A Southern Star Rises in the Low Country

Newspaper article

By: R.W. Apple, Jr.

Date: March 15, 2006

Source: Apple, R.W., Jr. "A Southern Star Rises in the Low Country." New York Times (March 15, 2006).

About the Author: R. W. Apple, Jr. is an Associate Editor for the New York Times. Apple began working at the Times in 1963 and has served as Washington Bureau Chief, Chief Washington Correspondent, and Chief Correspondent of the Newspaper. He has covered the Vietnam War, the Iranian revolution, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Apple also wrote the book, Applets Europe. He serves as the Director of the American Institute of Wine and Food.

INTRODUCTION

The city of Charleston, South Carolina, has a long history covering its 3 00 years of existence. The Spanish were the first to arrive in South Carolina in 1514, followed by the French Huguenots who settled in 1562. The Spanish struggled with Native Americans and later, the English and abandoned their settlements, along with the French. The first permanent settlement in South Carolina occurred in 1670 when the English settled at Albemarle Point on the Ashley River. King Charles II granted the Carolina territories to eight English noblemen called the Lords Proprietors. The English successfully created a plantation economy similar to those in the West Indies and brought in Barbadians to work the plantations. African slaves were soon needed as a result of the plantation boom, and by 1708, the majority of the plantation population was African slaves. In 1719, the colonists revolted against proprietary rule and South Carolina became a royal province.

Charleston then began to fulfill its destiny to become a major port town for the new world and in the 1750s, the proliferation of rice and indigo led to wealth for farmers and merchants. As merchants from the city traded with Bermuda and the Caribbean Islands, the population during this period began to change as well. Immigrants from Germany, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales permeated the city. In addition, increased trade led to a further expansion of plantations, thereby increasing the African slave population as well. Often the African slaves that were brought together in America were from different tribal groups and could not understand each other's language. As a result, the Gullah language and culture emerged as a combination of West African religion, culture, and language. Additionally, Sephardic Jews—those of Spanish and Portuguese descent—began to migrate to Charleston, leading it to become one of the largest Sephardic Jewish communities in North America.

As the cultural diversity of the city's immigrants grew, ethnic societies formed throughout Charleston. In 1737, the French Huguenots created the South Carolina Society. Germans were brought together in the German Friendly Society in 1766. In addition, the Irish were represented by the Hibernian Society beginning in 1801.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Charleston was the cultural and economic center of the South. However, the city and state of South Carolina were devastated during the American Civil War. On April 12, 1861, the first shots of the war were fired in Charleston Harbor. Although Charleston was spared the destruction that many cities in the south endured, the plantation-based economy was displaced by the end of slavery. Over the next decades, Charleston would struggle to reestablish its prewar status. In an attempt to rejuvenate the city's pre-war status, Charleston hosted the 1901 South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition. The city hoped to become the primary port facilitating trade between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean. The exposition was not a success. The port, however, would eventually develop into a gateway for modern-day trade with the U.S.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Eating well, very well, is nothing new in the marshy, island-rimmed Lowcountry of South Carolina. The complex and amply documented culinary traditions of this elegant peninsular city and its hinterland stretch back into Colonial times.

In 1742, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, born in Antigua, educated in London, wrote from her family's plantation on Wappoo Creek: "The country abounds with wild fowl, venison, and fish. The pork exceeds any I ever tasted anywhere. The turkeys are extremely fine, especially the wild, and indeed all the poultry is exceeding good. Peaches, nectarines, and melons of all sorts are extremely fine and in profusion." Decades before the Revolution, she cultivated rice and figs, baked macaroons with West Indies coconut, and macerated peach kernels in wine, brandy, orange flower water, and sugar to produce the cordial ratafia.

