Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland
The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland
The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland
Ebook560 pages7 hours

The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The perfect gift for Southerners, history lovers, and foodies alike.

Discover the secrets of one of the most mysterious, romantic regions in the South: the Lowcountry. James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award-winning author Joe Dabney produces another gem with this comprehensive celebration of Lowcountry cooking. Packed with history, authoritative folklore, photographs, and fascinating sidebars, Dabney takes readers on a tour of the Coastal Plain, including Charleston, Savannah, and Beaufort, the rice plantations, and the sea islands. Includes:

  • Benne Seed Biscuits
  • Sweet Potato Pie
  • Frogmore Stew
  • She Crab Soup
  • Brunswick Stew
  • Hoppin' John
  • Oyster Purloo
  • Cooter Soup
  • Hags Head Cheese
  • Goobers
  • And much, much more!
LanguageEnglish
PublisherSourcebooks
Release dateMay 1, 2010
ISBN9781402250613
The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland
Author

Joseph Dabney

Joseph E. Dabney is a retired newspaperman and public relations executive who has studied the Carolina and Georgia Low Country, Appalachian, and hill-country food traditions for many years. Author of the highly acclaimed Mountain Spirits and James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award winner Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Related to The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking

Related ebooks

Cooking, Food & Wine For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking - Joseph Dabney

    new."

    CHAPTER 1

    Carolina Gold!

    You can smell this [Carolina Gold] rice when it’s growing. Smells like it’s going to be an extremely good year.

    —Rice planter Campbell Coxe Darlington, South Carolina

    Even if you have no leaning towards the doctrine of predestination, the story of the Low Country can almost persuade you that this coastal region of South Carolina was foreordained to plantations…The lay of the land, its climate, even the way its tidal rivers run, fitted it for them peculiarly.

    —Samuel Gaillard Stoney Plantations of the Carolina Low Country

    Campbell Coxe. (Photo by the author.)

    In the decades leading to the dawning of the eighteenth century, the merchants in Britain’s burgeoning Carolina colony sensed that an Oriental-West African long-grain rice grown near Charles Town might prove to be a gainful enterprise, possibly more profitable than growing indigo.

    Their optimism was understandable; the rice was found well-suited to the coastal region’s fertile soils and subtropical climate. And as experts would later find, the resulting rice was amazingly easy to cook, had a sweet buttery taste and aroma, plus a creamy texture. Carolina Gold Rice soon came to define the Carolina Rice Kitchen, which will be covered fully in chapter 10.

    Rice is now Sown in Carolina, and become one of the great products of the Country; I have seen it grow, and flourish there, with a vast increase, it being absolutely the best Rice which grows upon the whole Earth, as being the weightiest, largest, cleanest, and whitest, which has been seen in the Habitable World.

    —WILLIAM SALMON BOTANOLOGIA, LONDON (1710)

    Sometime in the mid-1700s, enthusiastic Lowcountry planters proudly viewed the head-high rows of golden-hued grain swaying in the autumn breezes. Charleston warehouses soon were flooded with rice orders from customers in the West Indies, England, and Europe. Someone called the rice Carolina Gold, and indeed, it was gold in more ways than one. The super strain soon spawned a plantation frenzy that in a few decades would help make Charleston the preeminent economic and cultural capital of the Lowcountry—from 1720 up to the Civil War, Charleston would be celebrated as the wealthiest city in North America.

    The late Karen Hess, eminent food historian, expressed amazement at Carolina Gold’s eighteenth-century ascendancy, calling it a rice so esteemed that its very name early became a generic term in much of the world for the finest long-grain rice obtainable. In her 1992 book, The Carolina Rice Kitchen, Hess noted that even the Chinese emperors were said to have favored Carolina Gold as their chosen rice.

    Richard Porcher, a retired botany professor at The Citadel, has studied the history of Carolina Gold, the Lowcountry’s super strain of rice that flourished prior to the Civil War and has been restored in recent years. (Photo by the author.)

