Our Coast's Food: Seafood Fritters
By Liz Biro
Coastal Review Online
Sometimes even before sunrise on Saturdays when I was a child, my family of part-time fishers were on Onslow County’s New River headed to our favorite clamming hole. While one of us kids dug clams with my mother, another of us rode with Dad on a small skiff pulling a shrimp trawl, setting nets or looking for oysters. Once, we lucked up on shallows teeming with bay scallops.
No matter how tired we were at the end of the work day, enough energy always remained to fry up a batch of seafood fritters.
A mountain of the fluffy, fried pillows, golden brown and jammed full of chopped shrimp, scallops or clams, sometimes a combination, teetered on the same platter each weekend. What looked like enough to feed a crowd was quickly consumed by my family of just four.
My Italian mother, who knew little of cooking seafood until we moved from central New Jersey to the N.C. coast, based our fritter recipe on one she acquired from a Harkers Island friend named Roma Nelson Chadwick. Our neighbors were related to Roma, and sometimes we were invited to accompany them to “dinner,” meaning lunch, at Roma’s tidy Harkers Island home. Her small table, covered in the cleanest white cloth I’d ever seen, was a groaning board holding the weight of bread, collards, seafood, sweet corn, fresh tomatoes and, one day, clam fritters.
“What are those?” my mother said, zooming in on fritters that likely reminded her of the delicious things that come out of fry shops known as “friggitorie” in Naples, Italy, not far from her hometown.
Roma described a simple recipe: Stir together water, seasonings and self-rising flour in a bowl. Add chopped clams. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot oil. Fry until browned. Serve hot, cold or at room temperature.
