ISSUE 89, SESAME, Part 1: Benne Cakes-Benne Candy-Benne Wafers

Benne Cakes-Benne Candy– Benne Wafers

Benne is the Gullah Geechee name for the old varieties of sesame brought over from West Africa during the era of slavery. It derived from the Mende language of West Africa. Sesame was probably grown in the South Carolina colony during the 1690s.  By the 1740s Anglo-American planters in Carolina had noticed the benne growing in the food gardens of the enslaved Africans and began the long experiment in exploiting its oil for  commercial ends.  (The Charleston County Public Library has a very informative and readable essay on this—“Benne Seeds in the Lowcountry” https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/benne-seeds-lowcountry ).

We speak of benne as though all the sesame grown in the South since the 1700s was one variety.  But early as the colonial period the botanically literate understood that two kindsexisted—one East Asian—that matured in the summer, with plants short in stature, that had seed that ripened at the same time.  Benne (Sesamum indica) ripened in September and October, grew to the size of an adult human being, generated many thousands of seeds per stalk, ripened from the bottom of the plant to the top at different times in pods that shattered. Several strains of benne came from Africa, producing seeds that differed in color from grey to straw.  Benne contains about 45% oil in the seed. 

The Africans who brought the first seeds to North America also brought a rich range of foodways with it.  In India and Africa it had been an important oil seed for two millennia. African Americans mashed fresh harvested seeds and put them in hot water, then skimmed the oil off the top to use as a cooking oil. The did not, for the most part, parch the seed before mashing it. (This is what imparts the pungent flavor and dark coloration to Asian sesame seed oil).  They used the cake (the mash left after the oil was removed) as the base for stews. They pan parched the seeds to use as a condiment, added to greens, hominy grits, soups, and baked goods. 

One thing was not part of the African foodways: the confectionery use of benne.  That would come in the mid-19^th century in West Africa.  In the South it occurred a generation earlier when New World sugar was combined with parched seed.  Benne Cakes – Benne Candy – and Benne Wafers are all creations of the diaspora to America. 

Benne Cakes, like their culinary relative Ground Nut [peanut] Cakes, were called cakes because they were round.  The parched seed was combined with cooked molasses or brown sugar syrup and poured onto a cold surface where it hardened, a petrified pool of pleasure.   The original benne cakes, combined parched benne with molasses and some flavoring.  Molasses, because it was cheap, was universally employed as a sweetener, and so was standard in early 19^th-century candy making.  Blanche S. Rhett uses this oldest formulation of the Benne Cake in her recipe in 200 Years of Charleston Cooking (1930).

The introduction of large scale cane sugar planting in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1810s, enabled the amount of refined sugar on the American market to be so great that the prices per pound began sinking, until in 1824 they become low enough to make a cone of granulated sugar (usually brownish or tan in color; pure white remained high end and expensive) readily purchasable by nearly everyone.  Consider the observations in Francis Porcher’s 1849  A Medical Botany of South Carolina: In South Carolina, the seeds are largely used by the negroes for making broths.  They are also eaten parched, and are made with sugar into a very nice candy” (811). A recipe for Benne Cakes first appeared in print in the 1873 cookbook 50 Years in a Maryland Kitchen by Mrs. B. C. Howard. It used Brown Sugar, not molasses, as the sweetener.  Nevertheless it is an early recipe, with no butter, cream, vinegar, or lemon juice in its formulation. 

Benne Candy (infrequently called benne brittle) was made from brown sugar and benne.   The 19^th-century forms of Benne Candy often made a thick syrup of bubbling brown sugar, water, butter, vinegar or lemon juice, and sometimes cream.  It was poured hot in a flat pan and often cut into squares or rectangles. Sometimes, however, it was poured into disc shapes. Yet it still bore the name “candy” rather than “cake.” Twentieth-century recipes sometimes made used of evaporated milk for greater richness and smoother mouth feel.  This recipe from 1941 captures a fairly standard southern practice for the period. 

Benne was planted in quantity throughout the South for oil production in the 19^th century, but after its employment as a frying medium and salad oil was eclipsed by David Wesson’s refined cotton seed oil at the end of the 19^th century, benne remained in cultivation as bird feed on hunting plantations, as a patch plant grown by Gullah Geechee farmers, and by some seed producers serving local markets.  But as early as the 1920s sesame grown from elsewhere began jostling benne on the grocery shelves.  In the Post-World War II era, the Herbert Martschink & Sons Store on the corn of King and Queen was famous as the one reliable source for the seed in Charleston.  It sourced the benne from Gullah farmers on James and Johns island, and would put up a wooden sign in the window reading BENNE SEED when it was available.  All the traditional cooks would come in and clean out the stock.

The Benne Wafer in its current incarnation as a hard dry disk of benne, sugar, cream and a little flour, was refined circa 1930 by Miss Merriam Harris of the Colonial Belle Kitchen in Charleston from earlier confections.  Harris made a business out of updating and refining old traditional preparations (peach leather, ground nut cakes, benne candy), and made them Charleston signatures when they became tourists treats at her Old Slave Market Museum in the later 1930s.  The Old Colony Bakery’s recipe derives from Harris’s as does the form and appearance of the wafer.