ISSUE 65, COLONIAL COOKING, Part 2: Charleston Discovers Culinary Antiquity
Charleston Discover Culinary Antiquity
We tend to think of Charleston as a bastion of culinary antiquarianism, with a Moonlight and Magnolias nostalgia about the old ways and the old foods. But that sensibility developed only after the turn of the twentieth century. For one thing the culinary apogee of Lowcountry cuisine developed only after the Civil War when truck farming on the Charleston Neck gave rise to a plentitude of vegetables that made variety available to even the poorest consumer. The idea of a signature Charleston food besides rice did not even arise until 1906 when Owen Wister’s novel Lady Baltimore created a mystique around Lady Baltimore Cake. A White Cake with nuts served by Charleston’s Christian Women’s Exchange in the 1890s, it became, improbably, a central character in Wister’s romance about a male cosmopolite who visits the atavistic southern city of Kings Port (Charleston thinly veiled) and falls in love with the cake and its maker.. The hero’s aunt Carola and her “Colonial Society” had invited him to learn of the anti-modern manners and tastes of Kings Port. The cake puts him under the spell of never- never land.
Charleston Society delighted in the novel, the cake on which it was based, and slowly the idea that certain signature foods could express the peculiar specialness of a place began to take hold. Lady Baltimore Cake’s became a rage and prompted a turf war between two ladies claiming special connection with the recipe. Indeed the Exchange would dissolve because of the contention, with the Y. W. C. A. taking over its projects and place in Charleston Culture.
From 1919 to 1930 the invention of Charleston culinary tradition became the task of the Tea Rooms, seasonal places of refreshment run by women seeking to raise money for various charitable causes. There were two tea seasons: November-December, from Lent through Easter. Only tea and coffee were heated—everything else on the menu was pre-prepared and served at room temperature: sandwiches, cakes, pies, confections. Pioneering these efforts was Miss Ottolingui’s “Lady Baltimore Tea Room” that opened in holiday season of 1919. Ottolingui was one of the claiments of the honor of the guardian of the sacred recipe for the cake after whih her Tea Room was named. Ottolingui besides the standard tea room sandwiches sold peach leather, partridge berries (used as holiday decorations), fruit cake (Charleston Black Cake), and Lady Baltimore Cake.
At about the same time Ottolingui’s friend Charleston pastel artist Frances “Fanny” Mahon L. King decided to distill Charleston cooking into its few signature dishes in a pamphlet sized cookbook, F. L. K’s Charleston Recipes (1919): 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 in fruit cakes.
As the contests for public dollars heated up between “The Lady Baltimore Tea Room” the “Y. W. C. A. Tea Room,” the Samaritan Circle’s “Ye Olde English Tea Room,” the “Battery Tea Room,” “The Green Parrot Tea Room,” “The Forget-Me-Not Tea Room” and the “D. A. R. Tea Room” certain of the hostesses began introducing more local fare to entice custom. Chicken and Waffles first appeared on the menu of the Green Parrot, Damson Preserves at the Battery Tea Room. There were two problems with how the tea rooms operated: 1—the things they sold were on consignment and depended on the willingness of a volunteer to make something 2-the Tea Rooms were administered by committee (with the exception of the Lady Baltimore Tea Room) and so often lacked decisive planning or quick adaptation of mission or practice.
It took an outsider—a woman from Ohio—to grasp how to invent tradition, revise the past, sell the signature product, and serve the new motoring public with tourist novelties. Miriam B. Wilson (1879-1959) cannot be described in a few glib sentences. Her teenage years coincided with the emergence of the cultural ideal of the “New Woman,” and she absorbed its notions of personal sovereignty deeply. She never married and immersed herself in the women’s club world. She trained in navigation and became a licensed ship captain. During World War 1 she was hired by the U. S. Archive to explore dimensions of African-American culture for collection development. After the War she moved to Charleston, and began the avid collection of slave-era black material culture: wrought iron, quilts, pottery, carved objects, and musical instruments. She supported herself by opening a souvenir shop, antiques store, and items that the Tea Rooms were introducing as local foods.
Consider Peach Leather: In 1924 peach became a Christmas treat featured at the Lady Baltimore Tea Room in Charleston. Almost immediately a second tea room—The Spinning Wheel at 250 King Street—began featuring it. In the following year the Charleston Junior League adopted it alongside the traditional cakes as a featured item in their annual fund raising food sale. In 1927 Miriam Wilson adopted the confection as the signature treat of her Anchorage Antique Store at the Pirates House on 38 Queen. She also served “benne cream.” Both were creations of the antebellum period that had long been accepted as ordinary features of food. But by the late 1920s that was not enough. Word of John D. Rockefeller’s project to make Williamsburg into a monument of the American 18th century filtered to parts farther South. Blanche Rhett staked out a kind of culinary priority of SC over VA in 1930 by publishing her 200 Years of Charleston Cooking (more on this later). Wilson realized that the moment for rebranding had come.
In 1930s she took over the small white clapboard building that the Junior League was using as hq for its lending library and gift sales at 52 Meeting. The League’s members found keeping the shop afloat too time consuming. Wilson installed herself in it renaming it the Colonial Belle Kitchen. Shortly afterwards she claimed to have found a colonial era manuscript containing recipes for peach leather and her benne products. But that was smoke and mirrors. Her recipe was cribbed from Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina House Wife, the benne recipes from Ladaveze’s Candy. But more importantly, it was at the Colonial Belle Kitchen that she kept several favorite street confections that had been outlawed during the sanitation crackdowns in the 1910s from disappearing from the city: groundnut cakes, benne wafers, monkey meat.
Wilson realized that foods and places needed stories, so she published her own chatty guide to Charleston’s streets and landmarks. In 1938 she purchased the Old Slave Mart and made it into a memorial to African American crafts, an emporium for tourist souvenmirs, and a dispensary for Old Charleston Confections. I’ve written about her “Slave Recipe Company” elsewhere. But from the late 1920s to 1950, Wilson was the chiefs saleswoman of the Colonial City and its Food.