The Witches

MUSSEL, SHRIMP, and COD STEW

Recently, a group of friends and I were reminiscing over dinner about various childhood humiliations, swapping stories about terrible first kisses, super-flared jeans, mushroom cuts, and organized dance routines. One friend talked about laughing until she wet her pants at a middle school semiformal; another told of getting a jumbo cola thrown at her from a car full of older girls.

Then my friend Nick, who is also from Massachusetts, told us about the time he went on a class field trip to the Salem Witch Museum in third grade and threw up from sheer terror in front of his entire class as soon as the tour guide placed his head in the stocks. I was laughing so hard I had tears coming down my cheeks, but the rest of my friends, all of whom grew up outside New England, were absolutely horrified, unable to believe that we were taught about such violent atrocities at such a young age.

I had always assumed that this was a part of everyone’s elementary school curriculum—that everyone had learned about Cotton Mather and Bridget Bishop, about stonings and hangings, before being dismissed, wide-eyed and silent, for recess. I was shocked to learn that most of my friends had never heard of the Salem witch trials until high school, when they were assigned The Crucible, and others not until midway through college, when it came up in an Early American History class.

After that night I started asking friends who teach elementary school whether they taught their students about the witch trials, and all but one of them laughed and said that they would never be allowed to. It got me thinking about my early education and the teachers who firmly and honestly taught me and my peers about witch hunts and genocide and war. These were the blue-haired New England teachers of the old school, who wore sensible, midcalf cotton skirts and believed that fear was an integral part of educating children.

I loved these women, with their Ivory soap smells and tea-stained teeth and their willingness to tell the truth about just how ugly the world can be. It was easiest to imagine that these ladies, who never once mentioned husbands or children of their own, lived at the school—unlike those bubbly, young, just-married teachers who were forever showing us photos of their new homes and kittens and bringing their husbands to school for visits. It was also easy to imagine that these women, who insisted on teaching us about the atrocities of the Salem witch trials, were themselves witches.

Year after year rumors circulated about the same teachers, and things only got worse after we read Roald Dahl’s The Witches. While the history lessons about the witch trials provided us with impractical tools for spotting a witch—hidden birthmarks and difficulty reciting the Lord’s Prayer—The Witches told us that it was as easy as looking at hair, hands, eyes, gums. We looked and looked, finding signs wherever we wanted to and making them up when we couldn’t.

As a child, anything that I read in a book was the absolute truth as far as I was concerned, so when Dahl told me in the foreword to The Witches, “This is not a fairy tale. This is about REAL WITCHES,” I believed him wholeheartedly. I read the book like a manual, flipping back to it for reference whenever an adult was particularly cruel to me or an old woman looked at me for too long while I read at the library.

Dahl, like the teachers of my youth, wasn’t shy about frightening children. His insistence that what he was writing was true is perhaps one of the reasons that this book has always been so controversial—kids are gullible and witch hunts are real, and teaching children to look for physical signs in a woman that will condemn her as evil is dicey territory. Before the Salem witch trials in 1692, there were the Vardø witch trials in Norway, starting in 1621 and continuing intermittently until 1663. These trials serve as the historical backdrop to The Witches. The narrator’s grandmother hails from Oslo and assures him that “her witch stories, unlike most of the others, were not imaginary tales. They were all true. They were the gospel truth. They were history.”

Besides their bleak shared history of witch hunts, Norway and Massachusetts also find common ground in the fact that they are coastal and have therefore relied heavily on the ocean as a food source throughout history. I never knew just how spoiled I was by Massachusetts seafood until I moved away from home and ate in other cities. Growing up, we consumed enormous amounts of seafood—tiny, sweet scallops and plump, briny Wellfleet oysters; mayo-heavy lobster rolls, with meaty claws peeking out from inside buttered hot dog buns.

In the winter we ate oven-broiled cod, white and flaky and covered in butter and Ritz Crackers. In the summer we rowed a rickety boat a half mile out to gather armloads of shiny, tight-lipped mussels from a gigantic lion-shaped rock, braving razor-sharp barnacles and dive-bombing seabirds so that we could have mussels, steamed or grilled, for dinner. In every season we ate steaming bowls of creamy, chest-warming clam chowder dotted with sweet corn and linguiça sausage and full-bellied littlenecks.

One scene in The Witches resonated with me the most, both as a child and as an adult: the one in which the narrator’s grandmother reminisces about her childhood days spent “out in the rowing boat.” She tells him about how she and her brother used to explore the tiny islands along the coast, diving into the sea “off the lovely smooth granite rocks,” dropping anchor to fish for cod or whiting, and frying up whatever they caught in a pan for lunch—adding that “there is no finer fish in the world than absolutely fresh cod.”

They used mussels for bait, and if nothing bit they would “cook [the mussels] in sea-water” until they were “tender and salty” and “delicious.” When they were feeling less ambitious they would simply row out to sea and wait for the shrimp boats to head home, waving at the men so that they would stop and give them handfuls of shrimp, “still warm from having just been cooked,” and they would “sit in the rowing boat, peeling them and gobbling them up,” even sucking out the head to make sure they got every last bit. It’s a beautiful passage, and one that reminds me just how much talent Dahl had, not only as an imaginative storyteller, but as a writer.

Reading about cod and mussels and shrimp so close together immediately makes me think of the cioppino my family used to get in the Italian North End of Boston, packed with the morning’s catches and simmered in wine and plump tomatoes and speckled with crushed red pepper.

THE WITCHES

Mussel, Shrimp, and Cod Stew

In this recipe I use mussels, shrimp, and cod for their literary authenticity, but feel free to add or substitute any fish or shellfish you prefer, or whatever looks the freshest at the market.

Serves 6

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 yellow onion, diced

1 fennel bulb, thinly sliced

1 bunch fresh parsley, roughly chopped

½ bay leaf

2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste

5 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper

1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

2½ cups chicken stock

1½ cups dry white wine

½ cup bottled clam juice

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 fresh basil leaves, finely chopped

Leaves of 4 thyme sprigs

1½ pounds mussels, debearded and washed

1½ pounds large raw shrimp, peeled and deveined (thawed if frozen)

1½ pounds skinless cod fillets, cut into 2-inch pieces

Freshly ground black pepper

Crusty bread, for serving

In a very large pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil and butter over medium heat. Add the onion, fennel, parsley, bay leaf, and salt and sauté until the onion and fennel are translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper and sauté for 2 more minutes.

Add the crushed tomatoes, chicken stock, white wine, clam juice, tomato paste, basil, and thyme to the pot. Stir, cover, and cook until the mixture comes up to a simmer. Reduce the heat and continue to simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.

Add the mussels, cover, and cook until they begin to open, 5 to 10 minutes. Stir in the shrimp and cod, cover, and simmer until they are just cooked through, another 5 to 10 minutes. Discard any mussels that did not open.

Season the stew with salt and pepper to taste. Ladle into shallow bowls and serve with good, crusty bread.