True grits

Charleston, South Carolina, is known for many things. Now a small city of c.130,000 people, at one time it was the fifth largest city in North America and was home to nine out of the ten wealthiest men in the US. It has perhaps the most beautiful architecture I’ve ever seen: its historic quarter is lined with porticoed and Greek revival mansions besides sprawling gardens and cobblestones. It has a sultry climate; streets are lined with palm trees and surrounded by picturesque marshland inhabited by alligators, turtles, pelicans and their so-called “state bird”, the mosquito. It was also the site of the start of the American Civil War in 1861 when the Confederacy fired the first shots across the city’s harbour. But all of this beauty, wealth and history was founded on an extremely sinister platform: the city played a pivotal role in North America’s slave trade, with around half of all Africans who were forcibly brought to the US arriving through its port. More recently, however, it has become known for something else entirely: its vibrant and blossoming food scene… which may have had something to do with my decision to go there. And while the food was some of the best I’ve had in America, the most interesting thing about it was the way it reflected all of the city’s complicated history, reflecting an intersection of a fertile and abundant coastline with African and Native American ingredients.

Navigating the maize

Corn is the backbone of southern cooking; what would it be without bourbon, cornbread or grits? As I mentioned in a previous blog on tortillas (“something to taco ‘bout”), corn is thought to have been domesticated by native peoples in North America around 10,000 years ago. The preparation of turning corn into grits – essentially grinding the kernels and then boiling them with water or milk to make a porridgy dish – was passed to settlers by the Muskogee tribe and they’ve since been widely enjoyed in the southern states. They’re unusual enough to this Brit that I watched someone put cheddar cheese on a bowl of something that I took to be porridge and recoiled for several seconds until I noticed the “grits” label on the vat nearby... While commonly enjoyed at breakfast, they also form the base for perhaps the most classic of Charleston dishes: shrimp and grits. This started as a humble meal that would have been enjoyed in poorer kitchens, shrimp being readily available in the waters surrounding the city. The shrimp would have been sautéed in a little bacon fat (pork products being another southern staple) and served over a plain bowl of grits. As I was to discover, the pattern of simple home foods being translated into restaurant dishes is a common one in Charleston. The city experienced something of a culinary renaissance in the 1980s, with new restaurants appearing in a city that had centred around home cooking for centuries. Hence, the once inexpensive bowl of shrimp and grits was elevated for paying customers, and a version now appears on nearly every menu in the city. I decided the best place to sample this speciality would be one of the oldest restaurants in Charleston: Poogan’s Porch (wonderfully named after a stray dog who liked to hang out on the portico). Their version of this classic dish is made with sausage, sweet onions, peppers and gravy. I can see how this would be a hugely comforting home dish, being rich and savoury and filling. The buttery grits reminded me of polenta and the shrimp were incredibly fresh and perfectly cooked. But I must admit (in a very un-Mary move) to giving up towards the end of the bowl… the first couple of bites were good, but it was all a bit much for me, particularly when you’re not used to the texture of grits.

The importance of Gullah cuisine

It’s impossible to talk about Charleston’s food without talking about slavery. By 1708 the majority of the city’s population were enslaved Africans, the descendants of whom are called the Gullah or Geechee (specific terms that encompass African Americans in the coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida). While most of the American food I’ve talked about in this blog is a story of immigration by choice - albeit often with significant factors pushing people from their original homes - South Carolina’s food is shaped by people who had no choice in coming to the US. A notable example of this is the proliferation of rice in local dishes. Unlike other southern states that relied on cotton or tobacco, South Carolinian planters found that rice thrived in the swampy freshwater surrounding Charleston. Such was its profitability that planters deliberately enslaved people from the “rice coast” of West Africa (stretching from Senegal to Liberia) who had knowledge of rice cultivation. The immense wealth that this crop brought to Charleston was therefore built upon the forced labour of thousands of slaves, and the crop would not have thrived without their knowledge and labour.

Given the importance of rice to the local economy, it’s unsurprising that rice made its way onto the tables of people of all races and social classes in South Carolina, and the importance of the grain is still evident in many of the area’s classic dishes. Of course, slaves were the ones who were doing the cooking, both for their own families and for the wealthy slavocracy, meaning many of these dishes have a notable West African slant. An example of this are the omnipresent one-pot dishes of red rice, pilau and perloo, which can be found on menus across Charleston. For these preparations the rice is cooked with flavourings like tomatoes, celery and peppers, bearing unmistakable similarities to the West African dish of jollof. The most unfamiliar (to me) use of rice I enjoyed in Charleston was a dish of “middlins”, or broken rice grains, that have a texture similar to the ubiquitous grits. This has a fascinating history that further highlights the role of enslaved people in the area’s cuisine; when preparing rice, slaves were tasked with pounding raw rice grains in a pestle and mortar to remove the husks and produce the white grains ready for cooking. A significant proportion of the grains were broken in this intensive process, and these were incorporated into local cooking; over time these “flawed” bits and pieces of rice became appreciated for their own texture and rice is now intentionally broken by producers to create middlins for sale. The version I tried was cooked with brown butter and field peas, and served with sausage, crab and blackened catfish, a dish that clearly showcases the natural coastal bounty of the area as well as the use of West African ingredients.

