Yes, Uncle Quentin had the secret of locating and shelling out quahaugs. That was his share of the business. It was right that spry nephews with supple posteriors should lake orders from him about digging and carrying the shellfish home. Uncle Quentin had the thin, expert blade to his jackknife that made his fast work at shelling possible. That was another secret.
Uncle Quentin had more. He had greater secrets. He had the two sole recipes for cooking quahaugs without letting on to them that they were being cooked at all. Lightning, again. For his two kinds of cooking were matters of a few blue seconds only.
First, there were his doughnutted quahaugs. He shelled the bivalves for my mother. Under his sharp blue eye she drained them bone-dry and rolled them in com meal with an egg-yolk batter. Then Uncle Quentin took a fork to the quahaugs, one by one, and dipped each into a skillet of seething bacon fat. Just one slow dip and no more, then out and onto a paper mat to blot out the fat, smoking, translated, transfigured, never given a chance to be surprised at being seared to his core while still alive, to harden his heart and his tenderness at being cooked. It was cooking by chain lightning, and nothing less.
But the other recipe of my Uncle Quentin is even more monumental and tricky. I hope and believe I have remembered it correctly. I hope to feel the sting of my uncle's Red River quirt on my rear if the quahaugs do not come out as his did. They are the best headstone my Uncle Quentin could have. Here goes:
Quahaug Cakes
You shelled the quahaugs. drained them for an hour, took out the green livers so as not to offend the eyes of the fastidious (my Uncle Quentin never permitted such a sacrifice of tongue to eye!), and chopped them up finely with an equal amount of stale crackers. You mixed in the yolks of five or six eggs—for a family the size of ours—and the peck of shelled quahaugs you were making up in this one batch. The egg yolks provided the means for making the mass adhere properly. You patted the mess into flat, oval patties and you put them into a cool place, say, down-cellar, to age overnight.
Then when you were ready to cook the cakes, you got a griddle so hot it smoked, rubbed on a slab of fat pork, and turned the smoke azure. You dropped on the patties of chopped quahaugs and let them stay only while you counted to twenty, slowly, flipped each one over, and gave the port side twenty more counts. Then off and onto the table where hungry people sal and burned their mouths with them, and blessed you as their mouths burned.
Notice that here is no salt, no pepper, no bay or any other herb. A quahaug, my Uncle Quentin used to say, is all the spices and the garnishes himself, and he needs nothing to cook in. He is the whole sea and the summer sky.
These are the two sole ways the uncookable quahaug will endure cooking and yet retain his incredible and indelible flavor. Chowder is a murder.
Oysters? The best of them, even the ephemeral little South Carolina ones that must be eaten ten feet from their home, are flat and savorless beside the sweet, strong, variegated, persistent, seductive taste and texture of the Maine quahaug. The chill of the North Atlantic is in him, the spice of sunlit and iodized brine. He is the bayberry of the sea. The twentieth, the fortieth, raw quahaug tastes as full and savory as the first—as the ninetieth, when it was my Uncle Quentin doing the eating!
I have a belief in some sort of immortality. For I do not see how any being that had lived life in Maine would ever give up the chance of returning there as an astral body. If that be the case, and if I had the eyes to see him, I would know where to look for my stout Uncle Quentin. He would be where the astral Abenaki warriors squatted on their shell heaps. He would be there, right in the middle. And I would know him at once, not only by his red hair and red moustache, but better by the mountain of dripping quahaug shells shining all around him. Where the shells rose the thickest, there my Uncle Quentin would be. And there would be twenty small Indian boys, my counterparts, bringing him new quahaugs by the basketful, just as I used to sweat to do in my boyhood long ago.
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