A Matter of Taste 
Planter’s Lunch 
A carpetbagger's kitchen tour of the New Old South 
by Raymond Sokolov 
North of Charleston, in that swampy 
paradise for waterfowl known as the 
South Carolina Low Country, is a 
9,000-acre quondam rice plantation I 
will call Tara. It began as a cypress 
swamp where Indians fished. Toward 
the end of the seventeenth century , Eu- 
ropean settlers discovered that rice 
would thrive in the murky waters that 
ran through the plantation to the At- 
lantic. Slaves who spoke Gullah, the 
West African-English patois, extirpat- 
ed the cypress and dug dikes for rice 
impoundments. The crop was so lucra- 
tive that it took two centuries before a 
combination of hurricanes, competi- 
tion from more economical rice fields 
in other states, and Reconstruction 
brought an end to Carolina riziculture. 
The coup de grace came in 1942, when 
hydroelectric damming let seawater 
flow inland, turning the Low Country 
into a brackish fen. 
By then, certain rich Yankees had 
bought control of many of the old es- 
tates. They converted the impound- 
ments into game preserves and man- 
aged the salty water so that it produced 
food for shootable birds. The only con- 
stant in this human-churned environ- 
ment was the black population. Some 
descendants of the slave communities 
remained, while rice mills and whole 
“streets” of slave cabins collapsed. 
One such black retainer was on hand, 
Descendants of slaves carry on the 
cooking traditions of South Carolina's 
Low Country. 
early in this century, when Tara’s new 
Yankee owner arrived unannounced, 
landing a private plane in a field. The 
black servant had never seen a plane be- 
fore, never heard of one, but he gath- 
ered his courage and walked forward to 
greet the young visitor from the sky. 
“Hello, Massa Jesus,” he said, “and 
how’s your Pa?” 
Today, that man’s grandson carries 
on the family tradition at Tara. He lives 
by the old and crumbling rice mill, and 
he speaks Gullah with his wife, who 
cooks plantation meals in the big house. 
Her fried chicken is a paradigm of the 
best in southern cooking. Her hot bis- 
cuits define delicacy in baking. When 
this dignified, taciturn old woman 
makes crab cakes, they are light and 
crisp and almost pure crab meat. 
Like other traditional Low Country 
cooks, she uses rendered pork fat from 
bacon or hog jowl, where most of us 
would use butter or oil. When she 
makes shrimp stew, she begins by fry- 
ing bacon in the pot. 
There is nothing more fundamental 
to a cuisine than the fat it uses. In his 
classic study of French regional cook- 
ing, The Food of France, Waverley 
Root divides France into three parts: 
the “domains” of butter, olive oil, and 
lard (meaning any kind of pork fat, as 
well as goose fat). 
In the Old South, salt-cured pork 
was the standard source of cooking fat, 
even in seafood dishes. Oysters were 
prepared this way, for example, in 
brown oyster stew with benne, or sesa- 
me seed (see recipe). Benne was intro- 
duced by slaves, who considered it a 
lucky plant. Modern versions of this 
Afro-American stew are done, not with 
cured “side meat” or jowl, but with 
more readily available bacon. 
Oysters continue to be a mainstay of 
Low Country seafood. At Tara, on spe- 
cial occasions, local gentry gather for 
an open-air oyster roast. This feast is 
similar to the New England clambake, 
but it is far simpler. Indeed, a Low 
Country oyster roast requires nothing 
except a fire, a grill, bushels of select 
McClellanville oysters from just down 
the coast, and burlap sacks. You dump 
the oysters on the fire, cover them with 
burlap, and as soon as they start to 
open, you shovel them onto a table cov- 
ered with paper. 
Guests are provided with one work 
glove, to protect the hand that holds the 
oyster, and an oyster knife, to cut the 
bivalve loose. I consumed several dozen 
juicy charcoal-roasted oysters one nip- 
py evening. As if this were not enough, 
the natural order of things in the Low 
Country supplies an extra bonus for the 
omnivorous diner at an oyster roast. 
Every so often, one of the oysters con- 
tains a small, pink soft-shelled crab 
Pinnotheres ostreum, called the pea 
or oyster crab, is a tiny creature that at- 
tains a maximum width of one and a 
half centimeters. At an early stage, it 
crawls inside an oyster and installs it- 
self for a lazy, commensal existence. 
Harmless to its host, the oyster crab 
merely uses the larger animal as an 
apartment. Male oyster crabs do mi- 
grate in search of a female residing in 
another oyster. But once the uninvited 
male visitor has copulated, he dies. 
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