    While early accounts credit an English sea captain for bringing the initial Carolina Gold seed stock from Madagascar, knowledgeable experts are not so sure. Among them is previously mentioned former Citadel botany professor Richard Porcher, who has studied the Carolina Gold history for years, including travel to West Africa’s rice coast region.

    The fact is that we don’t know where those first seeds came from, he said during a 2008 interview at his hometown of Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River from Charleston.

    One theory is that the seeds with a likely West African pedigree may have reached the Carolina colony on a slave ship from Africa’s windward coast, often called the rice coast, whose people had been engaged in rice farming for centuries. Or perhaps they came via one of the Caribbean islands in the British West Indies.

    While indigo and long and short staple cotton would come along as major Lowcountry cash crops, it was the strongly marketable Carolina Gold super rice that became North America’s most profitable enterprise, much more so than tobacco in Virginia, although with a requirement for many, many more slaves per plantation.

    By the time Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, more than a hundred thousand acres of Lowcountry land were devoted to Carolina Gold on sixteen hundred plantations and farms. Annual production yields at the time incredibly topped more than a hundred and eighty million pounds of rice. Most was exported through the ports of Charleston and Savannah to eager customers in the West Indies, England, and the European continent.

    WILLIAM BARTRAM VISITS A GEORGIA RICE PLANTATION

    In the evening, I arrived at the seat of the Hon. B. Andrews, esq. [near Sunbury, Georgia] who received and entertained me in every respect…I viewed with pleasure this gentleman’s exemplary improvements in agriculture; particularly in the growth of rice, and in his machines for shelling that valuable grain, which stands in the water almost from the time it is sown, until within a few days before it is reaped, when they draw off the water by sluices, which ripens it all at once, and when the heads or panicles are dry ripe, it is reaped [by hand] and left standing in the field, in small ricks, until all the straw is quite dry.

    The machines for cleaning the rice are worked by the force of water. They stand on the great reservoir [that] flood the rice-fields below.

    THE TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM (1700s)

    The rice affected everything in Charleston living. As historian Samuel Gaillard Stoney noted, For two hundred years, it…moulded Lowcountry life as did nothing else. With a few bags of the super rice, one could make purchases or even pay rent.

    Charleston’s astute merchants and traders had already become independently wealthy. They exported Indian furs and deerskins, as well as lumber, turpentine, tar, and pitch emanating from the colony’s endless forests of long leaf and loblolly pines and hardwoods such as oaks, cypress, and tupelo gums. These enterprises provided the wherewithal for many to buy up vast tracts of Lowcountry land for rice plantations. Wealthy Barbados sugarcane planters started migrating into the new colony and bringing along their slaves, ready to go to work clearing swamps and creating plantations on which to plant rice and indigo and, later, cotton.

    The Rice Plantations

    The Lowcountry’s subtropical climate and swampy geography proved ideal for growing rice, especially those near the vast network of rivers and creeks. Planters established their initial rice fields—called inland plantations—on interior dry land, with the crops watered from reservoirs, artesian wells, springs, and rainwater.

    By the mid-eighteenth century, planters began converting to more efficient tidal technology. Powerful eight-foot-high ocean tides, heavy with salt, were used to push the rivers’ lighter fresh water up through plantation sluice gates into the Lowcountry rice fields.

    The aforementioned Professor Porcher told me, I’m led to believe that the black Africans had a lot to do with the establishment of the rice industry [in the Lowcountry]. After all, he added, they’d been cultivating rice over there in the Niger River delta hundreds of years before arriving in the Lowcountry [in slave ships]. And way before the Europeans got to Africa in the fourteen hundreds.

    Swamps were cleared of cypress trees such as this to make way for rice plantations in the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. (Photo courtesy Del Presley, Statesboro, Georgia.)