Notable early cookbooks were compiled by her daughter, Harriott Pinckney Horry (1770), and another relative, Sarah Rutledge ("The Carolina Housewife," 1847). Miss Rutledge included recipes for shrimp, crabs, oysters and shad—all Charleston mainstays a century and a half later—as well as daubes and ragouts introduced to South Carolina by the French Protestants known as Huguenots. Nor did she omit savory dishes based on ingredients brought by slaves from West Africa, such as okra, sesame seeds (known here as benne, exactly as in Senegal), peanuts, and black-eyed field peas—the key ingredient, along with rice, in that quintessential Lowcountry treat Hoppin' John.

But the Civil War and its aftermath took a heavy toll, devastating the aristocratic families like the Pinckneys and the Rutledges (from both of which my wife, Betsey, descends) and fastening a straitjacket of poverty on the Lowcountry that stayed in place for almost a hundred years.

These days Charleston is again a boom town, with soaring real estate prices and growing suburbs like Mount Pleasant, which is linked to the city by a spectacular $650 million suspension bridge, opened in 2005. Packed with restaurants old and new, the area has become one of the South's important culinary capitals—a worthy rival, if on a smaller scale, for New Orleans, at a time when many of that city's eating places are struggling to regain their footing after the hurricanes of 2005.

To mark its arrival in the gastronomic big time, Charleston staged its first Food and Wine Festival early in March, drawing more than 5,000 people over three days. Chefs and other food experts came from across the South to size up the situation, and many of them were impressed.

"The seeds have been here for a long time," said John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, "and now they're sprouting, at the most opportune moment." Frank Stitt, the chef and owner of the heralded Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Ala., agreed that "Charleston is poised to take its place alongside New Orleans, and the process won't take long."

Unlike New Orleans, Charleston was slow to develop a restaurant culture, and the best cooking was long confined to private kitchens. As late as 1958, when I first visited the city, in search of architectural rather than epicurean thrills, it had only one significant restaurant, Perdita's, which specialized in she-crab soup, made with the orange roe of the female of the species. Not incidentally, the definitive sherry-laced version of that soup is said to have been perfected early in the twentieth century by William Deas, butler to a local grande dame named Blanche Rhett, who produced a cookbook in the 30's.

Betsey can remember street vendors calling out "Swimpee! Swimpee!" when she was a young girl. They have disappeared, along with most of the sweet, tiny creek shrimp that they sold and the habit in many households of eating shrimp and grits for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, sometimes in the same day. Still, that dish, usually made with larger if still succulent bay and ocean shrimp, has become the emblem of Charleston restaurant cooking in recent times, as ubiquitous as pizza in Naples.

Today, though, a new sophistication is sweeping across the city and its suburbs as chefs with fresh ideas arrive from places like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Houston, eager to use local ingredients in new ways shaped by their own experience.

As the newcomers have poured in, some of the old masters have decamped—first Louis Osteen took his rich duck and quail specialties, his oyster stews and cobblers, to Pawleys Island, almost two hours up the coast, while more recently Michael Kramer, the Californian who put McCrady's on the culinary map, headed north to Chicago, and Rose Durden abdicated her seemingly permanent post in the kitchen of Carolina's.

Many of the town's classicists continue to turn out their classics, of course. The food-mad pilgrim can still revel in Robert Carter's moist, towering seven-layer coconut cake at the Peninsula Grill and Bob Waggoner's authentic, brightly spiced Frogmore Stew (a Lowcountry witch's brew that includes shrimp, crab, corn and sausage) at the Charleston Grill. And night after night at the cozy little Hominy Grill, Robert Stehling sends out carefully handmade versions of a myriad of regional delicacies, like okra and shrimp beignets, shad roe (perfectly sautéed and prettily poised on a heap of stone-ground grits) and buttermilk pie, which beats a buttermilk sky any old day.

There is much to like about Fig, Mike Lata's pared-down dining room on Meeting Street, Charleston's main stem. Things like the mustardy deviled eggs served while you read the menu, for example, and a warm salad of shrimp, pancetta, radicchio, and cherry tomatoes, and a wine list filled with fairly priced, seldom-encountered gems such as Brick House Oregon pinot noir, made by my friend Doug Tunnell, and the matchless Armagnacs of Francis Darroze.

