ISSUE 93, REFLECTIONS, Part 3: Lowcountry Cuisine, an Overview
Lowcountry Cuisine, an Overview
[Delivered at Cook it Raw Charleston, October 2013]
The Lowcountry is a coastal region in the southeastern United States extending from the Cape Fear River in North Carolina southward to the St. John’s River in Florida. Or if you need a more memorable bounding—from Jacksonville NC to Jacksonville FL. First named by geographers in the first quarter of the 19th century, the Lowcounty extends roughly 100 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean and encompasses the sea islands of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, as well as the tidal zone of the mainland. Four cities punctuate the region: Wilmington, North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, and several substantial towns—Georgetown, Myrtle Beach, Beaufort, Brunswick, Extensive wetlands offer an extensive habitat for wildlife, and the agricultural landscape, reclaimed from coastal forests during the 18th and early 19th centuries, is largely comprised of sandy loam filled with organic matter.
Lowcountry cuisine: A distinctive repertoire of culinary practices and dishes emerged in the antebellum period in the Lowcounty. At the center of these foodways was rice, a grain introduced in the late 17th century and reaching its apotheosis after the introduction of Carolina Gold (Gold Seed) Rice in 1785-86. The other cash crop of region-cotton—because it exhausted nutriments in the soil forced planters to resort to experimental agriculture in the 1820s—crop rotations, manuring regimes, and fallowing. The rotation crops for rice and cotton—benne (low oil landrace sesame), field peas, sweet potatoes, corn, brassicas—became central components of the emerging cuisine. Subsidiary cash crops—peanuts in the Cape Fear region—citrus in the St. Johns River region—also entered into the regions foodways.
Lowcountry cuisine coalesced out of a set of foodways developed in the colonial era. European settlers —(Britons, French Huguenots, German Salzburgers, Peninsular Spaniards, and a sprinkling of Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swiss ) imported livestock, fruit trees, garden vegetables, and landrace wheat, rye, barley, buckwheat, and oats. They adopted certain Native American cultivars—corn, squash, beans, sweet potato, tomatoes, hot peppers, pecans, persimmons. The Native peoples in turn adopted Old World fruits into their diets. Because of the European dependence on chattel slavery to transform and work the landscape, the foods of the enslaved Native and African workforces became part of the nutritional regimen of the plantations. African diaspora foods—okra, cow peas, eggplant (guinea squash), peanuts, benne, and callaloo greens were incorporated into plantation meals, often with enslaved cooks overseeing food preparation.
A wealth of fresh and salt water seafood, turtles, and fish—a plentitude of game and wildfowl—made the harvested components of the diet particularly varied and rich. Additionally, trade connections with the West Indies, Africa and Europe enabled importation of seeds, fruit trees, cheeses, oils, spices, salt, and prepared foods. These were distributed through an extensive network of groceries, the majority of which were run by Germans during the 19th century.
The Historical Stages:
The Rise: A vernacular country cooking practice coalesced into a cuisine in the 1830s. At that juncture the maturation of markets in the coastal cities, the development of professional caterers in restaurants and hotels in these cities and the synthesis of classic French pastry cooking and African-American approaches to the creation of dishes (a development in Charleston spearheaded by three cooking dynasties: the Mignot-Rutjes family, the Sally Seymour-Eliza Seymour Lee lineage, and the Nat Fuller-Tom Tully lineage), the institution of horticultural societies in the region and their inauguration of systematic plant breeding and seed improvement, and the widespread adoption of the cook stove with its precise temperature control. The accomplishments of the first era of Lowcountry cuisine were institutionalized in the landmark cookbook by Sarah Rutledge, The Carolina Housewife (1847). The first era of Carolina Cuisine would end when the Civil War destroyed the slave-based economy that secured the plantation world.
