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Howard Mitcham became deaf as a teenager after contracting meningitis and went on to live as an artist, poet and chef, with Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod and New Orleans as his two fixed points. His haddock with almonds at Pepe's drew diners all the way from Boston, and he made the drawings in the book himself.
The book was published in 1975 and is about the fishing town and its cooking. Portuguese, Creole and North American coastal traditions mingle in dishes such as Cape Cod gumbo, Provincetown paella and Portuguese clam soup, alongside stories about the fishermen and boats around them. Mitcham treated cheap bycatch with the same seriousness as lobster and wrote without the solemnity that characterised cookbooks of the period.
Anthony Bourdain was handed the book on his first day as a cook at the Flagship restaurant in Provincetown and called it one of the most influential books of his life. This 2018 edition has a foreword by him, and he was still cooking Mitcham’s squid stew.
The book contains the iconic recipe for a clambake for 150 guests, cooked in six galvanised rubbish bins over an open fire on the beach. The recipe features in A24’s film Tony, in which Dominic Sessa plays the nineteen-year-old Bourdain starting out as a dishwasher at the Flagship in Provincetown in 1975. Bourdain himself described those years in Kitchen Confidential, his breakthrough book about life in restaurant kitchens. Mitcham’s book is the one he learnt to cook fish from.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
Foreword: Anthony Bourdain
Illustrations: Howard Mitcham
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 9781609808396
Language: English
First published: 1975, this edition 2018