    An early reference to the use of the tidewater technique was contained in a 1738 Georgetown County land sale notice. The owner, William Swinton, proclaimed that, Each [field] contains as much River Swamp, as will make two Fields for 20 Negroes, which is overflow’d with fresh Water, every high Tide, and of Consequence is not subject to the Droughts.

    With the tidal technology, which Rice Museum Director James A. Fitch described as a huge hydraulic machine, workmen controlled the strong tide-waters with a unique system of sluices, locks, and wooden floodgates, which they called trunks.

    Fitch described the floodgates as two facing dike doors that opened and closed automatically from the pressure of the tide waters. The planters and their slaves also constructed canals between the fields that provided workers access to the rice fields using barge-type flats. Trained African trunk minders kept the tidal river floodgates under constant surveillance.

    Rice Museum dioramas depict eighteenth-century Carolina rice being harvested and transported from plantation rice fields. The Rice Museum is located in Georgetown, South Carolina. (Photos by the author.)

    Tidal rice-growing called for the flooding of the rice fields from May to November. About that time of year, plantation owners and their families would head to second homes situated on the cool Atlantic coast to escape the miasmic fumes and mosquito-borne malaria, according to Archibald Rutledge, leaving their fields under the care of their white overseers and the Negro slave drivers. (Most blacks, natives of Africa, were immune to the sickly season illnesses.)

    Elizabeth W. Alston Pringle told about her family’s summertime exodus in her Chronicles of Chicora Wood:

    At the end of May, my father’s entire household migrated to the sea, which was only four miles to the east of Chicora…but only to be reached by going seven miles in a rowboat and four miles by land. The vehicles, cows, furniture, bedding, trunks, provisions were all put into great flats…at first dawn and sent ahead. Then the family got into the rowboat and were rowed down the Pee Dee, then through Squirrel Creek, with vines tangled above them and waterlilies and flags and wild roses and scarlet lobelia all along the banks, and every now and then the hands would stop their song a moment to call out: ‘Missy, a alligator!…’ There were six splendid oarsmen, who sang from the moment the boat got under way.

    Many other Lowcountry planter and merchant families would spend their summers at Beaufort, Bluffton and Edisto Island, and other cool sites while still others (several hundred altogether) would sail to New England, their favorite destination being Newport, Rhode Island.

    The tidal plantation technology was demonstrated successfully by planter McKewn Johnstone at his Winyah Bay plantation and Gideon Dupont at Goose Greek in St. James Parish in the early 1700s.

    Once the West African strategy of [tidal] rice growing was discovered, noted James Fitch, in his book Pass the Pilau, Please, the Huguenots and the British [planters] began to settle north of Charles Town into the Georgetown region, some sixty odd miles to the northeast. They, along with other European planters to follow, selected plantation sites along the Waccamaw, the Great Pee Dee, the Little Pee Dee, the Black River, and the Sampit. In time, the Waccamaw Neck became the Carolina colony’s primary rice growing territory. These were in addition to rice grown along other Lowcountry rivers such as the Ashepoo, Santee, Combahee, Stono, Edisto, Ashley, and Cooper, among others, and including Georgia’s Savannah, Ogeechee, and Altamaha Rivers, as well as on some barrier island locations.

    Of course the essential element in the Charlestonians’ grand visions was the importation of African slaves. Boatloads of African slaves came first from the British West Indies and later directly from the coastal areas of West Africa. It was the African blacks who would provide the essential manpower—and at times the technical know-how—to convert Lowcountry jungles into profitable rice domains.

    In 1751 Carolina Governor James Glen wrote that on the larger plantations, planters considered thirty slaves to be the correct number for a rice plantation with one white overseer. Glen calculated that a plantation would produce 2,250 pounds of rice for each good working hand.

    By the mid-1700s the Lowcountry’s slave population had zoomed to around seventy thousand Africans, a distinct Lowcountry majority, according to George Milligen Johnston. In his 1763 pamphlet, A Short Description of the Province of South Carolina, he said, They with a few exceptions do all the labour, or hard work in the country, and are a considerable part of the riches of the province…They are in this climate necessary…their number so much exceeding the whites.

