COMFORT CONCH FRITTERS by Bob Morris

Note: If you can’t find conch, then you can use shrimp. And, in dire circumstances, I have substituted squid. But it just ain’t the same.

For the fritters:
2 cups conch meat, pounded and diced (about one pound)
2 cups self-rising flour
2 eggs
1 onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
1 tablespoon of your favorite hot sauce
About 1/2 cup milk
Salt and pepper to taste
Peanut oil
For the sauce:
1 cup ketchup
Juice of 1 lime
Several squirts of your favorite hot sauce.
Ground black pepper to taste
1 tablespoon Duke’s mayonnaise
Maybe some Pick-a-Peppa sauce, your call
Make the sauce first. Mix the first five ingredients together. In a separate small bowl, stir the mayonnaise and make it good and creamy before combining with ketchup mixture or else it will get all lumpy. Let the sauce sit in the fridge for a while.

The secret to conch is you have to pound hell out of it before you can eat it. So take a ball peen hammer and beat the conch on a cutting board until the thick membrane breaks and the conch flattens out like veal scaloppini. Then slice it into good-sized chunks. In too many fritters—the kind you get at most restaurants—they process the conch into minuscule bits and it might as well not even be there. But these are fritters with substance.

Then mix together all the ingredients, heat the peanut oil in a cast-iron skillet and fry spoon size balls of batter until they are brown and crunchy. Dip them in the sauce. And eat them while looking out on the water and being glad you didn’t have to drive all the way to the Bahamas to get them.