The Heyday: During Reconstruction (1866-1877) a number of developments conspired to enrich Lowcountry cuisine to its greatest complexity and distinctiveness. Foremost among these was the institution of truck farming—the production of garden vegetables for the markets of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—throughout the Lowcountry. The horticultural genius of the region was directed toward the refinement of potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, asparagus, radishes, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, cabbages, and watermelons. Nearly as important was the extraordinary expansion of the varieties of regularly available salt water fish in the region—from six varieties in the antebellum periods to thirty four during Reconstruction—by the entrepreneurial African-American fish broker, Charles C. Leslie in Charleston. His fish trade ranged from Wilmington to Darien, GA. This period lasted from 1870 until World War I when rice culture expired and California trumped the Lowcountry as supplier of the nation’s vegetables. During this period several flagship hotels and restaurants became nationally famous for their renditions of the cuisine: The Carolina Hotel Restaurant in Wilmington, NC, H. F. Pereneau’s Restaurant, Thomas Pinckney’s on King St., Paris Gibb’s on Tradd, and Eckhoff’s on East Bay in Charleston; Hussey’s Cotton Exchange Restaurant, the Gem, and the Restaurant Francais in Savannah, Delot’s Restaurant in St. Augustine. The landmark cookbooks of this era of Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book (1867) by Mrs. Annabella Hill of Savannah, GA. And the Carolina Rice Cook Book, edited by Louisa C. S. Stoney of Charleston in 1901.
The Decline: From 1920 until 1990 the various crops central to classic Lowcountry cuisine ceased to be grown—rice, benne, sugar cane, asparagus, sea island white flint corn. Increasingly, the dishes recorded in the cookbooks—particularly Blanche S. Rhett’s 200 Years of Charleston Cooking (1934) and the greatly influential Charleston Receipts (1950) were performed with substitute ingredients—and as the twentieth century advanced, increasingly with products of industrial agriculture. A few landed families maintained traditional foodways, and a small group of black skillet Gullah cooks kept aspects of the kitchen craft alive in Restaurants such as Henry’s and Perditas.
The Revival: In the wake of the Cajun foodways revival of the 1970s, several chefs in Charleston and Savannah began searching for the signature dishes of the Lowcountry tradition. In the early 1980s, Elizabeth Terry of Savannah, creator of Elizabeth’s on 37th revived the grits cake; Louis Osteeen of Louis’s Charleston Grill began growing local ingredients for his restaurant, and Donald Barrickman of Magnolia’s revived the traditional breakfast of Shrimp and Grits as an entrée. Yet by the middle 1990s a general realization emerged that no reworking of traditional dishes would revive a cuisine in the absence of a restoration of the ingredients—the Carolina Gold Rice, the gourdseed grits corn, the benne, the field peas—that built it. Publication of John Taylor’s Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking in 1993 shocked people into a sense of how much had been lost. At this juncture Glenn Roberts organized Anson Mills, a company intent upon reviving the landrace grains at the heart of southern cooking. Dr. Merle Shepard of Clemson University sought to organize the repatriation of Carolina Gold Rice organizing the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. Dr. David Shields in 2003 hosted the “Cuisines of the Lowcounty and Caribbean Conference” in Charleston, inaugurating the effort to reconstruction the agriculture, marketing, and culinary preparation of Lowcountry cuisine. Since 2003, the restoration of a pantry of ingredients has inspired Sean Brock, Mike Lata, Robert Stehling, and the newest generation of Lowcountry chefs to renovate a novel cuisine from old ingredients.
The Cooks: Household cookery was profoundly gendered. The kitchen was deemed under the direction of the plantation matron, and white women were schooled in the art, even if they did not do the bulk of the hands on food preparation. All of the classic 19th and early 20th century cookbooks treating the region’s cookery, except one, were composed by white women. Among these women baking, particularly the baking of cakes, held a particular prestige and the exchange of recipes among expert cake bakers was a foodway. An African-American woman was the primary food preparer on Lowcountry plantations, and on the largest plantations a black male field cook did the butchering. In Lowcountry cities, restaurants, hotels, and cookshops were under the direction of male caterers, with some women pastry chefs in the mix. These tended to be either European males, or African American males and females. In Charleston two African American dynasties (the Seymour-Lee, the Fuller-Tully) trained most of the important African American townhouse cooks of the 19th century, whether enslaved or freed. Tom Tully trained most of the hotel cooks of the later 19th century. In the latter half of the 20th century white restaurateurs began to dominate the city scenes in Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville.
