ISSUE 5, CLASSIC COOKBOOKS, Part 5: Charleston Recipes 1919
Defining the signature foods of a Southern City
F L K’s Charleston Recipes
The Creole Boom in late 1880s cookbook publication set southern locales thinking about highlighting the peculiarity of their cookery, rather than their manifestion of cosmopolitan ideals of fine dining. The question was always how one delimited the locale. Did a cookbook author embrace the general designation of “Southern” (Southern Cook Book was the title of one of two cookbooks issued in conjunction with Charleston’s West Indian Exposition of 1901-02. Or one could invoke one’s state, Jane Hamilton's Recipes: Delicacies from the Old Dominion (1909), or perhaps a region, such as Tidewater.
During the World War I the Charleston pastel artist Frances “Fanny” Mahon L. King decided to distill Charleston cooking into its few signature dishes. In 2021 when one thinks of Charleston cuisine there are a number of dishes that signify the place: shrimp and grits, she crab soup, Lowcountry Boil, Hopping John. Fanny King a century previous had a different sense of Charleston Food: Okra Soup, Shrimp Pie, Tomato Pilau (Red Rice), Hopping John, Sweet Potato Pone, and Pumpkin Chips, Pickled Shrimp. Perhaps the most remarkable single recipe in the collection is Elize Lee’s 1830s formula for “Black Cake.” This famous African-American pastry chef and caterer, and her Mother Sally Seymour, composed recipes that were preserved in many manuscript cookbooks maintained by Lowcountry families. Black Cake was the dense matrix for fruits and nuts.
We note the change in signatures because locales with strong traditions have dynamic foodways that are cycling ingredients and recipes into and out of prominence at regular intervals. 50 years prior to F L K’s Charleston Recipes key dishes included broiled rice birds, rice field turkey, cured mullet roe, shrimp and hominy, rice bread, chicken pilau, ground nut cakes, and tanya. Charleston Recipes, in its exclusive concentration on signature dishes, offers a clear measuring point.
Fanny Mahon King was an odd champion of echt Charleston cookery, for she was a native of Aiken, educated in Washington D. C., married Thomas Gadsen King and lived with him at Point Pleasant Plantation near Megget, S. C. She took up art after taking courses at the Carolina Art Association. She and her husband resided in the winter season in the city and she worked on the staff of the Charleston Museum. Perhaps it people from “out” who see most clearly what is distinctive in the foods and manners of a traditional place such as Charleston.