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- Charleston Preserved
- Lowcountry Cuisine
Colonial settlers to Charles Towne found maritime forests, winding rivers, and vast marshes along a flat coastal plain, which came to be called the Lowcountry. This expansive backyard provided a cornucopia of sustenance -- seafood, game, and produce -- and the recipes French and English settlers brought from their homeland were altered to match the ingredients found here. After slaves were brought in from the West Indies and West Africa to work the rice fields, the Gullah language -- a rollicking creole of English with African words and accents -- and culture developed. Because blacks and whites were in such close proximity (slaves outnumbered whites for generations), the two groups' languages, accents, and cuisines melded. The mix of continental recipes and African flavors, made by using the harvest of the region, became known as Lowcountry cooking.
Rice, rice, and more rice is ever-present in Lowcountry dishes, including pilau, also spelled purlieu (both pronounced pur-low), which is a pilaf -- rice cooked in meat or vegetable broth. Salty-sweet shrimp and grits is on menus of every price category in Charleston. You can buy creamy she-crab soup in restaurants and stores. Other essential dishes are Hoppin' John (rice and beans), and Frogmore Stew (with shrimp, sausage, and corn). Okra, eggplant, hominy (cooked grits), tomatoes, butterbeans, benne seeds, ham, shrimp, fish, and game are all part of the regional cuisine. Southern favorites like fried green tomatoes, fried fish and oysters, bacon-wrapped shad roe, and stuffed quail are popular here, too. But Charleston cuisine is not all about things past; true to the spirit of Lowcountry cooking, town chefs continue to innovate and create using the local harvest of farm-fresh heirloom vegetables and seafood caught daily just offshore.
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