At the moment I first met Alex Sanders, the mythical and larger-than-life former president of the College of Charleston, it was on a hillside in North Georgia, where he stood holding a brace of live Maine lobsters in a doughnut box while he taught a group of children a magic trick. We were the guests of two ebullient Georgians, Joe and Emily Cummings, on the first of twenty-five annual weekends when a specially selected group of friends would gather for sparkling conversation and superb food. I had always thought I had a good personality until I met Alex Sanders, and I found myself gripped by a kind of autism during that memorable encounter, when Alex dazzled the entire entourage with stories about the South that seemed epic in scope and definitive in nature. That evening, we met at sunset, with the long shadows moving across the hills and the last light sliding across the mountain lake like icing slow to cool.
Emily Cummings, our hostess, pointed toward the disappearing sun and shouted to her musical and talented family, “Oh, look. The sunset. The sheer beauty of the world.”
Her husband, Joe, a wordsmith of great note, added, “By God, this light is a changeling, even a barbaric thing. Thus, this noble orb, engorged with mercury and gold, vanishes even as we speak the name of harsh, demonic night…”
I was new to all this and found it interesting, indeed. Long prepared for these sudden paganlike moments of ecstasy, the four Cummings children, aged eight to eighteen, rushed to their parents’ side and all six of them began humming, tuning, and harmonizing their voices, sounding much like musical instruments warming up in an orchestra pit.
Alex Sanders and his wife, Zoe, watched my reaction to all this with great bemusement. I saw Alex smile as my face turned to pure astonishment when the Cummings family bade farewell to the fast-disappearing sun by bursting into song:
“Day is done, yes, the day is done.
Day is done
Yes, oh Lord, day is done.”
I am not speaking here of a shy, Trappist-like praise of the spilling of time as in Lauds or Matins. It looked like the finale of Show Boat or West Side Story, with everyone singing at the top of their voices, their arms extended, Joe down on one knee, and Emily thrusting an umbrella out toward the mountains and beyond.
Alex Sanders noticed my puzzlement and utter surprise at the suddenness and spontaneity of the scene as the valley rang with the echoes of the hymn.
Then Alex spoke: “Ah! I could not help but notice—this is your first time with the Family von Trapp.”
I fell in love with Alex Sanders that weekend, simply one of the many over the years who have been overwhelmed and ambushed in the field by the sheer immensity of his charm. By a roaring fire on the second day, Alex told some of the greatest stories I had ever heard, and I had to fight the urge to retreat to my room to record them in my journal while their fresh, persimmon-like details still burned along the taste buds of memory. In firelight, Alex had the head of a Javanese tiger and a serenity that enabled him to hold court without resorting to coarseness or testosterone. He waited his turn, then used a matador’s skill in controlling the pace of his narrative, and by changing the rhythm of his great accented voice, he could move us the way the matador could change the direction of a bull’s charge by the flick of the wrist and the false billow created in that acreage of red cape. His phrasing was eloquent, colloquial, his pitch perfect. Wonderful writers surrounded him, and all of them found themselves bested and awed.
I will always remember Alex sitting in his flannel shirt with the smell of burning wood around us as the fires of autumn lit up the ridge of Tate Mountain with the surprising beauty that withering grants to its high forests. Alex’s stories matched the uncommon colors of fall, where the trees flared up in all the vividness of wild roses gone to seed, the wings of hairstreaks and hummingbirds and all the last rainbows of the dying year. Rarely had I encountered stories so original, so strong with delightful detail, so perfect. Like wood smoke, his stories were born of fire, then carried away through air.
Whenever I have been in the presence of Zoe and Alex Sanders, the food has always been fabulous, the company unparalleled, the drink free-flowing and plentiful, and the conversation thrilling, heady, life-changing. As a couple, they have turned the dailiness of life into an art form and invited anyone who crosses their path to learn all its steps and secrets. As the College of Charleston knows, the now-retired President and Mrs. Sanders live out their lives at full speed, incapable of holding anything back. Both are fine cooks, and I have eaten like a deposed Italian king when I’ve found myself a lucky guest in their house. Zoe has as inimitable a reputation and mystique as a hostess as her husband does as an orator or storyteller or judge or educator. She is pretty, fiercely competent, fiery in her beliefs, and tenacious in her loves and enthusiasms.