ROUGH PRINCIPLES
Baking: The most cosmopolitan dimension of Lowcountry kitchen craft, baking was particularly associated with breakfast breads, party cakes, and dinner staples such as rice bread and wheat loaves. The chemical baking that prompted the transatlantic quick bread revolution in the early 19th century was embraced by bakers throughout the region; baking powder and baking soda gave rise to biscuits, muffins, and quick rolls galore. Because rice and corn—grains without gluten—dominated the agricultural landscape, chemical leavening was important for batters employing rice flour and corn meal. Wheat (soft winter wheat) tended to be grown by German settlers in South Carolina and Georgia, particularly in Ebenezer, GA, and Orangeburg, SC. In Lowcountry cities bakeries manned largely by Europeans produced most of the wheat loaves consumed. They employed imported yeasts. After the Civil War the Charleston Mills began importing California Wheat for bread manufacture. In the country, plantation bake houses supplied the loaves, using yeast created on premises from potato, fig, or other sources. The widest range of baked goods were associated with breakfast, and were the most regional in terms of recipes: hoecakes and johnny cakes, griddle cakes of rice, corn, wheat, and rye, rice waffles, corn dodgers, rusks, muffins, and . Cakes were the least local in inspiration, participating in the French traditions of confection, albeit using local ingredients for seasoning.
Roasting: The most English dimension of Lowcountry cuisine was the roasting of meats. If one examines the earliest of the region’s cookbooks, 1832’s A Carolina Receipt Book by “A Lady of Charleston,” the instructions on preparing beef, mutton, veal, sheep, and pork derive for the most part from William Kitchener’s The Cook’s Oracle and other British cooking manuals of the 1810s and 20s. The haunches and steaks are prepared at hearth fires rather than cook stoves. Game and fowl were roasted The one major exception to this practice was barbecuing, the open air slow, low heat cooking of meats in pits or on scaffolds. This method of slow roasting on damped fires derived from Native American practice and was used for communal or event cooking throughout the South and West Indies. The Lowcountry practiced it from the 18th century on, applying it to pork, mutton, beef, and goat. Over the course of the 19th century a decided preference for pork developed and the evolution of various rubs and marinades. In the twentieth century the characteristic division of the Lowcountry into the northern vinegar and pepper zone, the South Carolina mustard-based sauce zone, and the Georgia tomato zone came into existence. The preference for a whole hog approach to barbecuing occurred, with offal and “parts” being processed into hash.
Boiling: Over the past two centuries the greatest alteration in attitude about cooking took place in connection with boiling. At the beginning of the 19th century a range of dishes—meats, vegetables, puddings, and fish—were subjected to a rolling boil. The heat control enabled by the cook stove in the 1830s led to a fundamental reorientation to certain sorts of preparations. The poaching of fish became standard kitchen practice. Puddings began to be steamed rather than immersed. Vegetables could be simmered, or sautéed rather that boiled to mushiness. Intense boiling of meats began to be relegated to offal and parts (chitterlings, tongue, pig feet, cow hoof), while hams, once boiled, were baked instead. Certain vegetables continued to be boiled—many roots (although baking was also popular), asparagus, artichokes, peas, and broccoli were boiled as a matter of course. (See also Stewing.)
Stewing: Combining a variety of ingredients in one vessel in liquid—meats, grains, vegetables, and cooking them long was a characteristic approach of Lowcountry cooking and a major legacy of West African cookery. A range of classic dishes—greens, chicken bog, perloo, hoppin’ john, oyster and benne stew, pinebark stew, frogimore stew operate on this principle. The grain added in the dish might be rice or corn. Meat, fish, and seafood was optional, yet included when available.
Frying: The cast iron Carron wares (skillets, spiders, Dutch Ovens, etc.) that were standard equipment in the age of hearth cookery survived in the age of the cook stove because of their suitability for frying. The West African influence on cooking technique was most manifested in frying and stewing, although the fats (lard, benne seed oil, cotton seed oil, and butter) differed from those of the slave coast. Fish, fruits, some vegetables, and eggs were fried in a hot fat or oil. For the most part, frying was done in a shallow layer of oil, or sometimes a skim. In the mid-19th century a penchant for batter frying—frying fritters—became widespread. A wide range of meats, vegetables and fruits were coated and browned in lard or butter. The minimalist fritter was simply fried batter or meal (the Indian meal fritter or hush puppie, corn dodgers, rice fritters. Fritters could be savory or sweet and were consumed with dipping sauces.
Cured Meats: A regular rite of Lowcountry winter was the slaughter of livestock. Pigs were scalded, butchered, and processed, with hams being salted, leaf fat being rendered to lard, offal being boiled to pudding. Mutton and Venison joined hams in the smokehouse. Because of the problem of skipper infestation hams—whether of hog, button, goat, or venison—were often coated with black or red pepper. Invariably these meats underwent dry, or “country” curing with aromatic smoke in low temperature smokehouses.
