DI MARE

A bone-thin man pulled a black stone bowl from a bed of orange coals with a pair of worn pliers. He rested the bowl in a metal frame that stood up from a bamboo cart and slid a dash of sesame oil down its side. The oil ran to the well of the bowl and sizzled and popped. He added onions and garlic and long pieces of lemongrass. The mixture squeaked and sighed in the heat. He held three of the largest shrimp I’ve ever seen in his right hand while he stoked the ingredients in the stone bowl with his left.

They weren’t shrimp. They were prawns. And they were as big as his hands; long and gray with whiskers that curled out like snapped fishing line. Their eyes were black discs the size of nail-heads.

He added the prawns and they changed from gray to pink in seconds. A few minutes later they were placed on my plate and covered in a dust of red chili powder.

They were eaten – shell and all. Definitely the strangest way I’ve had shrimp, or at least a shrimp relative.

We grow up eating popcorn shrimp from fast-food chains; we eat over-buttered scampi and heavy cheese’d pastas studded with oil-logged, overcooked shrimps.

Sheesh. What abominations.

The Italians are of the opinion that dairy products should never be mixed with seafood; I tend to agree. There’s something to be said for simplicity.

Barebones dishes – shrimp boiled with handfuls of Old Bay, some new potatoes, some sweet corn: that’s it.

Shrimp cocktail: that's it.

Large tiger shrimp, split down the middle, skewered and painted with olive oil, garlic, sea salt, pepper and barbecued: that’s it, too.

In the Pleistocene, my family and grandparents used to head to Ponte Vedra, Florida in the summer.

The dining room woke the stomach up from its beach food slumber. Corn chips and Goober Grape sandwiches and Yoo-Hoos.

Ponte Vedra’s shrimp cocktail came from the kitchen in a frosted silver goblet. A dozen pink shrimp fanned around the rim, their necks nestled in ice. In the center rested a half-dollar sized ramekin of piquant cocktail sauce, a fine mixture of grated horseradish and ketchup and fresh lemon juice. A small silver cocktail fork grew from the middle, its three tines staking a lemon wedge. The shrimp were always firm and crisp and snapped when bit. They tasted clean and sweet with a faint residue of salt.

I’ll never forget them.

The only other shrimp I’ve had that can compare are the ones I had a few weeks ago on Jekyll Island. They were wild Georgia shrimp, caught right off the marshes, and they needed nothing but shelling. Katrina and I overdosed on 'em last Summer...