Old family recipes are a big part of the holidays. Unfortunately my family tree did not include many recipe fans. As for the women in the extended family, the recipe cards were in their heads and did not transfer onto cardboard. My grandmother did not surrender any of her secret recipes, taking them to the grave with her, so we depended on my mother’s know-how to keep some in-house meals true to tradition. Sometimes a new recipe would enter our lives, and we made the effort to keep them in hard copy whenever possible. That is why, when my parents and I fell in love with a shrimp bog recipe back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, we were devastated when it disappeared.
My mother had clipped it from a magazine, one of the many she read religiously every month. The big problem with clippings back then was that the instructions often ran atop a photo or an ad, and continued on another page somewhere in the back of the issue. This meant creative clipping, trying to preserve orphaned lines of preparation directions with careful folds or tape. Also, without the Internet being as big a resource, once a magazine was off the shelves, recovering anything from it was difficult at best. This particular recipe apparently went into a place for safekeeping, and it was so safe it was lost.
While I was recently clearing off a bookshelf, I came across a metal box and, upon opening it, found a small treasure inside. Among its strange contents, I found a few neatly folded yellow napkins from the days when one could buy pink, yellow and blue napkins in a multipack. Also inside were bobby pins, a few clippings from businesses long gone, and to my delight, there was the original recipe for the shrimp bog, beautifully folded and hidden for decades. It was an early Christmas present and brought me joy.
For the holidays, I’ve decided to create the dish, to end the year with an old tradition. I’ve never done seven fishes for Christmas, but two pounds of shrimp sounds like an interesting alternative. Along with onions, tomatoes, rice and seasoning, it should bring a renewed joy to the palate.
Have a delicious holiday, everybody.
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