Once, I sat with friends as Alex and Zoe fixed a fish stew that I remember being as good as any bouillabaisse that I ordered in the back-streets of Marseilles. The rouille they composed to top that soup in cloudlike dollops was a lovesong to garlic. I can summon up visions of past meals that have included ice chests loaded down with shrimp that had been swimming offshore that morning; oysters gathered during the last low tide; salads glistening with olive oil and darkened with raindrops of balsamic vinegar; fennel and red peppers blistered on the same grills where marinated flank steaks will follow; quail and wild rice swimming in gravy; sirloin steaks as large as my head hanging off serving platters; grouper and salmon and mahimahi coming off their bones in nuggets of white flesh that tastes like seaborne butter to the palate.
Both Alex Sanders and I have been accused of being prone to grotesque exaggeration in our careers, and there is great merit when that accusation is directed at Alex. But in my own defense, I can never convince people outside the South that I know someone as pointlessly colorful, outrageous, and bone-jarringly amusing as Alex Sanders himself. Alex helped me understand that the South I grew up in is so over-the-top and overbaked that I see myself as a shy minimalist trying to ink black-and-white woodcuts of my native land. Southerners all know that the South is too bizarre and out of control for its own good. I always find myself having to surrender some of the juice, hold back on the cayenne and Tabasco, for the sake of credibility itself.
When The Prince of Tides came out in 1986, I sat in the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York answering questions from a hostile reporter. As I dined on sweetbreads poached in white wine, I never thought I would be conducting much of the interview about Alex Sanders while a journalist skewered my brightest work.
“I found the white porpoise scene in your novel a little much,” she said, toying with her salad. Critics are mostly bulimic, rail-thin—no great appetites there. “Homage to Herman Melville. Right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “Alex Sanders told me the story.”
“Who is Alex Sanders?”
“The greatest of all South Carolinians,” I answered. “I thanked him in the acknowledgments.”
“You thanked everyone in the acknowledgments,” she said. “But there’s no white porpoise, right?”
“Wrong. I saw the white porpoise swimming in Harbor River when I was at Beaufort High School.”
I could tell she did not believe me, but she went on with the next question. “In your book you have a Bengal tiger at a gas station. How ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, eating happily “Another story from Alex Sanders. That was Happy the Tiger at an Esso gas station on Gervais Street in Columbia. I once fed Happy a chicken neck after I got my car washed.”
“Let’s go on,” she said, her voice skeptical. “The moving of the town? To make way for a plutonium plant?”
“Want to go to the town?” I asked. “It’s called New Ellenton.”
“You claim it’s true.”
“I could get you a radiation burn at the plant, if you’re so inclined.”
She looked over her notes, then said, “And you’re going to tell me Alex Sanders told you this story.”
“It’s one of his best,” I said.
“Do you pay Alex Sanders royalties?”
“If I were a good and decent man, I certainly would. But I prefer to simply rob him of all his material and take full credit for it. He does the same to me.”
“Do you ever have any ideas of your own?” she asked scornfully.
“Every once in a while I borrow from my meager pantry of ideas. But not often.”
“What does this Alex Sanders do? Is he employed?”
“He’s the chief justice of South Carolina’s Court of Appeals, and he teaches at Harvard Law School.”
She studied me for a moment, then said, “You’re exaggerating again.”
“Hotshot reporter like yourself could find out in a jif,” I said, my voice revealing my irritation.
“You sound hostile.”
“You find me dishonest.”
“I’m skeptical,” she said.
“That makes me hostile.”
“Does the great Alex Sanders find you hostile?”
“He finds me perfectly delightful in every possible way,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I feel the same way about him. I’d rather spend an evening with Alex Sanders than anyone I’ve ever met. You’d feel the same way if you knew Alex. Everyone does.”
Again, her eyes went to her notes, and her hostility was like a condiment to the meal. She said, “Let’s go to the old chestnut. If you could invite any three people in history to a dinner party, who would they be?”
“Alex Sanders. Alex Sanders. Then Alex Sanders again.”
“You’re making fun of the question,” she said.
“I certainly am. You want me to answer Jesus of Nazareth, Genghis Khan, and Eva Braun. Something like that.”
“Something like that,” she said, then she looked around at the décor of the unsurpassable Four Seasons. “Why did you want to eat in a place like this? I find it pretentious.”
“It was recommended to me by Alex Sanders and his lovely wife, Zoe.”
