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Our forebears prized these tiny shell- 
fish. Alan Davidson, in North Atlantic 
Seafood, reminds us that George Wash- 
ington loved them so well that P. os- 
treum was almost renamed the Wash- 
ington crab. The first president often 
saw them served floating on top of an 
oyster stew. And in palmier days, 
Americans frequently ate oyster crabs 
sauteed or deep-fried, with or without 
oysters. Davidson also mentions two 
recipes from a Philadelphia cookbook 
published in 1901: an omelet contain- 
ing twenty-five to forty oyster crabs 
and a “real extravaganza” called Cano- 
py a la Lorenzo, which consisted of a 
bell-shaped crouton stuffed with fifty 
oyster crabs, one-fourth of a truffle, 
crab meat, chicken meat, and cream, all 
dusted with bread crumbs. 
I doubt that anyone in the South 
Carolina Low Country still serves oys- 
ter crab as a separate dish, but the culi- 
nary past persists at old homes like 
Tara because the memory of how to 
live off local products persists. And the 
old cypress swamps still produce most 
of the old-time foods, including a yel- 
low-bellied turtle called terrapin or 
cooter (see recipe). Certain foods com- 
mon all over the South — Jerusalem ar- 
tichoke, mustard pickle, pickled okra — 
are widely available in Charleston su- 
permarkets. At the gourmet shop in 
the shopping arcade in Charleston’s 
boutique-filled former slave market, 
you can buy folkloric, if foxy, wine fer- 
mented from the juice of the scupper- 
nong grape. 
Meat counters routinely sell shreds 
of bacon for rendering. And the local 
predilection for rice has more than sur- 
vived the demise of South Carolina’s 
own rice production. Local cookbooks 
are filled with recipes for pilaus: elabo- 
rate risottolike dishes garnished with 
okra, chicken, or shrimp. The prevail- 
ing local pronunciation of pilau, no 
doubt a Gullah adaptation, sounds like 
“perloo.” 
So Low Country cooking traditions 
are not all shriveling up in the face of 
competition from the master culture. 
But culinary tradition in and around 
Charleston can only be as vigorous as 
the people who cook it. And eat it. 
The ideal mode of transmission of 
traditional food knowledge is from an 
expert cook to an apprentice living in 
the same household, under culturally 
and agriculturally stable conditions. 
This perfect set of circumstances ob- 
tained in the South in general, and on 
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