Lipids: The preferred frying medium was lard. Suet was not a significant fat. Attempts were made to cultivate olives for oil in the 18th and 19th century with limited success. Quantities of olive oil were imported for culinary uses—particularly as a salad oil—throughout the 19th century. But cultivators turned to the oil of benne plant for a substitute frying medium (because of its high smoke point) and salad lubricant. From 1810 to 1890 it until the late 1880s when David Wesson refined cotton seed oil (landrace sesame) to palatability. “Wesson Oil” as it was called prevailed from 1890 until the devastation of the southern cotton fields by the boll weevil in the 1910s. Cotton seed oil factories were converted to processing peanut oil, which was the oil of choice during the early 20th century. David Wesson hydrogenated cotton seed oil to form cottonlene, a shortening intended to substitute for lard in baking. The product became better known under the name Crisco. Butter was imported in substantial quantities from New York State during the 19th century to serve in sautéing, baking, and anointing bread, rolls, and muffins.
Sweeteners: From the colonial period onward, intimate trade with the West Indies made cane sugar an abundant ingredient of the region, and one of the chief commodities sold in grocery stores. The cultivation of purple stripe sugar cane in the Georgia Sea Islands and Louisiana made molasses and loaf sugar plentiful and cheap in the 1830s. This had two immediate effects: the use of sugar as a preservative of fruits , berries, and some vegetables; the employment of sugar as the engine for alcohol creation in the home manufacture of fruit and vegetable wines. The effects of both developments were marked: Preserves, jams, jellies, marmalades and glazed fruits abounded. Fruit wines were converted into fruit wine vinegars, hence pickled items no longer were soused in the standard malt or cider vinegars. A vivid palate of acidic flavors typified the 19th century. In the 1850s Gov. Hammond of South Carolina and Lawrence Wray introduced 15 varities of sorghum from Natal in South Africa. Cold tolerant, these canes could be grown at lattitudes far north of the Zone 8 tolerance area of sugar cane. During the Civil War when the fall of Natchez cut off southern sugar supplies, sorghum was universally embraced as a sweetener. The foliage was used as cattle fodder. It has retained since that time, a place in the Lowcountry pantry. A third source of sweetening emerged in the latter half of the 19th century when watermelons covered much of South Carolina and Georgia. Watermelon syrup and molasses made from the meat of watermelons pureed, filtered, and reduced became a beloved item of commerce in the final quarter of the 19th century.
Seasoning & Herbs: Salt was imported into the Lowcountry in quantity. When the salt domes of Florida and Louisiana were discovered, they supplanted off shore supply from Turks & Caicos Island. Groceries supplied imported spices of which pepper, mace, allspice, and cinnamon were most important. Curry powder became available late in the antebellum period and found some use in stews and one-pot cookery. A wide variety of flavoring plants and herbs were grown in kitchen gardens. Mustard, cayenne, bird’s beak and squash peppers, anise, and the following herbs: Balm, Basil, Borage, Burnet, Caraway, Chervil, Chives, Garlic, Hop, Hyssop, Lavender, Marjoram, Marigold, Mint, Nasturtium, Parsley, Pennyroyal, Rosemary, Rue, Tarragon, Thyme, and Wormwood.
Greens: Conceptually, greens were regarded as continuing the nutritional/medicinal category of herbs. Greens were garden grown and prepared for cooking or salad. They were an important component of both country and city cooking, vernacular and refined cookery. Pot-likker, bacon and greens, slippery collards, spinach, and sorrel soup were the important cooked dishes. The favorite salad herbs were lettuce, cress, corn salad, dock, fennel, purslane, samphire, sorrel, tansy, and white mustard (picked young before the leaf roughed out). In country cooking foraged greens went into the cook pot or into the salad bowl as well as cultivated greens.
Root Vegetables: Root vegetables served two functions in the food system: besides serving as human fare, the cured, chopped, and sometimes cooked sweet potatoes, potatoes, turnips, carrots, rutabagas, and parsnips served as winter feed for livestock. Grain feeding of cattle did not become widespread until the 20th century in the Lowcountry. (It provides only 1/3rd of the nutrition per acre of sweet potatoes.) Sweet potatoes developed a particularly important place in Lowcountry cuisines being boiled, baked, prepared in pones, candied, rendered into puddings and pies, and processed into beer. One traditional root vegetable beloved in the 19th century has disappeared from the Lowcountry table, the Tanya—the root of the elephant ear plant.