The reporter rose up to shake my hand and said, in parting, “I haven’t believed a word you’ve said.”
I found this strange encounter in one of my journals and wanted to include it in this book because Zoe and Alex are unlike any two people I have ever met. They entered my life like two sharply tanged sorbets, coming in the middle of the meal to cleanse the palate and ready you for the feast that is on its way from the kitchen. Always, they have surprised me with their uncanny and inexhaustible generosity.
When I last saw Alex, he told me about selling a litter of Boykin spaniels from the back of a pickup truck to a group of rich Yankees at William Buckley’s house in Camden, South Carolina. Then he launched into one of the greatest love stories I’ve ever heard, about a shepherd in France who falls in love with a beautiful French reporter. The reporter climbs for six hours to reach the upper pastures where the shepherd tends his flocks in plain sight of the Alps. But I only hint at these stories with the hope that I live long enough to include them in future novels I have stolen from the brimming imagination of the greatest of all South Carolinians, Alex Sanders.
SOUPE DE POISSON Near the docks of Marseilles, in a restaurant that looked more dangerous than enchanting, I followed the maitre d’ to a small table with a starched, no-nonsense tablecloth; a glacial waiter moved toward my table. My guidebook said the restaurant served one of the best bouillabaisses in Marseilles, where the dish marked its provenance. I had eaten Zoe and Alex Sanders’s fish soup on two occasions—once in the mountains of Georgia at Joe and Emily Cummings’s house, and once in their own house in Columbia. I noted that these were two of the finest home-cooked meals I had ever eaten. This soup is celebratory and generous of spirit, and you fall in love with the friends who take the time to make it for you. It is a soup of great simplicity, yet the taste resonates along the palate.
I thought I was going to catch grief from the waiter for dining alone because Julia Child had forewarned in her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking that bouillabaisse was best made for a table of six. The French waiter asked me if it was my first time eating bouillabaisse in Marseilles, and I said in pidgin French that it was. “The bouillabaisse of Paris is not bouillabaisse,” he said in one of the only French sentences I’ve ever understood.
When he emerged later from the kitchen, I could smell the meal racing ahead of him in the air. He set it in front of me and told me to inhale the steam rising from the broth. The smell was clean and deep, as though I were living inside an aquarium. I took a spoon and made sure I shaved off the southern portion of the rouille, a piece of sole, the scented broth, and a piece of the toasted French bread at the bottom. It was good beyond my powers to dream.
France, ladies and gentlemen. France.
• SERVES 6 AS A FIRST COURSE
4 cups Fish Stock (page 12)
2 tomatoes, coarsely chopped
3 pounds any combination of fresh fish, cleaned, skinned, and cut into large dice*
12 slices baguette, lightly toasted
Rouille (see below)
1. In a medium stockpot, bring the fish stock to a simmer. Stir in the tomatoes and saffron and continue to simmer until the flavors marry, 8 to 10 minutes.
2. Gently place the pieces of fish in the simmering stock and continue simmering until the fish is cooked through but still slightly translucent in the center, about 5 minutes.
3. Put 2 slices of toast in each wide, shallow soup bowl. Ladle the soup into the bowls. Place a spoonful of rouille in the middle of the soup and serve. Pass the remaining rouille at the table.
Rouille
Use Homemade Mayonnaise (page 57) for the framework. Add 5 finely minced garlic cloves to the whisked egg yolks and a crushed small dried red chile when the mixture is transferred to the food processor.
GRILLED FENNEL AND PEPPER SALAD • SERVES 6 TO 8
4 fennel bulbs, cleaned, trimmed, and quartered
4 large red bell peppers, cored, seeded, and quartered
Olive oil
Coarse or kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper
Fresh mint leaves
Balsamic vinegar
1. Toss the vegetables in olive oil, add salt and pepper to taste, and marinate for at least 45 minutes.
2. Light a medium-hot fire. Grill the fennel, cut side up, for 3 minutes. Turn and grill for another 3 minutes, or until lightly charred. Grill the peppers for 2 minutes a side until lightly charred.
3. Arrange the fennel and peppers on a serving platter. Sprinkle with fresh mint. Pass balsamic vinegar on the side.
*Using at least four or five types of fish makes the soup more interesting: cod, mahimahi, tilapia, sea bass, grouper, halibut, snapper, trout, monkfish, catfish, or swordfish. Avoid strong-flavored fish like bluefish or mackerel.