Eating and Drinking

PROVINCETOWN IS, OF course, part of New England, a region of hard-knobbed hills and low mountains rising up from a cold ocean amenable only to crustaceans, squid, and some of the hardier, less glamorous finned fish: cods and blues, flounder and bass; fish that tend toward practical shapes, the torpedo or the platter; fish with powerful jaws and blunt, businesslike heads and sleek strong bodies of gunmetal, pewter, or muddy brown. The soil around there produces almost nothing delicate—no fragile or thin-skinned fruits, no tentative greens that would expire in a cold snap, hardly anything that can reasonably be eaten raw. Cranberries and pumpkins do well; bivalves flourish in the chill waters. It is most agreeable to that which has developed thick rinds or shells. If New England has been, from its inception, home to preternaturally determined human settlers, to those who equate hardship with virtue, its Puritan and Calvinist roots are apparent in its diet, which runs not only, of necessity, to that which must have the toughness boiled out of it before it can be served but which tends to eschew, by choice, any spices more flamboyant than salt and pepper. When a friend of mine moved from New Orleans to Boston, she said one night in exasperation, after another bland and sensible meal, “You notice they didn’t call it New France. You notice they didn’t call it New Italy”

Fresh fish is Provincetown’s most prominent glory, and most fabulous among its fish, to me, are the clams and oysters that come from the tidal flats of Wellfleet, two towns away. A Wellfleet oyster, especially in the colder months, is supernal: firm and immaculately saline, a little mouthful of the Atlantic itself. One autumn several years ago when I was staying for a few days with a friend, she came home in the afternoon with a bucket each of clams and oysters she had dug from the flats in Wellfleet, bearded with bright brown seaweed, and a huge bouquet of wild irises, dark as bruises, with tight, cogent little blossoms so unlike the paler, more ephemeral irises sold in flower shops it was hard to believe they were the same flower at all. It is possible to stride out into the landscape and return not only with dinner but with flowers for the table as well.

Fresh local fish is not, however, as abundant in the restaurants of Provincetown as you might expect it to be. A century or more of excess has depleted the surrounding ocean, and much of what can still be coaxed from the water is bedded in ice and shipped elsewhere. There are only two or three raw bars in town, where you can actually procure shellfish forked out of the sand nearby. Fried clams are easier to find, and while a proper clam roll—crisply fried clams with briny, gelatinous bellies served on a grilled hot dog bun—is a marvelous thing, the precise origins and even the pristine freshness of the clams in question are not matters of great concern. Squid and scallops, among the less endangered inhabitants of these waters, are mysteriously hard to find in restaurants in town, and you’re at least as likely to be offered fresh cod in New York or Philadelphia as you are in Provincetown.

To whatever extent a discernible local cuisine exists, it is Portuguese. The Portuguese food most common in New England runs to soups and stews, whatever can be simmered until its fibrousness or bitterness begins to yield. Kale soup studded with circles of linguiça, a Portuguese sausage, is a staple, as are dark, tomato-based squid stews and salt cod in various forms. Some of the local Portuguese families still dry cod in their yards, either laid out flat on the ground or hung from the limbs of trees. But Portuguese food, too, is increasingly hard to find, at least in part because the restaurants of Provincetown have, for some time now, aspired to a certain pan-American sophistication that tends to involve the same pasta and chicken, the same tuna and salmon and beef, that you can get just about anywhere. Generally speaking, you are best advised while in Provincetown to forget any protracted search for indigenous foods and just eat and drink whatever most appeals to you. You need not seek out the rare or quintessential; no one back home will be disappointed if you’ve failed to taste something famous that’s made in a seaside cavern and aged ten years in kelp, or that’s been retrieved by specially trained ferrets from the upper branches of particular trees, or that secretes a deadly venom unless harvested at the apogee of the full moon. You are free.