Our great-granny USA road trip officially kicked off in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, with us driving past sand dunes and beach oats billowing in a warm breeze (because summer was just wrapping up on the Atlantic coast). We’d been tipped off on a local cooking hero, grandmother Sharon, who lives in a hurricane-battered home that has withstood 60 years of wind thrashings.
Its very beams were once trodden by sailors doomed to meet their end at Diamond Shoals – the most eastern point of the USA at which two deadly currents clash – only 10 minutes from Sharon’s home.
‘You just batten down and make sure as hell you have some potatoes, onions and a burner to cook with – it ain’t scary at all,’ is her reaction to the extreme weather she faces each year. Her stew included a ‘bread pie’, which is essentially chopped-up bits of bread dough cooked in broth to become flat, tender and chewy dumplings that serve to thicken the soup and add warmth to this hurricane-defying dish.
In typical fashion of people from the south, Sharon welcomed us with warm, wide arms. We relished gulping down her intelligent insights on life as much as the sweet iced tea on her back porch. We talked politics, philosophy and love as we crowded over her stove to cook up stewed shrimp, caught fresh on her doorstep that day.
Shrimp Stew with ‘Pie Bread’
Feeds 4
Takes 40 minutes
Ingredients
3 tbsp olive oil
500g shelled king prawns
4 waxy red potatoes, skin on and cut into 2cm cubes
½ large white onion, diced
1 tsp sea salt
2 spring onions, chopped
For the pie bread
120g plain flour
1 tbsp butter
For the pickled lettuce
1 romaine lettuce, finely shredded
100ml cider vinegar
100ml water
Method
Start with the pie bread. Combine the ingredients in a bowl, rubbing the butter into the flour with your hands. Season with salt and pepper and slowly add cold water a tiny bit at a time (around 60ml). Mix as you go and stop adding water when the flour firms up and comes together into a ball, but isn’t sticky or wet. Knead for 1 minute and set aside with a tea towel over the top of the bowl as you prepare the rest.
Next shred your lettuce and mix in a bowl with the vinegar and water. Set aside in the fridge to pickle.
Now for the stew; place a large pan over a medium heat with the olive oil (enough to cover the base of the pan) and cook half of shrimp until pink and perhaps turning slightly golden at the edges. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
Put the second batch in the same pan, cook for 1 minute and add the potatoes, onion and sea salt along with a sprinkling of pepper. Pour in enough water to cover all the ingredients, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes, or until the potatoes are almost tender.
While the stew cooks, return to the pie bread. Dust a clean surface with flour and roll out your dough 3mm thick. Cut the dough into 3cm squares.
When the stew has cooked for 10 minutes, lay the pieces of pie bread into the pan, cover and cook for 15 minutes on a very low heat, stirring occasionally, until the pastry is tender and puffed and the stew has thickened slightly. Top up the broth with water if it’s not soupy enough for you.
Ladle into bowls, drop in the tender prawns from the first batch and sprinkle with spring onion. Serve the pickled lettuce on the side. We had ours with Sharon’s iced tea.
