Baked Fish is Your Prize: Cooking with Sharon Peele Kennedy of Hatteras, NC

Reprinted and edited from Tradewinds Magazine, 2019, B. Garrity-Blake. Photo courtesy of Susan West.

Hatteras native Sharon Peele Kennedy has a clear message about how to best cook seafood: keep it simple! Currently writing her third cookbook and host of the radio show “What’s for Supper,” Kennedy explained to Susan West in a 2014 Coastal Voices interview that the “indescribably delicious” flavor of fresh North Carolina seafood needs no gussying-up.  

“I emphasize seafood done simply,” Kennedy cautioned. “Don’t cover your fish and shrimp with cheeses and sauces to where you can’t recognize that beautiful seafood that you’ve paid a premium dollar for - jazz up your potatoes, your rice, or your pastas, but not your seafood.” 

Kennedy’s cooking philosophy can be boiled down to “less is more.” A common mistake is to overcook seafood, she noted, which can make boiled shrimp chewy and baked fish dry and leathery. Poking and prodding a piece of fish while frying can interfere with the cooking process. 

“When people fry fish, they want to put the fish in the skillet, then move it,” she explained. “It’s very important to just let it sit there and form its own barrier so that when you turn it over, it’s got that nice crust. When you move it, you pull the breading off and it starts to steam.” 

Sharon Peele Kennedy draws heavily on her coastal roots. For example, she shares how to bake red drum, known as “old drum,” probably the most iconic dish of the Outer Banks. Old timers preferred the largest drum, man-sized and scaled with a garden hoe. Today legal-size red drum must be between 18 and 27 inches. 

“You slice potatoes super thin, and toss them with some onions and flour,” Sharon says. “Put them on the bottom of your pan and lay your fish on top – boneless or bone-in sides, skin off.” She noted that traditionally folks kept the bone in for better flavor, which is her preference. 

“Then fill the pan with water just up to the fish, cover it with foil, and bake an hour, hour and a half.” A common mistake is to add too much water, she warned, which subtracts from the flavor. Also refrain from adding too much salt, as “there’s enough natural salt so that as things cook, the salt will come out into the pan.”  

While the dish is baking, Kennedy fries out salt pork and then pours a bit of the grease onto the fish. She saves the crispy crumbles of pork to sprinkle on top of the finished product. She notes that today’s health conscious cooks can substitute olive oil for pork fat. 

“Having the baked fish is the prize itself, no matter if you use grease or olive oil.”  

Kennedy learned the art of simplicity from her parents and grandparents. Her father, Maxton Peele, was a commercial long-haul and pound net fisherman. 

“Garlic, dill, and nutmeg never went into a pot of what he was cooking, I can tell you that!” she exclaimed.

“My father would make these things called fried biscuits – he’d put them on a medium-hot cast iron skillet and fry cook ‘em. They’d rise, and the crust was insane—crunchy and salty and good. I’d hear that boat coming in, and I’d run to meet it - just get a piece of that fried biscuit.”

A couple of her favorite childhood dishes have become taboo, as they feature sea turtles and Atlantic sturgeon which are now federally-protected under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.   

“Dad made the best turtle hash,” Kennedy reflected. “I know it’s not a popular thing to talk about, but we had to eat and survive, and turtle was one of our wintertime sources of protein on the Outer Banks.” She emphasized that sea turtles were not targeted, but when the occasional loggerhead was landed, it would be quartered and shared among families.

Tuna, mahi, and wahoo are menu rock stars in seafood restaurants today. But on the Outer Banks and Down East, fishermen did not target these blue-water fisheries. Folks preferred the humble spot, croaker, mullet, and bluefish found in nearshore and sound waters. 

“We never really ate offshore fish,” Kennedy noted. “The first time I ever ate it was when I worked at Captain Peele’s restaurant, and Miss Grace and them were serving grilled swordfish. She let us taste it and I did not like it because it had a weird tang to it at the end.”

Few people along the coast of North Carolina ate shrimp back in the day. The crustaceans, called “bugs” by fishermen, were considered a nuisance and were used to fertilize gardens. Market demand for shrimp began to grow in the 1950s, and local tastes changed as well.  

“We got to where we were eating shrimp in the summertime,” Kennedy recalled. “Stewed shrimp has become a favorite.” She shared her recipe for stewed shrimp with pie bread.  

“You lightly flour your shrimp or just sauté them, let them brown,” she said. “Take the shrimp out of the pot and put your onions and potatoes in there with a little salt and pepper. Cover that with water and cook real slow. While that’s cooking, you make either pie bread or cornmeal dumplings.” 

