50's Scallops-Dang they were good!!

Unless you live in a coastal area, I doubt you can get scallops the way I used to love them; fresh caught out of Panacea Bay; wading, picking and scrambling, in a few feet of water, sometimes late at night with flashlights or even at 2:00 a.m. depending on the tides.

Panacea, of course, means "remedy" or "cure all" and that's exactly what this tiny Gulf shore community was for us in the 50's. Uncrowded, mostly sandy dirt roads, palmettos and scrub oaks, the ubiquitous pungent odor of brackish salt water, Leroy Crum's gas station and general store, George Metcalf's fish house, oyster shells piled up off the docks, mostly Jim Walter homes on large inexpensive lots. No McDonalds, Arby's and other such cookie-cutter food dispensaries.

You knew you were closing in on it when you turned off the main highway about 30 miles south of Tallahassee for the final 20 mile stretch of road bounded by the pines and marsh grasses of St. Mark's Refuge and unscarred by billboards and condominiums.

I remember that our arrival was usually late evening or at night and Dinah and I would play "rabbidize!" during this final stretch; searching for the glowing coals of rabbit, coon, fox, even bobcat eyes picked up by the headlights and trying to shout "rabbidize!!" first when we spotted them.

Our friends Gladys and Philip "Hunkie" Wald were wonderful hosts and always had one of Gladys' great seafood or wild game dinners waiting-fresh caught speckled trout, fried scallops and oysters, hushpuppies, slaw, iced tea. In winter, the meals were often Canada goose in wild blueberry sauce, broiled or fried sheepshead or snapper.

At The Oaks motel, grocery, fishing supplies and veterinary at the corner of the Panacea bridge you could order the "shrimp boat", about two dozen boiled shrimp plated in a boat-like container with cocktail sauce at one end and garlic butter at the other, served at the counter about as quickly and inexpensively as a "Big deal" "MacRib" or other chain food scam today.

The deliciously pure taste of those dishes, fresh and untampered with, is a joy now reserved for shore dwellers since the overly processed sea food available in super markets today is a feeble imitation.

Unfortunately, for most of us the fresh, original scallop flavor is gone forever; washed away by a tide of modern day sickipoos who have this obsessive desire to control every aspect of life as we know it in their hypochondriacal attempts to live forever which-if they will just check their genealogy and the medical history of mankind-they'll discover is impossible.

When you remind them of this fact, though, they say "I know, I know. But I want to try anyway...."!

Fine for them. But in seeking legislative remedy for their paranoia , the "poos" have spawned a legion of Federal agencies whose rules require that scallops, oysters and other mollusks undergo more chemical baths than nuclear waste material and be run over several times by garden tractors before they are finally blanched, scalded, rubbed, scrubbed, dubbed, siped, galvanized, flash frozen and delivered to the consumer as flaccid, colorless, tasteless,odorless and otherwise mangled misrepresentations of their former delectable little selves.

So unless you're a lot luckier than I am, this is where you have to start.

Tip #1. Buy the bay scallops, the large ones, for this dish. More scallop, flat sides for browning, easier to keep from overcooking.

Tip #2. Your scallops have likely been frozen, even if they are thawed when you buy them. This means that they will be loaded with water along with all the damned processing chemicals.

Forget about losing "the juices"; they are long gone anyway. So press them down with a plate or your palms until they are almost, but not quite, dry. Otherwise the liquid will spoil any chance you might have of getting a crusty pan browned surface on them.

I like to work with two pans; one for the scallops, the other for the onions, peppers, etc., that I want to have with them.

First get the vegetables going--olive oil and butter, a few red pepper flakes and garlic as a sizzling and spicy base. Then saute the onions, green peppers, mushrooms and other vegetable choices until they are almost done but still a little crisp. I like to scatter the diced up tops of scallions and some parsley as I take them off the burner.

Preheat the other pan until the olive oil sizzles, then turn the heat down slightly and put each salt and peppered scallop in place for cooking about two-three minutes on each side. Make sure the heat is not too high at this point or you'll blacken the surface without cooking it inside.

Turn one to see that the bottom is a nice, darkening brown before turning them all and working toward the same color on the other side.

In the final stage, a minute or so before they're done, dump in your vegetables, mix everything up and give it all a few squirts of lemon juice, scatter some parsley and onion tops ( I like to add parmesan cheese)--and step back to admire your handiwork before plating it up.

About as good as any store bought scallops can possibly be in today's sickiepoo, plaintiff driven Wal Mart world........