Blood, sweat and tears on the seashore

"That is to say, if you don't end up with a little mud under your fingernails, if you don't shed a little blood, you're not doing it right. "

I found this sentence in a restaurant review of a seafood restaurant near Folly Island, south of Charleston. I was reading the review with my daughter also reading, over my shoulder. Despite the fact this was the second time I had read the review, the sentence caught my eye because it paraphrased a sentence I had placed in a recipe I wrote for barbecuing pork, in which I opined that if you didn't cut yourself during the process of preparing, smoking or chopping the meat, you were probably doing something wrong.

Clearly, there is a philosophy about preparing certain savory Southern food items which requires a bit of dirt, mud and blood to be encountered. Having discovered this, I would have to suggest that I am a proponent of this philosophy and offer a corollary to that philosophy, which states that the messier the sandwich, the better the sandwich.

This is counter-intuitive, because the sandwich was invented in order to make it easier for a card player to eat something without stopping the card game and in order to present a minimum of mess. I have found over the years that my favorite sandwiches are the ones in which I have some difficulty in keeping the contents between the slices of bread before they enter my mouth. For intance, one of my favorite sandwiches is a reuben. The reuben seems to be prepared best when the Russian dressing and the sauerkraut are spilling out from between the bread and it becomes an endeavor to ensure that every bit of the sandwich is eaten.

I will be in the area where the reviewed restaurant is located. I look forward to testing the dirty nail/bloody finger philosophy of eating shellfish. I will report more later. I really look forward to it.