Mr. Lata, a thirty-three-year-old New Englander who came to Charleston by way of New Orleans and Atlanta, turns out a superb hanger steak with caramelized shallots and an old-fashioned bordelaise sauce, and a paprika-infused Portuguese seafood stew. His luscious pudding made with Carolina Gold Rice puts other local versions to shame.

But Fig's strongest suit is vegetables—appropriate enough in a city and a region where the three- or four-vegetable plate lunch remains a treasured tradition.

An adherent of the Slow Food movement, Mr. Lata knows when to gild and when not to. He dresses a billowing bowlful of tender pale green Bibb lettuce, grown on nearby Wadmalaw Island by Dan Kennerty, with freckles of dark green herbs and a sherry vinaigrette, nothing more. His roasted beets are sweet simplicity, too. But he transforms the seasonal produce of Celeste Albers, turning hardy winter chard into a voluptuous gratin and pairing pan-roasted cauliflower with mustard butter. Only the turmeric-flavored cauliflower dishes in India excited me quite as much.

"The food Celeste brings me is so perfect that you're frustrated the rest of the year when you have to make do with the ordinary stuff," Mr. Lata said, and he frets that the proliferation of golf courses, gated residential communities, and shopping centers here is squeezing farmers out, narrowing the range of products available to chefs….

A bit farther out of town, on Daniel Island, which once belonged to the Guggenheim family, Ken Vedrinski has given the area perhaps its most cosmopolitan restaurant, Sienna, a stylish, polished wood and stainless steel room with an open kitchen. Born in Ohio into a Polish-American family, he was largely raised by an Italian-American grandmother who proved to be his primary culinary influence.

Mr. Vedrinski likes bold flavors that "pop off the plate," he told me, and that showed in the array of Italian-style raw fish—crudo—that he served to a group of us, including Mickey Bakst, a veteran of the Michigan restaurant wars, who as maître d'hôtel has breathed animation into the Charleston Grill at Charleston Place, a rather sterile space that once epitomized the forbidding feel of hotel dining rooms.

The crudo at Sienna was every bit the equal of its celebrated counterpart, David Pasternak's at Esca in Manhattan, utilizing fish from near and far: local flounder, grouper, and oysters, tuna from the Northeast, ivory king salmon from the Northwest. Each got its own topping: olive oil for some, citrus juices for others, balsamic vinegar, even highly perfumed moscato vinaigrette.

Adapting a technique from Siggi Hall, Iceland's leading chef, Mr. Vedrinski bonds a ciabatta crust to a salmon scallop, a substitute for the crisp skin that he said "most Americans just won't eat," and serves it with a bracing cold salad of tomatoes, capers, garlic, and onions. He serves the classic Lowcountry combination of pork and shellfish in the form of intensely piggy guanciale, made from hog jowls, and lightly cooked shrimp over noodles hand-cut with a chitarra, a guitar-shaped tool.

We sampled all that, and two more irresistible plates—tiny veal meatballs, made to Grandma Volpe's recipe with impossibly ethereal gnocchi, and an unctuous rice pudding gelato made by Shun Li, the youthful Chinese-American pastry chef—before waddling out to our car, happily sated. Sienna's remarkably fastidious, decidedly modern Italian cooking could stand muster in New York, or in Milan for that matter.

Some people argue that Charleston lacks the lovable holes-in-the-wall that underpin the more ambitious restaurants in great food towns, places like the bouchons of Lyon, say, or the street-food stalls of Singapore. To a degree that's true, especially downtown. As much of the local food gossip these days centers on who serves the best beef—the Oak Steakhouse, Grill 225 or Mo Sussman's, the three main combatants in the city's red-hot steak skirmishes—as on who turns out the best shrimp and grits.

But move away from the center, to outlying areas where commercial pressures are not so intense, and you find plenty of joints where the old verities are served.

Take oysters. Charleston loves 'em, especially the uncultivated beauties, "meaty, juicy, salty," that John Martin Taylor, the Lowcountry food maven, gushes about, "continually washed by the incredible flow of our eight-foot tide," then plucked from the mud of the salt marshes and "garnished only by the glint of the January sun."

