ISSUE 51, BLACK CULINARY HISTORY, Part 4: Charleston's Black Cook Shops
Charleston’s Black Cook Shops
[Originally published Charleston City Paper August 26, 2015]
Where in old Charleston could one get Gullah cooking? We know that black chefs and caterers served a very cosmopolitan sort of southern cuisine at the great hotels and restaurants such as Nat Fuller’s The Bachelor’s Retreat and at Tom Tully’s. Did the African-inflected home cooking of the sea islands and Lowcountry have public eating places in the city? If so, what did they serve? In the 1850s the black cook shop appeared, mutating from the earlier tippling houses that were objects of vigilant scrutiny by the authorities. The anxieties that attached to the old drinking holes transferred to the new eating houses.
Proceedings of the City Council, May 28, 1856: [Mayor’s Report] “I would call the attention of Council to the evils arising from the negro “cook shops” or eating houses of which there are quite a number in the city. These places, for the most part are on the premises of liquor shops, frequently in the same building. Under such circumstances they necessarily lead to great irregularities. It is very generally believed that many of these negro eating houses are places where slaves habitually congregate for the purpose of drinking and gambling. But the police, though at present very vigilant and active . . . find great difficulty in detecting of offenders in the act of selling liquor, and are unable to convict for “negroes loitering” in the consequence of the ready plea that the negroes found on the premises were only there for the purpose of getting something to eat.” Charleston Courier (May 29, 1856), 1.
The earliest cook shops tended to be one of two sorts: those operating in the vicinity of the Charleston Market that specialized in the quick preparation of items available in the Market stalls; those operating as clandestine taverns. The Market cook shops tended to crowd South Market Street from East Bay to State Street. After interruption during the latter part of the Civil War, they were reinstituted in 1868. In 1870 the commissioners of the Market recommended the wholesale clearance of these eateries and the U. S. Government stipulated that no improvements would be made to the Custom House until these structures were removed. [Charleston Daily News (April 20, 1870), 3.] In August of 1871 the authorities reported, “The numerous little wooden cabooses or cook shops, which for a long time disgraced the lower end of the market, have been at last removed, and the public will be glad to learn that on their travels to and from the Mount Pleasant Ferry boat their sensitive olfactories will no longer be saluted with the oleaginous odors of fried fish and other savory dishes.” [“Removals,” Charleston Daily News (August 9, 1871), 3.] Three cook shops housed in free standing buildings were allowed to remain. An attempt was made to concentrate the wooden stall (twelve feet deep and seven wide) cookshops around Potter’s Fields. This failed. Henceforward small eateries that often did not dispense alcohol spread throughout the cityscape. They intermingled with the quasi taverns already spread in the city fabric. Ever after the cook shops had a dual reputation, on one hand a place of refreshment, on the other the congregating place of hedonists and seekers after illicit alcohol and pleasure. (Charleston’s first known Cocaine ring, headed by John “Bubsey” Miller was run out of a cookshop on the southeast corner of Market and Church Streets in 1909) [Charleston Evening Post (September 8, 1909), 8.]
Often the cook-shop’s associations with unsavory doings led to its notice in the public papers of the past century and a half. During Charleston’s great sanitary campaign of 1918-19 when the buzzards were driven from the city market and the city dump rationalized, Dr. Banov, head of the sanitary commission, shuttered 39 cookshops for unsanitary conditions. “The places closed are those whoch have scarcely any equipment save a stove and some kettles.” These were characterized as ‘fish sandwich cabarets.” From June of 1919 onward an eating house operating in the city had to abide by the following standards:
“39 Cook Shops are Closed Up,” The Charleston Evening Post (June 18, 1919), 13.
There are few descriptions of the interiors of the cook shops. A May 3, 1906 news story spoke of “dingy smoke colored walls” featuring a picture of President Teddy Roosevelt meeting Booker T. Washington. There were several small tables “with dark oil cloth covers.” The shop served “loud smelling viands.” [Evening Post (May 3, 1906), 10.]
What was so pungent smelling in this space? What exactly did they serve in the cook houses besides fish sandwiches? Information can only be secured piecemeal—for instance, the detail the William Robertson was stuffing himself with “cowpeas and rice” in a Drake Street cook shop when he was arrested for slashing Malsy Talton. [“Slashed for love,” Charleston Evening Post (October 21, 1909), 2. Of fish a special premium was placed on shark. “Negroes are passionately fond of fish, especially shark steaks.” Black provisioners would rush the fish pool at the end of Market Street whenever a landing took place. [“The Old Charleston Market,” Charleston News & Courier (June 9, 1895), 9. Of Gullah fish dishes, northern observers were struck most particularly with whiting and hominy . “It is a purely local combination.” Pairing fish with a grain was standard. Mullet was served with “small rice” [rice middlings]. [Charleston News & Courier (August 16, 1888), 4.] Even when frying fish, the recourse to grain was common. The corn meal coating for porgy when friend in lard or bacon fat extended the principle. A sweet pan fish, Porgy was fried with head on.
