THE WORLD’S BEST CONCH FRITTERS

When I’m on the road I sometimes cook conch fritters at my readings. The sometimes part of it is never a function of my willingness—I’m always ready for conch fritters. Rather, it’s contingent on two things: 1) the availability of conch meat; and 2) the willingness of bookstores to let me fool around with a frying pan full of hot peanut oil in their stores. No personal injury suits are currently pending.

Most of the conch available these days comes from the Turks & Caicos and Honduras. In the fall of 2004, when BAHAMARAMA came out and I started making conch fritters in bookstores as a way to lure unsuspecting would-be readers into buying a book from an author they’d never heard of, the price of conch meat was about $9 a pound. Since then it has jumped to almost $16 a pound … when you can find it. I have no explanation for the skyrocketing prices, but I damn sure think there ought to be an international investigation of the conch crisis.

For the recipe below, if you can’t find frozen conch, then chopped shrimp or calamari can be substituted. People tell me that clams work, too, but I’ll just have to take their word on that.

CONCH FRITTERS WITH SAUCE
(Makes about four dozen big fritters)

For the fritters:
2 cups conch meat, pounded and diced (about one pound)
2 cups self-rising flour
2 eggs
1 onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
1 tablespoon of your favorite hot sauce
About 1/2 cup milk
salt and pepper to taste
Peanut oil

For the sauce:
1 cup catsup
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
Juice of one lime
Your favorite hot sauce or several of them (datil pepper sauce works particularly well)
Fresh ground black pepper

Make the sauce first so it can sit awhile and taste better.

The secret to conch is you have to pound it before you can eat it. So take a ball peen hammer and beat the conch on a cutting board until the thick membrane breaks and the conch flattens out like veal scaloppini. Then slice it into good-sized chunks. In too many fritters—the kind you get at most restaurants—they process the conch into minuscule bits and it might as well not even be there. But these are fritters with substance.
Then mix together all the ingredients, heat the peanut oil in a cast-iron skillet and fry spoon size balls of batter until they are brown and crunchy. Dip in sauce. Lick your fingers. Go back for more.