All through the colder months, oysters in vast quantities are cooked over raging fires and consumed at outdoors open-them-yourself oyster roasts, accompanied by heroic quantities of beer. Much the same experience can be had all year, in less raucous surroundings, at Bowens Island Restaurant, a humble cinder-block place on James Island, south of Charleston, where clusters of oysters from the Ashley River are steamed under wet burlap on a sizzling metal plate, then shoveled unceremoniously onto your table. Add saltines, hot sauce, maybe a squirt of lemon to replace that "glint of the January sun," and the requisite beer.

A ramshackle roadside place called See Wee, on Highway 17 leading north toward Myrtle Beach, is blessed with virtuoso practitioners of another old Lowcountry art, frying. Frying oysters, frying pickles, and delicately frying green tomatoes—the best of my seventy-one years, cut thin, dusted with corn flour and plunged into the hot fat for just a few moments, served up crisp and golden with a mild horseradish sauce. But most of all, frying shrimp, as well as any Tokyo tempura master, without a scintilla of heaviness or a smidgen of grease to mar the love affair 'twixt crustacean and palate.

As is always the case, freshness is the key here. Shrimp start deteriorating the minute they leave the water, so you eat them best close to the sea. The See Wee sign promises that—"Local Shrimp," it says, "God Bless the USA"—and at the same time suggests an unhappy reality. Carolina shrimpers, like Maryland crabbers, are menaced by low-cost foreign competition.

The restaurant's unusual name? It commemorates a small, ill-starred Indian tribe who took to their canoes in the seventeenth century, hoping to cross the Atlantic to trade deerskins with the king of England. Most quickly drowned; the rest were captured and sold into slavery and death in the Caribbean.

Closer to town, on the same stretch of Highway 17, stands an unpretentious little monument to the Gullah people, as the African-Americans who inhabited the coastal islands are known, and their culinary culture. Gullah Cuisine, it is called, and it is the place to get over your allergy to that mucilaginous vegetable the okra pod. Charlotte Jenkins, sixty-three, the kindly, soft-spoken proprietor, cured me in ten minutes flat with her smoky, robust shrimp-and-andouille gumbo, thickened with okra (and not, like most Louisiana gumbos, with roux or filé); her deep-fried okra; and her distinctive yellow rice with crisp, vividly green okra. Mrs. Jenkins's sweet braised cabbage, her extra-cheesy macaroni and her state-of-the-art fried chicken were all richly worth the trip out from town as well.

The happy, appreciative crowd at Saturday lunch was as heterogeneous as you could imagine: black, white and Hispanic, working class and middle class, local and Yankee, young and old. Parked outside were a Lexus, a Mercedes, a Harley, several pickups and a lot of battered third-hand jalopies. This, I said to my wife, was the South we fantasized about but almost never found in the days when I traipsed around the region in the 1960's, covering Martin Luther King.

SIGNIFICANCE

In a 2005 census of Charleston, the city population was found to be approximately 116,000 people. Of that, sixty-three percent of the population is white, and thirty-four percent of the population is black or African-American. One percent of the population is either Asian-American or of Hispanic ancestry. The remaining population is Native American or Pacific Islander.

Charleston's cultural makeup is based on the intermingling of ethnicities available in the city and has emerged as a fusion of the elite and the working class. The first settlers to Charleston began the cultural phenomenon by bringing with them transplants from the Caribbean and from Africa. While these slaves worked their plantations, their children were schooled in the aristocratic traditions in Europe. The American Civil War ended the plantation economy but did not end the high versus low country reality of Charleston's landscape.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

McInnis, Maurie D. The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Web sites

National Park Service's Park Register. "Charleston—community history." 〈http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/Charleston/intro.htm〉 (accessed June 15, 2006).

South Caroline State Government. "A Brief History of South Carolina." 〈http://www.state.sc.us/scdah/history.htm〉 (accessed June 15, 2006).