Fried fish was eaten with a knife and fork during the 19th century. Indeed Joe Cole—the most famous huckster in Charleston from the 1870s to 1910—made it a point in his famous Porgy Song:
Hambone am sweet
Beats all de meat.
Possum an’ potatoes berry fine,
But you gimme, you gimme,
I rally wish you wish you would
All de porgy dat you catch upon the line.
Porgy walk and porgy talk,
Porgy eat with a knife and fork.
[Glimpse into the Life of the Fisher Folk,” Charleston Sunday News (July 16, 1911), 6.]
Sometime shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the fashion for the fried fish sandwich swept through the city. Fish sandwiches with fried catfish had popped up in other parts of the country in the mid 1890s. In Charleston the fish were oceanic, not cat, and the sandwich simple—bread, butter, and a skillet fried cornmeal dusted fillet. The concept may have been popularized by the Allen Amusement Company that ran a cheap lunch counter at the Isle of Palms in summer of 1905. “Among the favorite dishes order at the restaurant the most popular was the fish sandwich, which cost a nickel. The hungry customer for his five cent piece received a good sized, freshly fried fish, two generous slices of bread and good butter” [Charleston Evening Post (August 24, 1905), 3.] The convenience of the sandwich must have struck cook shop owners. In a decade the city officials would be calling the shops “Fish Sandwich Cabarets.”
When a cook shop had fried too much fish in the course of a meal rush, the cold fried fish was converted into Brown Fish Soup (basically a brown roux made of lard and flour with mashed cold fried fish, water, and salt & pepper added—in summer tomatoes & onions might be added). It would be served at the next meal.
Fish stews were a favorite lunch offering of the black cook shops, put on the stove during breakfast service and ready for ladling at 11:00 a.m., the common lunch hour from the 1860s onward. The contents of these stews were determined by seasonal availability. The black drum, an oceanic fish, was often found at C. C. Leslie’s Fish market. Because the large drum (over 35 lbs) were not favored by hotels and white clientele, it was salted (like codfish) and employed in the antebellum period as protein rations for slaves. Salt drum dishes survived into the Reconstruction period but not into the 20th century. Drum Steaks, cut an inch thick, were however favorite dinner fare in white and black venues, particularly in April and May. A recipe for these is recorded in The Carolina Housewife. Charles Hallock remarked that “In Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine the drum is the common dinner fish when in season.”[ Hallock, Camp Life in Florida, 55. ] By May fresh drum vanished from the table. The slicing of steaks from the Drum left a substantial amount of material—heads, meaty ribs, tails, belly. These too found a use. Fanny Kemble, in her 1838-39 journal of life as a plantation mistress on Butler’s Island Georgia, described an encounter with the cook, Abraham, after a Drum had been procured for dinner: “Abraham, our cook, went by with some most revolting-looking "raw material" (part, I think, of the interior of the monstrous drum-fish of which I have told you). I asked him, with considerable disgust, what he was going ito do with it; he replied, " Oh! we colored people eat it, missis." Said I," Why do you say we colored people ?" " Because, missis, white people won't touch what we too glad of."[ Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-39 (New York & London, 1863), 264]. The almanac for 1818 of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of Pinckney island, SC, repeatedly notes the dispatch of boats of his slave fishermen out Drum fishing in April in the weeks before and during cotton planting. He noted a total catch of 219 fish, 38 of which carried roe. On April 29 he noted, “Gave the Negroes of each Plantation this morning 10 heads, 11 Backs and 23 sides of Drum fish.” “Routine of Incidentals on a Sea-Island Plantation,” A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Washington, D.C., 1919), pp. 203-05. Drum ribs joined stews made of salt drum as part of the African-American sea island diet. After the Civil War, when freed sea islanders moved into Charleston in large numbers, they brought with them a taste for the gelatinous Drum Head Fish Stew. The cook shops obliged.
Another important market staple in Charleston that would find its way into cook house soup pots was black fish, the foremost commodity harvested out of Charleston harbor. The filets went to the hotels and townhouses. “The heads are cut off and with the assistance of a few Irish potatoes, a little butter and a bunch of herbs make a delicious chowder” [“The Family Market Basket,” Charleston News & Courier (May 26, 1888), 8.] Most cook shops, however, would have used bacon fat rather than butter in the preparation and included onions.
