ISSUE 65, COLONIAL COOKING, Part 3: Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking (1930)
In 1929 Mrs. Chester Durgin, a northern newspaper columnist, began touring the South with an eye to writing a series of articles. Her husband was the editor of the Long Island Daily Press. Mrs. Durgin inquired after “the secrets of Charleston cooking” and was “particularly interested in finding unusual ways of preparing vegetables” [“Writer Gather Cooking Secrets,” Charleston News and Courier (April 23, 1929), 2]. Material could be deposited at the Chamber of Commerce.
Tidings of a possible book on Charleston and/or southern cooking secrets set other inquirers working. Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and editor Lettie Gay signed a contract with a New York publisher for a volume to be entitled “Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking.” The recipes derived “for the most part . . . from the private scapbooks of old families.” The book would not document the fare of the professional chefs and restaurants that distinguished the city since the days of the long rooms in the American Revolution. Such public cookery was always calibrated to fashion and the changing tides of culinary taste. The household cookery maintained by the “old families” preserved only the enduring verities of taste.
Why Blanche Rhett decided that 1730 marked the beginning of the city’s culinary identity is difficult to determine. The Harriet Horry Recipe Book contained mid-18th century recipes. But nothing datable to 1730. Perhaps Miss Rhett liked round numbers. At any rate Blanche Rhett fixed Charleston food as grounded in colonial era practices. Just the same as Williamsburg. Yet at the same time Rhett secured recipes from William Deas, her black butler, and the inventor of She Crab Soup. So black cooking stood next to colonial cooking as a source of culinary authenticity.
Helen Woodward, Rhett’s collaborator, had a good deal to do with the creation of the book. She made her name in New York publishing circles in 1921 devising a marketing scheme that won a new generation of readers for Mark Twain’s collected works. A New York Jew, she married novelist and biographer W. E. Woodward, a South Carolinian and graduate of The Citadel, who moved north to pursue a literary career. Helen was a writer herself composing ‘Through Many Windows”. W. E. and Helen took to wintering in Charleston in 1928 renting a section of the Pirate’s House on Church Street—where downstairs Miriam Wilson maintained her Anchorage Gift Shop. Blanche Rhett was the landlady.
Rhett had the magnetic name and social connections—her husband had been Charleston’s mayor. So she was the ideal front woman for the scheme of collecting a multitude of recipes. Woodward contributed the Introduction and notes, Gay tested the recipes in New York. Aside from a handful of recipes taken from Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina House Wife, the contributions derived from family collections with names attached. What went back 200 years were the names, and sometimes the houses. The recipes were, for the most part, 19th and early 20th century in origin.
What did they do: they made Charleston the city of shrimp, she crab soup, okra soup (not gumbo), and (of course) Lady Baltimore Cake. The book came out in Spring of 1930. By late summer it had proved such a success that the Post & Courier newspaper determined it had to exceprt its contents In running columns through fall of 1930.