Fruits and Nuts: From the 1820s onward the markets of Lowcountry cities were renowned for the variety of fruits and nuts. Charleston was known for its pomologists, and orchards of plums, pears, cherries, peaches, apricots, and apples ringed the city. Citrus from the Florida and Cumberland Island were available in season. West Indian bananas, mangoes, papayas, star fruit, and cherimoyas appeared regularly. In the 1880s date palms were planted on the Georgia coast. Locally grown brined olives were periodically available in Charleston southward. Native fruits—persimmons and paw-paws—appeared in season, and dried persimmons were available all winter long. Nuts included pecans, butternuts, hickory, and walnuts. Imported pistachios were general available as well. During autumn chestnuts and chestnut meal were widely available, transported from inland Carolina and Georgia.
Oceanic Fish regularly sold at Charle C. Leslie’s Fish Market (1854-1910): Black Grouper, Black Grunt, Blackfish (Sea Bass), Bluefish, Bream, Carolina Whiting, Cobia, Crevalle, Croaker, Dolphin, Drum Fish, Eel, Flounder (Plaice), Hickory Shad, Kingfish, Knobbed Porgy (Scup), Mangrove Snapper, Menhaden, Moon Fish (Angel Fish), Mullet, Pigfish, Pompano, Red Grouper, Red Porgy, Red Snapper, Rockfish (Striped Bass), Sailor’s Choice, Sand Perch (Squirrel Fish), Sea Trout, Shad, Sheep’s Head, Spanish Mackerel, Spot, Tile Fish, Warsaw, Yellow Tail. Blue Crab, Soft Shelled Crab, Diamondback Terrapin, West Indian Green Turtle, White Shrimp, Brown Shrimp, Pink Shrimp, Oysters (Breach Inlet, Edisto, Saunder’s Creek), Scallops, Clams, Crayfish.
Game: Deer, Wild Pigs, and Turkey were the trinity of large animals that moved the imaginations of Lowcountry hunters. Waterfowl came next in estimation. While swans and geese abound and were hunted, hunters cherished ducks foremost of game birds: Wood Ducks, Black Ducks, Mallards, Canvasback, Redheads, Mergansers, Eiders, Ring-necked Ducks, and Teal found there way into dutch ovens and onto rotisseries spits. Rice fed ducks in particular won culinary esteem. Pheasants and Grouse were once rather common; not so much now. Dove and quail remain plentiful in parts of the Lowcountry. One delicious bird, the rice bird or bobolink, is now endangered and cannot be hunted.
Beverages: In the 18th century rum was distilled in the Lowcountry from molasses shipped in barrels from the West Indies, The rum combined with sugar and citrus served as the basis for the punches that were the favorite alcoholic beverages at social events. In the 19th century both Charleston and Savannah became center of brandy manufacture, serving the southern hotel trade. The locally grown fruits were employed in flavoring these spirits. During the 19th century Madeira became the decided preference among wines for serving with meals. Because of black rot, Pierce’s disease and phylloxera, growing European noble grapes proved extremely difficult in the Lowcountry. Nicholas Herbemont, the French viticulturist resident in Columbia, SC, pioneered the crossing of European varieties with local disease resistant grapes and creating vintage wines from them beginning in the 1820s. Two such grapes—the Herbemont and the Lenoir—became popular wine grapes in the 19th century and the former became the rootstock that saved the French wine industry in the 1860s from phylloxera. Two other Lowcountry grapes, the Catawba and the Isabella, became widely cultivated and influential grapes in 19th century wine making. Sweet wines made from Rotundafolia grapes—scuppernong and muscadine—have also enjoyed long favor in country regions of the Lowcountry. The widespread availability of loaf sugar drove a home fruit wine industry that still thrives in parts of the region. Attempts to grow coffee in the Lowcountry failed, but did not forestall the large consumption of the beverage. Experiments with tea-planting proved more successful and the Lowcountry boasted a tea plantation since the mid 19th century. Iced tea was a drink consumed in the region since the 1840s, well before its national popularity in 1900. Plantation breweries were found throughout the lowcountry and “hop beer,” “persimmon beer,” and “root beer” were common. In Florida Orange beer and orange wine were common before the popularization in the early 20th century of orange juice as a morning health drink.
Finally, a lost tradition of rice wine fermentation existed. It remains one dimension of our traditional cuisine deserving revival.
Fascinating. Thanks!