Crab Soup tended to follow one recipe, whether it was in the home, the cook shop, or the banquet—crab meat, precooked rice, and cayenne cooked in seafood stock. The basic recipe appears in the Charleston Evening Post of August 8, 1895, and should be regarded as a template, for other ingredients would be added as happenstance dictated. Stone Crab (a.k.a. Charleston Lobster) appeared in stews on the menus of high end Restaurants; the claw meat commanded too high a price to become a fixture on cook shop menus. [In 1895 a dozen blue crabs cost 15 cents a dozen, while a bunch (six) stone crab claws cost 25 cents]. She Crab Soup was the 20th century creation of William Deas, the African American chef of the Everett House. It did not figure in cook shop meals.
Shrimp were served ‘au naturel’ in the cook shops; that is, boiled with salt and cayenne, and herbs in shell and brought to the table for the customer to peel and eat. The very highest end eateries served shrimp pie as a breakfast dish. (Dr. Banov indicated that there were a half dozen well fitted shops that took boarders; these he did not close down in 1919.) The pies first appeared on the table in April and remained until November.
Okra Soup appeared in the second week in July and remained featured regularly as a lunch offering and as a prelude to dinner. The amalgam of okra and tomatoes “has a thousand recipes all ‘tried and found good.’ [Charleston News and Courier (July 11, 1896), 2] Butter beans and corn, shrimp and a shank of beef, onions and bell peppers might find there way into the pot for cooking long and low. At the end of the 19th century Cantini’s Wharf, where Savage, Tradd and Rutledge streets converge on the bank of the Ashley, was where the tubs of okra and tomatoes from James Island were off loaded. There okra jobbers such as Tante Sannie would set up a makeshift vegetable market using carts as stalls and bushel baskets as seats. Children would sit shelling sieve beans. [“Okreen Tommottis Bias!” Charleston News and Courier (July 31, 1894), 2.] Thomas Seabrook’s cook shop at Cantini’s Wharf made the most famous okra soup in the city. Seabrook, a ship’s carpenter born in 1861, had constructed the wooden shop on the wharf and turned it over to his wife Mary, born in 1866. For a over a quarter century it was the place in the city to experience the best vegetable cookery in the Gullah style. Their son Thomas Seabrook would continue the family’s carpentry/cook shop tradition, doing construction work and running a restaurant at 1 ½ Cannon Street with his wife Hattie through the 1930s. Indeed, the Seabrook family was something of a black cooking dynasty in the city from the 1880s through the 1920s. Anna, Dorothy, Ella, Henrietta, Richardine, and Wilhemiena were hired household cooks in the 1910s-30s. Edward Seabrook ran Seabrook’s restaurant on Archdale Street with his wife Maria during the Depression. Yet of this group, Mary Seabrook was the most legendary talent, known for her pilaus, her vegetable cookery, and her exemplary okra soup. Okra soup may have mattered most to her clientele. The distinctiveness of this preparation from other okra based soups, particularly gumbo, was a point of pride to Carolinians:
Let Boston rave on pork and beans
To such a mess I would not stoop;
Gumbo’s the dish for New Orleans,
But Charleston murmurs, ‘okra soup!’
[“Okratomottis,” Charleston News & Courier (November 17, 1914), 4.]
The vegetables that came into Charleston gave rises to a multitude of side dishes. Tomatoes from James Island and the Charleston neck were sliced, sprinkled with sugar, and eaten as dessert. [Charleston Evening Post (June 22, 1905), 5] Sliced with vinegar, salt, and pepper they made a simple salad.
Greens were available year round. Turnip salad—the old name for turnip greens was a cool weather favorite, invariably cooked with a meat and consumed with bread, usually cornbread. Indeed, when not cooked with a hog jowl (Charleston’s favorite choice) or sopped with bread, superstition held they might do you harm. [Charleston News & Courier (January 15, 1903), 5.] The taste for turnip salad was so great in the Lowcountry, a variety of plant was developed—the seven top turnip—that produced no bulbous root, simply foliage. Collards, too, were cooked with pork. Beds were grown on the northern neck—seeds planted in late June to mid-July for winter harvest. The variety grown in the region tended to be the Georgia Blue [Green] collard, a tough leafed sort that needed long cooking in much water. [Charleston News & Courier (March 26, 1911), 21.] After the cabbage truck farming boom of 1900-1915—it became cheaply and widely available in the city. It is from this time the smothered cabbage for dinner and bacon & greens for breakfast became ubiquitous on the Charleston’s table. Mustard greens, because of their sharp taste, had a reputation for being healthful, and were an invariable ingredient when in season in a pot of greens. White mustard was preferred over black and only eaten raw in its young stage before its leaf had roughed out. Eaten with cornbread, the greens were a meal unto themselves, and a mug of pot likker gave a finish to the repast.
