The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

This book, though incredibly beautiful and lyrical and so very funny at times, is also so heart-wrenching to read that I considered not going with it. And I’ve read it before, but I think sometimes when you read things at a younger age, you haven’t either gone through the devastation and heartbreaks of adulthood so you find yourself feeling more intensely things that perhaps didn’t touch you as much when you hadn’t gone through hell and come back to tell the tale.

At its heart, The Prince of Tides is about family. The betrayals and bonds and fucked-up connections and small heartaches and deep love and hate that any family goes through in life. The story is told from the viewpoint of Tom Wingo, one of the three Wingo children. Tom is an adult now, going through his own marital woes and never quite able to get to the place he wants, either emotionally or financially. It’s like all those things he wants are just out of his grasp. His twins sister Savannah, who lives in NYC, attempts suicide and Tom goes up there to care for her during her recovery. He meets Savannah’s therapist, Susan Lowenstein, and as part of trying to help his emotionally wrecked sister, starts to gradually tell stories of their life growing up on Melrose Island, about their abusive father and self-centered mother, their older brother Luke whose ultimate fate breaks your heart, and how their overall life and and one hour of brutal horror and its aftermath, has continued to affect them in such deeply dark ways.

I suppose my takeaway from this book is how much you can love the people in your family who have caused you the most pain, grief and anger. It resonates so powerfully for me, particularly Tom’s relationship with his mother Lila because he does love her, as much as he hates her. Our families can put us through the emotional wringer like nothing and no one else. I had a very strong bond with my maternal grandmother precisely because of the fact that my own mother and I had one of the most challenging and difficult relationships I’ve experienced. And yet…..I loved her. I didn’t realize how much until she died last October. I always thought I either hated her or was indifferent to her because of all the pain she inflicted on her kids, on her own family. It just goes to show that family bonds can be the most enduring, the most painful, the most strangulating, and the most fulfilling……all at once.

Though the book is quite lyrically beautiful and, at times, hysterically funny – the scene where Tom’s mother cooks a can of Alpo dog food to his father because he is being a total horrible prick – is classic. But it’s a book that will tear out your heart. It touches on so many painful topics and how all the crap we endure as kids can have such an enduring effect upon us as adults in ways we never truly consider. It strikes home for me right now because I am going through what feels like a very intense emotional transformation and depression because of dealing with my memories and grief over my mother, over the death of my first love, over so many work difficulties, over the betrayal of a man I have loved so deeply……….and I realize that so much of how I dealt with emotional upheavals as a child and what I learned from my own family dynamic has informed why I’ve done so many things as an adult. Going through transformations later in life is so much harder because we know how much emotional shit can hurt us, more so than as a kid. It’s tough, that’s for certain.

The bond that Tom shares with Lila is predicated very much on their shared love of food and cooking. Lila is an amazing cook and shows Tom how to cook such delicacies as shrimp mousse, bouillabaisse, and wild duck, the recipe for which is described in mouth-watering detail. Being that this book is set in the South, I could have made any number of delectable dishes mentioned between the pages, but when Tom waxes poetic about Lila’s cooking ability, I was inspired. You see, Lila wants to be accepted among the snobby, wealthy women of the Colleton League, an elite group of rich women married to the rich men who essentially run the town. Lila, who is poor and incredibly beautiful, is of course shunned by these women but that doesn’t keep her from trying to get acceptance by continually submitting recipes for inclusion into the cookbook the League publishes each year, made up of genteel dishes submitted by the wealthy wives. But ultimately, it was this passage that inspired me to try something I’ve never yet made in the kitchen – Southern style barbecue pork ribs.

She did magic things with pork that and changed the way I looked at the flesh of pigs forever. If she had published her recipe for pit barbecue, it would have altered the quality of life in the South as we knew it. But barbecue was indissolubly linked to her past and she eliminated it from contention as too simple and pedestrian.

Southern-style pork ribs are something I’ve never cooked before, so I am using a method that is a combination of suggestions from many of my Facebook followers, a few ideas from my dear friend Jake Goodmon who is a BBQ master, and my own taste palate.

INGREDIENTS
2 pounds St. Louis-style pork ribs
2 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 tablespoon liquid smoke
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon sea salt
2-3 tablespoons fresh ground pepper
1 teaspoons dry mustard
2 tablespoons smoked paprika
2 tablespoons dried onion
3 tablespoons garlic powder
1/3 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons red chile powder
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons dried parsley

METHOD
Marinate the ribs overnight in the grapeseed oil, liquid smoke, and apple cider vinegar, in the refrigerator.

The next day, remove from the refrigerator and drain the marinade, but don’t throw it away.

In a small bowl, mix together the sea salt, pepper, mustard powder, paprika, dried onion, garlic powder, brown sugar, red chile powder, red chile flakes, and dried parsley.

Rub over the damp ribs on both sides, and leave to sit for about an hour.

Preheat the oven to  200F and lay the ribs out on a baking tray. Pour the reserved marinade over them, cover with foil, and bake low and slow for up to 5 hours, turning after the first two hours and occasionally pouring over the juices. The smell is out of this world!

At the five-hour mark, turn on the broiler and remove the foil from the ribs. Broil for maybe 15 minutes, until they get dark brown and crunchy. Heat up the pan juices and reduce them until they thicken, then pour over the ribs.

Let cool about 10 minutes, then eat like a caveman, with lots of napkins for the sauce. So very good and perfect with a glass of red wine, though really, what DOESN’T go well with wine?