB