Summer cookbook: Tracy Sorensen’s seafood platter

My last meal is a welcome escape from regret and all twenty-first century environmental anxieties; it is time spent revelling in sight and smell and taste.

Tracy Sorensen's last meal? A simple seafood platter.

My last meal – the phrase makes me think of Tom Jones’s maudlin Green Green Grass of Home, which was in our collection of 45rpm records when I was a kid. The guy, locked in the four grey walls of his prison cell, watched by a guard and a sad old padre, is off to meet his maker at dawn. His aching dreams of home are all about oak trees, a blonde woman and very green grass.

These do not spell home for me, but I do understand the nostalgia and regret.

I’d be telling the guard and the sad old padre about how Dad used to walk out on to the reef at Warroora north of Carnarvon on the West Australian coast, wearing old tennis shoes to protect his feet. He’d reach in and grab a crayfish, wading it back to shore. Mum would lower it in to water boiled over a fire on the beach. We’d crack the shell and eat it warm.

It would be washed down with slightly stewed black tea with sweetened condensed milk.

I’d also tell the guard and the sad old padre about the bucket of prawns left on our doorstep – a gift from a prawner Dad met at the pub – and the whole bunch of bananas (that is, not just a hand but the whole stem with multiple hands) from a cricket mate who had a plantation out on the riverbank. I’d tell them about the day a primary school friend and I – allowed to range freely all over the town and estuary – squatted on the tramway jetty over the mud flats and shook red cordial out of our flasks.

We were transfixed by the fleeting, shapeshifting translucent orbs catching the light on their way to the briny water below. We spent all of our cordial this way, leaving us nothing to drink. These days, the translucent ruby of pomegranate seeds remind me of that day.

My last meal is a welcome escape from regret and all 21st-century environmental anxieties; it is time spent revelling in sight and smell and taste.

The rest – bales of rotting seagrass, the roar of the Indian Ocean, the joy of inhabiting a young body with all parts intact and functional – is to be supplied by the imagination.

This meal is a simple seafood platter with a bowl of salad and a little Tupperware bowl of condensed milk mayonnaise (the only form of mayonnaise we knew back then).

Serve on platters with little to no ceremony, as if life is always like this. Add a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon in it to wash fingers. A nutcracker (or an old hammer plus a thick wooden chopping board) can be passed around to help with the shells. Here’s the recipe:

INGREDIENTS

● 2 West Australian crayfish (aka rock lobsters )

● 1kg Shark Bay tiger prawns

● 2 blue swimmer crabs (or mangrove crabs – better still)

● Lemon

● Curly parsley

● 1 iceberg lettuce

● 1 big gnarly cucumber

● 4 ripe tomatoes (home grown, freshly picked)

● 4 shallots

● Half a cup of sweetened condensed milk

● 2 level teaspoons Keen’s mustard powder

● 3 tablespoons white vinegar

● White pepper and salt to taste

Serve with wedges of lemon and curly parsley (must be curly).

METHOD

Catch prawns, crayfish and blue swimmer crab according to local lore (and law). If this is not possible, procure these or their near equivalents from a fish market near you.

Boil each species separately. The crays will need 7-10 minutes, or until meat has turned from translucent to white. The prawns should take only 3-5 minutes. The crab is done when it goes bright red and floats to the surface. No need to rinse. Just let them cool down a bit – sitting on ice if you happen to have it – and put them on a platter on the table, whole. Serve with wedges of lemon and curly parsley (must be curly).

Tear up your iceberg lettuce, slice the tomato into wedges. Peel the cucumber and then run a fork down the sides, so that when it’s sliced the edges look fancy. Chop the shallots into half-centimetre pieces. Toss all together and serve with mayonnaise.

For the mayonnaise, blend the condensed milk, mustard powder and white vinegar and season to taste. The result will set thick, unable to be poured. So spoon a wodge of it on to your plate and take it from there. It makes a good dressing for the prawns, too.

Home-cooked potato chips and a fruit salad of mango, banana, pomegranate seeds and mint would complete this subtropical feast. Offer icy-cold Swan draught lager and/or cups of Bushells leaf tea with condensed milk in it, and bring out a box of dark chocolate after-dinner mints.

Tracy Sorensen grew up in Carnarvon, WA, and now lives in Bathurst, NSW. Her first novel, The Lucky Galah, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2019. The Vitals (2023), her second novel, is a cancer memoir narrated by the affected abdominal organs.