Frogmore Stew Sandwich

Frogmore is a crossroads on St. Helena Island, in Beaufort County, South Carolina, and the stew that carries its name is a pot of new potatoes, onion, smoked sausage, corn on the cob and shrimp, cooked in a set order. The sausage goes in first to flavor the water, the corn and potatoes after it, and the shrimp in the final minutes, because they go from translucent to rubbery in a short stretch. No shop or menu on record sells a Frogmore stew sandwich under that name. It is a build cooks make from what the pot leaves behind, splitting a roll and filling it with the same five things the table was eating an hour earlier.

The pot is traditionally poured out onto a table spread with newspaper, and everyone picks through it with their hands. One-pot communal cooking of this kind runs back to Gullah Geechee cooks, many of them descended from enslaved West Africans on the Lowcountry's plantations, and the hand-eating habit came with it. When the crowd thins, what is left on the newsprint is cold, a little waterlogged and plentiful: corn cobs gone pale, potatoes split at the skin, a heap of shrimp still in their shells, sausage cooling in its own fat. Wrapping that in bread the next day is the obvious move for anyone who cooked too much, and the sandwich assembles itself from the remains of the table.

Seasoning goes into the boiling water, never onto the finished food. Old Bay or a commercial crab-boil mix, the kind sold in a pouch with celery salt, paprika and cayenne in it, works its way into the shrimp, the corn kernels and the sausage fat while they cook, so the heat is already inside everything before anyone reaches for bread. That is why a cook can skip mustard and mayonnaise entirely. Each bite of the sandwich tastes mildly of the boil, with a slow burn that builds at the back of the throat, and the plain white crumb cushions it. A squeeze of lemon, if used, goes over the shrimp.

Building it is mostly subtraction. The corn comes off the cob in strips, the potatoes get crushed or sliced thin so they sit flat, the shrimp are peeled, and the sausage is cut into coins that stay put under the top half of the bread. A spoonful of hot, salty broth or a pat of butter goes in last, since the roll is the only part of the sandwich that can hold moisture. A soft hoagie roll soaks it up fast and starts to slump in the hand; a roll with a real crust holds its shape to the last bite. Warmed through, the shrimp turn sweet and snappy again, and the sausage gives a smoky, peppery bite against the bland crumb.

The variations follow whatever the pot held. Blue crab can go in alongside the shrimp, picked out of the shell first. A cook with a heavy hand with butter might brush the cut faces of the roll and toast them on a griddle until they turn gold and the edges crackle, which also buys a few more minutes before the broth reaches the crust. Loose kernels escape out the sides no matter how the roll is packed, and the broth runs down the wrist on the first bite, so the sandwich gets eaten the same way the stew does, over a table with something spread on it to catch the drips.

Origin and history

The name has an author, though the details shift with the telling. Richard Gay, of the Gay Fish Company on St. Helena Island, is credited with the recipe and the name. In the most repeated account, he was serving in the National Guard in Beaufort in the 1960s when, one weekend, he dumped the mess hall's leftovers into a single pot. The dish first went by Beaufort Stew, until his unit teased him about his home village and suggested Frogmore instead. Similar boils already existed on the island, and a competing local account credits the area's shrimpers with the method, so Gay is best described as the man who fixed the recipe and gave it a name.

The original pot held potatoes, onions, corn, sausage and shrimp, with the shrimp last, and the whole thing took about an hour. Gay's later written version added butter, Old Bay or crab boil, small red potatoes, Hillshire sausage, medium shrimp and blue crabs. Elsewhere the same pot is usually called a Lowcountry boil, and that wider name has largely overtaken Frogmore on menus and recipe cards. The village lost its own post office in 1988, when the United States Postal Service closed it, and the place name on the stew faded with the postmark.

The recipe's home base was the family business. John and Hilda Gay opened the Gay Fish Company in 1948, and Richard, one of their six children, worked as a commercial shrimper and helped run the company for 38 years. He brought the stew recipe back from Guard duty and handed out copies of it at the fish company, so the first written Frogmore stew went home with customers buying the same shrimp and sausage the pot called for.