ISSUE 82, SOME COOKBOOKS, Part 4: A Great Lowcountry Cookbook from South Carolina
A Great Lowcountry Cookbook from South Carolina
Southern cookbooks tend to be collections of community recipes. Even the great cookbooks documenting the cuisine of the coastal Southeast—Rhett’s 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, Charleston Receipts, Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking—identify informants and sources. While many of these until the late 20th century bore the names of white authors/editors, they invariably included numbers of recipes from Gullah-Geechee Cooks, frequently named. By the 1950s a repertoire of Lowcountry dishes had become set, and a church cookbook, school recipe collection, or Junior League assemblage had to include its central dishes or be reckoned second rate. I’ve always thought the finest examples of this literature resisted the temptation to include the latest fashionable items of cookery from national women’s magazines—no icebox cake, no Beef Stroganoff, no recipes calling for cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup to supply the body of a stew.
The following list suggests the range of books treating Lowcountry cooking from WW2 to the end of the 20th century besides the famous ones that everyone consults.
All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church, Waccamaw Favorites; Recipes from Pawley’s Island, S. C. (Pawley’s Island, S.C.: All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church, 1955).
Avery Institute, Treasured Recipes (Collierville, TN: Fundcraft, [1991]).
Billie Burn, Stirrin’ the Pots on Daufuskie (Daufuskie, SC: By the author, 1985).
Jane W. Fickling, Recipes from Old Charleston Catherine Lee Banks Edwards (1793-1863) Charleston, South Carolina (Birmingham: Banner Press, 1989).
Virginia Mixson Geraty, Bittle en’ T’ing’: Gullah Cooking with Maum Chrish’ (Orangeburg: Sandlapper Press, 1992).
Dee Hryharrow and Isabel M. Hoogenboom, The Beaufort Cook Book (Beaufort, S. C.: Beaufort Book Shop, 1965).
Junior Assembly of Anderson, South Carolina, Carolina Cuisine (Anderson, S. C.: Hallux, Inc., 1969).
Ladies Aid Society of New Wappetaw Presbyterian Church, McClellanville, S. C. Favorite Recipes (Kansas City: Bev-Ron Publishing Co., 1956).
Wilma D. Martin, Captain Murrell’s Savory Seafood Recipes (Murrells Inlet, SC: Rum Gully Press, 1990),
Mt. Pleasant Academy P. T. A., Mt. Pleasant’s Famous Recipes (Mt. Pleasant, 1959, rev. version of 1938 book).
Dawn O’Brien & Karen Mulford, South Carolina’s Historic Restaurants and their Recipes (Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 1984).
Mrs. Don Richardson, Carolina Lowcountry Cook Book of Georgetown, South Carolina (Charleston: Walter, Evans & Cogswell, 1963, 2nd edition).
Jim Rooney, Jim Rooney’s Edisto Eatin’ (Lenexa, KS: Cookbook Publishers, 1996).
Julie Lumpkin and Nancy Ann Coleman, The South Carolina Wildlife Cookbook (Columbia: S. C. Wildlife and Marine Resources Department, 1982, 2nd edition),
Oscar Vick, Gullah Cooking: Fish Cooking (Charleston: By the Author, 1991).
Women’s Auxilary, Ocean View Memorial Hospital, Coastal Carolina Cooking (Charleston: Walker, Evans & Cogswell, 1958).
Some are disappointingly cosmopolitan: The Avery Institute cookbook, South Carolina’s Historic Restaurants and their Recipes, and Carolina Cuisine. Some are idiosyncratically personal in their formulations; Oscar Vick forever using mashed potatoes as a thickener for dishes and overdosing dishes with Worcestershire—Or Jim Rooney’s Edisto Eatin’. But some are surprisingly rich and wonderful: Coastal Carolina Cooking’s seafood recipes. But of this list only one is essential reading for understanding the SC Lowcountry tradition. Mt. Pleasant’s Famous Recipe.
It went through multiple editions in the 1950s and ‘60s, beginning with a slapdash paperbound quasi-DYI printing. The 195 edition saw it achieve its fully shaped form. Assembled by the PTA of the Mount Pleasant Academy, it drew on the memberships for contents. The Academy, now 200 years old and the oldest continuously operating non-collegiate school in South Carolina, is located in Mount Pleasant’s Old Town. What makes the cookbook so cherishable? On every pages there are classic dishes in recipes that avoid glitz and hew to tradition. Rice dishes? It offers a dozen pilaus. Okra? Every which way. But what impresses me is the great neglected African diaspora vegetable in the South—eggplant (guinea squash in older cookbooks). The PTA offers more eggplant preparations than are found in any other SC cookbook of the 20th century. There are multiple shrimp pie recipes, sage advice on cooking venison, and a definitive treatment of “red horse cakes” (SC’s name for Hush Puppies). I reproduce the page on benne confections.
If you seek glitz, finesse, rare ingredients, meditations on seasoning, or discussion of beverages, look elsewhere. But if you want to know the heart of the Lowcountry tradition of cooking in the mid-20th century, this presents a funkier and truer picture than the near contemporary Charleston Reciepts.