This influence is seen in nearly all classic Charleston dishes, and an ingredient that appears everywhere is okra. In a now-familiar pattern, the plant was first grown by the enslaved Africans (having been brought over from their home countries), eventually findings its way onto everyone’s dinner plates. I enjoyed it in a version of succotash at Florence’s Lowcountry Kitchen, another once-humble dish that rose to prominence during the Great Depression due to its inexpensive ingredients. Usually based on beans and corn, this version also included the all-important okra in addition to other local ingredients and familiar southern flavours including celery, peppers and tomatoes (a combination also used in red rice). Add to this the locally plentiful shrimp and crab, and you have a delicious and beautifully fresh showcase of traditional Charleston cooking. Such is the importance of okra that it also lends its name to one of the most popular local dishes: gumbo. Ki ngombo or, in its shortened form, gombo, is the word for okra in several West African languages, and the early gumbo recipes centre around this ingredient, stewed with tomatoes, onions, butter and seasoning. This technique again highlights the importance of enslaved people’s cooking to the region; forced to work on rice plantations all day, they would stew vegetables in pots at the beginning of the day and come home to the results, perhaps eaten with some home-grown rice. Gumbos with a range of ingredients are still enjoyed throughout the area and I had a gorgeous bowl of the stuff at Jestine’s Kitchen (a restaurant with an amazing namesake, Jestine Matthews, whose mother was a Native American and father was a former slave). I had the deeply flavoured okra gumbo, cooked down with tomatoes and corn, and a delicious crab cake (another use for the local seafood). Their whole menu – stuffed with local favourites like red rice, okra and corn fritters - highlights the significance of the African legacy to the modern cultural identity of the region, and the utmost importance of acknowledging the dark history that led to it.

Lowcountry living

Running like a thread through the classic dishes of Charleston is the bounty of the surrounding waters. The Lowcountry is the extensive region that – as the name suggests – comprises low-lying coastal areas in South Carolina and Georgia. The city of Charleston alone has 500,000 acres of wetlands, salt marshes, swamps, creeks, lakes and ponds. These watery areas are flush with seafood including shrimp, crab, oysters, fish and – across the Lowcountry – more plant species than the entirety of Europe. It’s this distinctive geography that separates the cuisine from other areas of the south; for example it’s what allowed the extensive rice planting that shaped Charleston. This was evident in the first meal I had in the city, a sampler plate from Charleston Crab House, that included some of the classic dishes and ingredients I’ve already explored: red rice, hush puppies (a popular local appetiser of deep-fried balls of cornmeal dough that harks back to the importance of corn), and shrimp stuffed with crab and wrapped in bacon. The best thing on the plate, however, was the she-crab soup. A now-iconic Charleston specialty, this is a creamy soup made with local crabs and sherry that was invented by a butler for a wealthy South Carolinian in the roaring ‘20s. Its interesting name derives from the fact it also includes roe from female crabs, which gives it a distinctive tangy flavour and orange tinge. Sounds slightly odd perhaps, but it was absolutely delicious.

As the she-crab soup and the Gullah legacy have shown, Charleston is a city that relied on (often enslaved) home cooks for centuries. Only recently has its distinctive cuisine begun to move onto restaurant menus and to gain wider recognition. Perhaps the best example of this is the restaurant Husk, which is now famous for its incredible food that is entirely based on seasonal local ingredients and in encapsulating historic Lowcountry methods and recipes. It was here that I had one of the best dishes I’ve ever had: roasted oysters with chicken fat and pepper mash. The mash is essentially a hot sauce made by fermenting hot peppers, which highlights the restaurant’s focus on pickling and preserves, making use of the local bounty from fertile fields that benefit from mild winters and hot, humid summers. This was an amazingly simple yet complex dish: the first taste was the roasted, fatty chicken flavour followed by the beautiful plump and fresh oyster, finished off by a fiery dash of pepper, strong enough to make your tongue tingle. It’s one of those dishes that is hard to describe, so much more than its appearance would suggest... I would travel back to Charleston just for that dish. It’s this sort of cooking that is starting to show the rest of the country what Charleston’s cuisine has to offer: a completely unique range of dishes that highlights how food is always a window into an area’s past and the importance of understanding the people who have lived there.

Grits and cheese at the hotel breakfast buffet

Blackened catfish with rice middlins

Fried shrimp with crab and okra succotash

Okra gumbo and crab cake with sweet pepper relish and tartar sauce

Clockwise from bottom-left: she-crab soup; hush puppies with pecan butter; red rice with sausage; and shrimp stuffed with crab and wrapped with bacon, with tomato dip

Oysters with chicken fat and pepper mash