Red, White and Roux

One day last week, my good pal, Bud, brought over some fresh fish – a flounder all cleaned and scored, and a handful of whiting fillets. I was out of cornmeal but after a dip in self-rising flour and a plunge in hot oil, they were as good as it gets.

I started thinking about the pleasures of giving and receiving.

In the late ‘70s, I worked at WFLA-TV and Radio in Tampa. A young cameraman would bring in big brown paper bags of avocados from his mother's tree. They were huge, by grocery store standards, and there for the enjoyment of all. We would bring in stacks of saltines and sit at our desks eating our fill, smearing the crackers with huge spoonfuls of the ripe fruit. There was plenty to take home for guacamole and fancier stuff.

Now, at Thanksgiving, there are guests who raid their citrus trees and bring boxes of oranges and grapefruit to share. This year there were even key limes. Sometimes, there is heart of palm. Everyone brings cake.

We like to get, but we love to give. Even my students have been known to bring me a mess of bream.

My kumquat tree has disappointed the last two years, but previously colleagues have been invited to come and pick at will. I am looking for a good year of Japanese plums (loquats), and I hope carloads of children will come and eat to their heart's content. I will confide to them, though, that stolen Japanese plums taste better. The same goes for mulberries.

When I began planning my raised bed garden in the backyard, one of my first fantasies was being able to bring in bunches of green beans, snow peas, and carrots to friends. The green beans produced enough for only a few meals. I have high hopes for the snow peas. The broccoli is doing fine and we were able to give Bud a short stalk. We were so proud.

When I was a kid, we didn't grow vegetables or can preserves, we baked. Mama routinely made cookies for all of the employees at the county road camp. I made sweet yeast bread confections every Saturday (part of my 4-H project), and Mama always had a list of worthy recipients.

In return, we never bought seafood. We rarely asked, but it often appeared, thanks to the generosity of those who knew my mother.

And now we come to pecans. When I was young, we had three aunts with trees. My sister and I liked Aunt Nannie's nuts the best. They were barrel-shaped with a paper shell. Cracking was a breeze and two perfect halves were the result. Aunt Sara's nuts were more problematic. They were small and had a thick shell. Most times extreme picking was required to extract even a big hunk of a piece. The flavor was glorious. Aunt Goldie Mae had a mixture of trees. We were grateful for the bounty even though it meant hours of cracking hard work in the evenings in front of television.

Buying pecans was not even a consideration.

In the ‘80s I wrote a food column for the Times. Just before the new pecan crop, I wrote about recipes that could use up nuts left over from the previous year. Just imagine that kind of bounty.

My aunts are gone, and so are their trees. I hope there are people out there planting now, even though it might be 11 years or more before children pick up the nuts and crack them in front of the TV at night.

In the meantime, we still have the urge to grow and give. The collards will be sweet after they are kissed with a bit of frost and produce more than enough leaves to spread around. It won't be long before the pear trees are burdened with too much to eat out of hand. How about sharing so that others will be able to make Miss Edwina Chauncy's pear pie (Look in an old Philaco Club Cookbook) or my nana's pear relish? Figs will transform into preserves. Sometimes the giving goes both ways – fruit to canner and back again.

This is all unspoken generosity. There is no, “How about a pound cake for a pound of shrimp?” We don't even keep an internal accounting.

We give. We get. It is as simple as that.

Denise Roux is a regular columnist for the Apalachicola and Carrabelle Times. To reach her, email her at rouxwhit@mchsi.com