Wheat bread was made by bakeries in Charleston, not at home or in eateries. Quick breads and corn breads/pones, however, were products of the cook stove oven. There were two schools of making pone in Charleston—the older pracitioners did not put either baking powder or buttermilk in the mix. The batter was made of “corn meal, eggs, salt and water and the best quality butter.” [“Old-fashioned Corn Bread,” Charleston News and Courier (March 31, 1900), 4.] The corn meal had to be water milled coarse ground. The newer practitioners used baking soda and buttermilk.
Green corn or ‘mutton corn’ was the fresh milky kernels cut from the cob for use in soups, stews, or puddings. If one had a quantity of eggs at one’s disposal, green corn pudding was an easy and popular dish. Creamed corn with lots of pepper, alone, also adorned the bill of fare in August.
The grain that dominated cook shop cookery in Charleston was rice. A staple employed year round, it appeared throughout the day: as porridge or waffles at breakfast, in soups at lunch, as plain rice, in field pea and rice pilaus, as rice bread and as rice wine. Its myriad uses were documented thoroughly in Karen Hess’s The Carolina Rice Kitchen, one of the few classic works on Charleston culinary history.
The sweet potato had a versatility matching rice. It was boiled, mashed, and intermingled into dough for sweet potato biscuits; it was sliced and fried in lard in a cask iron skillet; it was slow boiled in sugared water for candied sweet potatoes; they were baked in the oven; they were made into pone; they were mixed with eggs, spice and sugar for custards and pies.
Peanuts (also called Pindars and groundnuts into the twentietch century) tended not to appear in the cookshops. Roasted nuts and boiled peanuts tended to be sold to the public through specialty retailers. In 1905 a commentator observed, “In the last few years in Charleston, which as a city has always been a good consumer of peanuts, there have been instituted several peanut vendor stands at various street corners, and the good old days for the fruit dealers, when they used to give a slender pint of small burned nuts for five centers, passed away, because the professional peanut man believes in selling a generous quart of well roasted hot peanuts for the nimble nickel ” [“The Peanut Crop Short This Year,” Charleston Evening Post (October 30, 1905), 8.] The roasted nuts were the large Virginia peanuts, rather than the smaller, oilier, and tastier Carolina African Peanut used to make peanut oil to boil, and to make ground nuts with. In 1895 Charleston growers had a fad moment of growing ‘Spanish pindars’ which had multiple nuts per pod. Their greatest fashion was among hog growers seeking a feed alternative to sweet potatoes when fattening the hogs for slaughter.
We should close be recalling the names of some of the most noteworthy cooks who operated in this culinary world. Some, such as William G. Barron, elevated himself into the ranks of the premier black caterers in the city.
George Alston 17Queen 1910s
William G. Barron 12 State Street 1880s-1890s
T. G. Brown 88 Market Street 1890s
Edward Buist 16 Market Street 1910s
F Capers 52 Market, 14 Market 1890s-1900s
Maggie Capers 10 Market Street 1910s
Miller Cantey 554 King Street 1900s
F. T. Casey 124 Columbus Street 1910s
Oliver Clement 2 West Street 1910s
George Courser 438 King Street 1890s
Railing Deas 61 King Street 1900s
Walter Crump 57 Market Street 1900s
S. Garland 59 Alexander Street 1890s
Frances German 170 Calhoun Street 1910s
Mary Gibbes 72 Calhoun 1900s
Thomas Giles 239 East Bay 1880s
Robert Goff 551 King Street 1890s
S. L. Green 61 Market Street 1900s
Henrietta Jones Market Street 1890s
Annie Lewis 55 Market Street 1910s
Philip Mackell Elliot & Bee Streets 1860s
Hettie May 63 ½ Line Street 1900s
Samuel Miller 96 King Street 1910s
Lucius Mitchell 47 ½ Archdale Street 1900s
Henry Moultrie 647 King Street 1900s
E. F. Peronneau 391 !/2 King Street 1910s
Pierce Peterson 51 ½ Line Street 1890s
Fanny Richardson 14 Market Street 1880s-1890s
Joe Richardson 2 Vernon Street 1910s
Alice Robertson West end Grove 1900s
Mary Robinson 530 King Street 1900s
J. P. Seabrook 554 ½ King Street 1910s
Mary Seabrook Cantini’s Warf 1890s-1900s
Thomas Slaughter 71 Market Street 1880s
Martha Smalls Princess Street 1890s
William M Smith 89 Market Street 1910s
J. Trapmann Moreland’s Wharf 1860s
Andrew Turner 551 King Street 1880s
A. Wallace 51 Market Street 1880s
Mary Weston King Street & Mary Street 1870s
Jeremiah Williams 101 King Street 1910s