    Rice planter Nathaniel Heyward, arguably the Lowcountry’s largest and most productive planter, was said by the 1850s to have owned more than two thousand slaves on his various plantations.

    The planters’ initial task was using slave labor to clear the floodplain swamps. They cut the deep-rooted cypress trees just above the ground level. Stumps can still be seen today at low tide on many abandoned plantation sites.

    RICE GRITS, OR MIDDLINS

    In Colonial Lowcountry, African slave women were tasked to hand-pound Carolina Gold rice: to hull it to brown rice, then winnow it, then pound it again, winnow it again and screen it for brokens (middlins), then hand-pick it to produce grain for white rice. The resultant rice was considered the finest quality, exclusively for the tables of the elite.

    However, the grains fractured like mad in the field and the mill as well. The best colonial hand pounders (slaves who hulled and polished rice grains) managed to come up with only about 70 percent whole grains.

    These were saved for export. The remaining middlins grew in preference across the local population, because middlins, round and rolling on the tongue, accepted flavors with more enthusiasm than whole grains. Many Charlestonians and Lowcountry people remain loyal to broken rice and the dishes associated with it. Today, middlins are called rice grits.

    —KAY RENTSCHLER ANSON MILLS, COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

    Plantation rice farming was labor intensive. The annual cycle began in March with the plowing of fields using mules and oxen wearing snowshoe-looking boots to keep them from sinking into the soft soil. A month later, slave women began planting the seeds that they had soaked and dried in clay to prevent them from floating to the surface.

    During the summer, between floodings of fields, slaves hoed the rows of rice periodically. This was followed by harvesting in the fall, using hand sickles, and threshing, first with flailing sticks, later by threshers powered by mules and steam. Similarly, milling the rice to remove hulls and bran also evolved from mortar-and-pestle techniques to devices powered by animal, water, and steam. Remnants of steam-powered mills have been found on former plantation sites.

    The aforementioned Archibald Rutledge (1883–1973) told about returning in the twentieth century to his own two-thousand-acre historic Hampton Plantation, located near the Santee River, that he had inherited long past the Lowcountry’s two-hundred-year rice-growing era. In his 1941 book, Home by the River, the poet told of finding evidence of Hampton fields that had been closely cultivated for rice, featuring ancient canals surrounding former rice fields. At the head of the canals, Rutledge noticed heavy wooden floodgates. Regarding other plantations nearby, he said:

    Sixteen miles from its mouth, the Santee divides; and these two streams flow independently into the ocean. Between them is the lonely delta of the Santee, formerly one of the greatest rice-growing areas of North America…On the South Santee, I remember Waterhorn, Wambaw, my own Hampton, Romney, Montgomery, Peafield, Peachtree, Fairfield, Palo Alto, the Wedge, Harrietta, Woodville, Egremont, Mazyck’s and Washoe…Ormond Hall was near by. Of all these great plantations, Hampton alone is occupied by its owners; Fairfield is still owned by the Pinckneys, but it is not occupied.

    Former slave Ben Horry is pictured at his home at Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, in the late 1930s. He recalled for WPA Federal Writers Project interviewer Genevieve Willcox Chandler his earlier days working on a Waccamaw River rice plantation in Eastern South Carolina with his father. (Photo by Bayard Wooten. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.)

    Professor Charles Joyner of Myrtle Beach detailed the history of the Waccamaw Neck slave plantations with wonderfully nostalgic images in his highly regarded history of that era, Down by the Riverside. Included was this scene drawn from a Waccamaw River cruise he took on the Island Queen:

    As we gaze beyond the broken trunks of the rice fields now reclaimed by river and swamp, we can almost see the workers keeping pace with one another as they move across the fields. We can almost hear their singing as their hoes rise and fall on the beat. Here, at the edge of the river, there is an eerie feeling that we can almost reach out and touch these [Gullah slave] people.

