Legend of the Country Captain

Hey I stopped by to see John Currence at his office and there was famed food stylist and my pal Angie Mosier snapping photos of a bowl of country captain. What's "country captain," you ask? It's one of those regional dishes like West Indies salad that I promise I'll explain to you one day but I never will because I'm always so tired. But that's not the point. Angie was snapping photos for John's upcoming cookbook. "There's a lot of profanity, I noticed," said Angie of the text of John Currence's cookbook. Then she and John Currence began swapping some profanities to humorous effect. But that's not the point either. The point is that I got to eat the food after they took pictures of it! John put the country captain in a skillet and heated it up on the stove and poured it into a bowl in a less stylized incarnation than the one in which it had so glamorously appeared for posterity just moments before and I ate every piping hot and succulent morsel of the country captain and in addition could have eaten, might very well have eaten - indeed was explicitly encouraged to do so - the crab cakes that were prepared and photographed afterward but I had some errands to run and I drove off looking in the rearview mirror with a single tear making its way down my face as the crab cakes receded into the irretrievable distance and I thought of all the lessons I had just learned. So if AND WHEN you buy John Currence's cookbook and you go to the page where the country captain is and you see the picture of the country captain you can think to yourself, "Jack ate that country captain! Wow," you can think, "How about that! Jack ate that country captain. THAT country captain! That one RIGHT THERE! Hey, honey, come take a look at this! Jack ate that country captain! No, I'm serious, THAT COUNTRY CAPTAIN RIGHT THERE. But he didn't eat those crab cakes." And then you'll close the book and stare thoughtfully - and somewhat forlornly - into the emptiness of space.