large southern plantations in particu- 
lar, for generations. Even after Low 
Country plantations were sold to Yan- 
kees during the “Second Reconstruc- 
tion” following the 1929 stock market 
crash, kitchen staffs still carried on the 
practices of their mothers and grand- 
mothers. Only a generation ago, there 
were still blacks at Tara who had never 
set foot off the property. 
Today, the Tara cook is probably the 
last in her line. And even her cooking 
shows signs of a corrupting contact 
with the outside world and its con- 
venience foods. Her shrimp stew, for 
example, contains bottled ketchup, 
Texas Pete hot sauce, and Lea and Per- 
rins steak sauce. 
In Charleston, the same discontinu- 
ity is detectable even in places where 
tradition is most militantly affected. 
The superb plantation cook, left, 
probably the last in her line, made a 
shrimp stew for the oyster roast, above. 
For example, the local Junior League 
cookbook, Charleston Receipts, in- 
cludes old-fashioned cooking terminol- 
ogy, but a woman on the committee 
responsible for the book told me that 
she didn’t understand expressions such 
as “a blade of mace.” 
Actually, it is a good thing that the 
texts of these recipes, with their antique 
references to blades and pecks, have 
been scrupulously preserved. The hon- 
est scribes at the Charleston Junior 
League have reproduced on paper the 
practice of their mothers and their 
mothers’ cooks without so much as a 
phrase of modem revision. But how 
much longer the women in Charles- 
ton’s stately and well-kept homes will 
continue the New Year’s Day tradition 
of cooking Hoppin’ John, that hearty 
combination of rice and cowpeas (small 
legumes, also called field peas, resem- 
bling miniature black-eyed peas) is not 
clear. The dish, which gets its special 
flavor from rendered hog jowl or ba- 
con, dates back at least as far as 1841, 
when, according to oral tradition, it 
was hawked in the streets of Charleston 
by a crippled black who identified him- 
self as Hoppin’ John. 
This superb concoction will continue 
to stick to Low Country ribs as long as 
someone keeps on growing cowpeas, as 
long as there is a demand from those as- 
tute enough to crave this savory source 
of complete protein. Other aspects of 
South Carolina Low Country cooking 
are more fragile, more dependent on so- 
cial context and culinary skill. I have in 
mind the lunch that took place after 
Tara’s most recent oyster roast. 
Inevitably, some of the roasted oys- 
ters were left over. With consummate 
delicacy, the old cook breaded them 
lightly and fried them. They came out 
crisp, but still succulent and full of the 
smoky taste from the previous night’s 
outdoor feast. 
At Tara, they can still pull off this 
sort of culinary magic, but Tara is a 
special place, costly to maintain. It is 
also gravely menaced by a plan to re- 
dredge neighboring rivers, which will 
desalinate Low Country rice impound- 
ments and make them unfit for sup- 
porting the carefully nurtured plants 
that attract the game birds that cur- 
rently attract wealthy Yankee owners. 
The trend, in any case, is for such Low 
Country plantations to be donated to 
the public as nature conservancies. In 
one such 20,000-acre tract that I 
toured, the endangered red-cockaded 
woodpecker finds a safe niche, and a 
protected herd of deer feed on corn set 
out for them in troughs. The former 
black staff is long gone, their church 
abandoned. Nature stands still in this 
place, embalmed by vigorous and inge- 
nious human efforts to maintain a hunt- 
er’s paradise, but the human presence 
has dwindled to a small band of envi- 
ronmental biologists, gifted at provid- 
ing a welcome for the semipalmated 
plover, but not primarily concerned 
with the survival of shrimp stew. 
Raymond Sokolov, a writer with an 
interest in the history and preparation 
of food, is editor of Book Digest. 
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