    A Carolina Gold Revival

    Lowcountry rice plantations went into a steady decline after the Civil War, and Carolina Gold became virtually extinct following a disastrous 1911 hurricane.

    But in the 1980s, something of a miracle occurred as far as the long-lost Carolina Gold rice was concerned. Savannah eye surgeon Dr. Richard Schulze, who had been growing rice to attract ducks to his Turnbridge Plantation across the Savannah River in South Carolina, ran across two important pieces of information.

    The first, he told me in a telephone interview to his office in Savannah, was a wonderfully comprehensive article he read in the New Yorker magazine, written by E. J. Kahn. It mentioned that scientists studying the genetics of rice had accessioned some sixty-five thousand varieties of rice that had been stored for future studies.

    A NEW STRAIN COMING: CHARLESTON GOLD

    A brand-new Carolina Gold super strain, to be called Charleston Gold, is scheduled to go on the market in 2010. The Carolina Gold Foundation called it an exceptional rice with an elegant aromatic long grain Japonica dwarf of pure Carolina Gold with a very promising future.

    This followed more than a decade of research and development led by Dr. Merle Shepard of the Charleston-based Clemson University Coastal Research Center, who partnered with Dr. Gurdev Khush, a professor from the University of California at Davis. Intensive testing was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Anna McClung, leader of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Beaumont, Texas, rice research project.

    About the same time, Dr. Schulze read a label that accompanied his modern hybrid rice and discovered that Carolina Gold was in its pedigree!

    It didn’t take much imagination, he related in his book, Carolina Gold Rice, to assume that somewhere, someone must have the original seed, the equivalent of what had reached the Lowcountry in the 1680s, three hundred years earlier. Dr. Schulze launched something of a detective seed hunt. The Rice Foundation put him in touch with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Service in Beaumont, Texas. There, Dr. Charles Bolich, a USDA rice research scientist, informed him that the USDA had, indeed, kept a small sampling of Carolina Gold seeds in its Idaho gene bank seed collection. Bingo!

    Dr. Bolich very generously grew some Carolina Gold rice for me, Dr. Schulze said, and in 1985 sent me two small bags of seed rice totaling fourteen pounds.

    The following spring of 1986, throwing all caution to the wind, he planted the entire fourteen pounds in one of his Turnbridge plantation catfish ponds, carefully prepared as to grade and drainage. As the plants grew and matured, he said, I raised the water level to act as a natural weed control and also to support the long stems.

    The first harvest that fall yielded sixty-five pounds of Carolina Gold, none of which made its way to the table! It was all used for a second planting the following spring, but in two former catfish farms! That fall the harvest totaled four hundred and seventy pounds.

    By 1988, we were well on our way, Dr. Schulze said. Moving the springtime planting to a full field, the harvest that fall totaled about five thousand pounds.

    At long last, he related in his book, the fabled rice could be tasted. That Christmas season, Dr. Schulze’s wife, Tricia, his co-worker in the Carolina Gold reintroduction saga, arranged a banquet at Savannah’s Oglethorpe Club where they shared their success story with forty-eight friends. The rice did indeed live up to its reputation, and everyone there enthusiastically partook of a series of sumptuous rice dishes including a rice pudding dessert.

    Campbell Coxe checks his Carolina Gold rice fields at his Plumfield Plantation near the Pee Dee River in Darlington County, South Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Robert Manning.)

    Glenn Roberts, president of the Carolina Gold Foundation, praised the Schulzes for repatriating pure heirloom Carolina Gold to its former home in the Lowcountry. For the first time, lowcountry descendants were able to savor the supreme taste of the long rice as their ancestors did.

    Rice planters Campbell Coxe of Darlington County, South Carolina, and Glenn Roberts and his Anson Mills, headquartered in Columbia, have become major producers of Carolina Gold rice, shipping their product

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1