Kennedy explained that pie bread is pastry made with flour, water, and a little bit of oil, rolled out and cut into small pieces. Dumplings are made with corn meal, flour, and water. She prefers the more delicate pie bread for stewed shrimp. She cooks the pie bread separately in boiling water so that it doesn’t get slimy from the stew. 

“Then add your shrimp and pie bread to the stew and simmer another ten minutes or so.” 

Sharon Peele Kennedy is part ambassador, part preacher when it comes to spreading the word about North Carolina seafood. She’s been a long-time board member of NC Catch, the umbrella organization supporting regional seafood-branding “catch” groups: Carteret Catch, Brunswick Catch, Outer Banks Catch, and Ocracoke Fresh. She demonstrates how to cook seafood at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, and has also demonstrated at Farm Aid, the North Carolina State Fair, and the Outer Banks Seafood Festival. 

 “I went to the State Fair with 150 pounds of shrimp for an NC Catch cooking demonstration,” Kennedy recalled. “And I had ten pound of potatoes, five pounds of onions and some salt meat. I carried the potatoes and onions and cornmeal because I knew we were going to be neighbors with House Autry breader mixes. I wanted to woo them with a pot of my stewed shrimp - maybe they’d like to sponsor one of our CATCH groups.” 

Kennedy planned to steam shrimp for the general public. But she found that the shrimp went fast, with passers-by snagging a sample and going on their way, not bothering to stop and learn about seafood. 

“In the meantime, my first batch of stewed shrimp was ready,” she said. “Matchstick potatoes, little dumplings, and chopped shrimp in two-ounce proportion cups with a tiny spoon.” She offered it to the public and folks were mesmerized, never having eaten anything like it before. 

“They wanted to know what kind of broth was used, what did we put in it? People commented about how delicious it was and pulled other people in to taste it. They went bananas for stewed shrimp! Within three hours, we’d gone to SAM’s Club for 3,000 spoons and two-ounce cups, and we ran out on the third day. I kept saying ‘We’ve got a friend in Jesus,’ because we stretched 150 pounds of shrimp to feed 3,000 people!”  

Sharon Peele Kennedy does not need to practice Lent in order to give up red meat for seafood. “I go veggie if there’s no seafood to get,” she remarked.  But she is one of a handful of native-born Catholics on Hatteras Island, where the Methodist and Assembly of God churches have long held sway. Her grandmother helped start Catholic services before Sharon was born. 

“My grandmother named our church, Our Lady of the Seas,” Kennedy explained. “She held the first Catholic mass on Hatteras Island in her living room, using an ironing board as the alter.” A priest came by boat from Elizabeth City to hold mass on Saturdays. Her grandfather, a Frisco native who had moved his family from New York to Hatteras during the Depression, did not share his wife’s faith. In fact, he was a preacher at the Lighthouse Assembly of God Church.  

Although the transition from big city life to the Outer Banks was rough on her grandmother, having left “taxis, meat markets, and opera houses for sand dunes and sand spurs,” her mother Juanita Peele took to banks life like a fish to water. She had no qualms about “scrubbing clothes, wringing chickens’ necks, and cooking on the wood fire." Her mother married a fisherman, and Sharon and her siblings were raised with a large garden, chickens and ducks, and of course all the seafood they wanted. 

Today’s lifestyle is far busier and costlier, so the average working family does not have time to grow, process, and slow-cook their every meal. Kennedy’s radio program “What’s for supper” came about from conversations she’d have in the grocery store with friends and neighbors seeking her advice about what to cook after work and how to cook it. 

“I was running into people who’d say, ‘Oh, what are you cooking for supper?’ I’d find myself helping people put their meals together.” One winter she called a local radio station and pitched an idea for “What’s for Supper” to “give people a little suggestion of what they could cook that night.” That was ten years ago and she’s still going strong, heard regularly on Beach 104 and Water Country 94.5 at 4:35pm – just in time for supper. 

“I dedicate all of the shows to seafood because our local fishing communities have been put at an unfair disadvantage by many unnecessary and unfair regulations.  I want to encourage people to go into seafood markets ask for North Carolina caught seafood, and support our local fishermen and women,” Kennedy said. 

“Most people don’t think about stopping to a seafood market,” she added. “They go to their regular supermarket and get chicken, beef, or pork. If I could suggest, hey, get a half a pound of scallops, a half a pound of fish, some taters, and onions, and you got dinner and plus all the health benefits of the seafood!” 

She noted the irony of today’s regulation-heavy fisheries that makes it hard for fishermen like her brother, Michael Peele, from setting aside a mess of fish for friends and neighbors because commercially-landed product needs to be sold to a licensed dealer and accounted for in a trip ticket.  

“Dad would take a bucket of fish around the village and give it to the elderly people for supper,” Kennedy reflected. “That was a Hatteras Island tradition.”