On the banks of Store Creek, winding across the middle of Edisto Island, South Carolina, three of Emily Meggett’s daughters gathered on a spring afternoon. Lavern, Marvette, and DeeDee had come to share dishes from their mother’s bestselling cookbook—fried chicken, cornbread, field peas, and coconut black walnut cake, to name a few—with a crowd bussed down from Charleston. Hymns would have made it a church supper, but this Lowcountry picnic still came close to a religious experience for those who had never tasted the home cooking of the Meggetts, a Gullah Geechee family whose venerated mother presided over a wood-fired stove for more than half a century. “We put pepper jelly on the table for everybody,” Lavern says. “My mom was such a hospitable person, and she instilled that in us. Food was a gift of love that my mom gave, so we keep that going in her memory and in her honor.”
Emily gained national recognition for championing the foodways of an undervalued culture shortly before she died, at 90 years old, in the modest house where she raised 10 children. As an older generation passes, inheriting these recipes—let alone the cast iron skillets and wooden spoons—requires commitment to a Southern culinary tradition with a complicated history. The Gullah Geechee are descendants of enslaved Africans who were first transported across the Atlantic in the late 17th century to the Carolina coast, where they were forced to grow and harvest rice in the harshest of environments. Some were also given the task of preparing daily meals for plantation households, and began to introduce techniques and seasonings rooted in their homelands, including Senegal, Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana. And it is a testament to these ancestors that the present generation is keeping that kitchen flame burning.
“It’s important to carry on the legacy of those who come before us and ensure that we are still telling those stories,” says Rhonda Mitchell of The Drizzled Pear. “My grandmother is 98, and if you listen to her, she speaks Gullah Geechee. I have memories of sitting on her floor, eating stewed chicken and rice on a paper plate. But rice built Charleston on the backs of our ancestors; I’m a descendant of those slaves. It’s an honor to be able to take those ingredients from a troubled history—red peas, rice, okra, collards—and share that heritage.” Mitchell’s Sea Island red pea and collard greens fritter, topped with smoky tomato jam, is a history lesson in one bite. “Some people think collards are grandma food, but they’re not. I’ve become infatuated with the greens from Joseph Fields Farm [on Johns Island].” When she started her catering company, Mitchell took inspiration from the city’s first Black chefs and caterers, citing Sally Seymour and Nat Fuller, who found paths to freedom through the kitchen door.
Other women chefs raised on the peninsula with that same core social value include Workmen’s Cafe owner Angie Bellinger, who serves sweet potato casserole, shrimp and crab bisque, and lima beans with pig tails and smoked neck bones at her meat-and-three on James Island. (She credits her mother with the way she cooks lima beans.) Amethyst Ganaway has generously shared her recipe for brown oyster stew and often cites her granny as inspiration. Janae “Tater” Coaxum, whose menu at Tater’s Sea & Soul in North Charleston does justice to old-school okra purloo and smoked turkey wings, also offers spectacular whole fried blue crabs coated in a shattering crust. It’s her take on the “beautiful swimmer” that has been a staple of Gullah Geechee recipes, such as crab rice and she-crab soup, for centuries.
Former bartender Tia Clark found her calling as an environmental advocate and coastal protector after an elder taught her to cast net in the tidal marshes. Inspired by the Lowcountry staple deviled crab, in which richly spiced crabmeat is baked with breadcrumbs (and often stuffed inside a crab shell), Clark’s deviled crab balls are a closely held family secret—but she’ll teach you how to catch your own beautiful swimmer on one of her expeditions.
And then there’s Charleston newcomer Bintou N’Daw of Bintü Atelier. While not Gullah herself (she was born in Senegal and partly raised in France), her dishes express profound ties to West Africa. “To understand the story of [Charleston], you have to be able to show the connection with the grits and the fufu,” she says. N’Daw only learned about Gullah Geechee culture after she moved to South Carolina, but soon realized that many Gullah recipes overlapped with the ones she learned from her family: red rice and jollof; peanut stew and mafé; gumbo and thieboudienne.
“It’s time to tell the story from different eyes, the eyes of an African,” she insists. “To link African American and the Africa that I know, to honor those dishes, yucca, yams, beans, and fresh fish.” Aside from a few spices, she says, “I can find everything, exactly the same things here.” N’Daw’s recipe for mafé yapp contains dawadawa, also known as iru or the African locust bean. Stirred into pots across West Africa, the spice has a complex flavor that lands somewhere between chocolate and miso. These fermented seeds also give bold character to N’Daw’s peanutty lamb stew. She serves it over delicate Carolina Gold middlins, or broken rice. “Casamance is where the rice is grown in Senegal, and there is an old rule that you have to pay the farmer to grow and care for it. You can’t buy it outright. That way nobody can come and say ‘I’m going to buy all the rice.’ So everyone has the food.” She thinks passing along this tradition is the biggest gift you can get.
Mitchell agrees. “This cooking is inherited. And it’s instinctive. My mother and grandmother knew how to make things just by touch, taste, smell, look. I’ve never seen a measuring cup in their hands.” When asked who she’s holding hands with and passing along knowledge to, the first person that comes to Mitchell’s mind is her 16-year-old daughter. “I’m doing my best to teach her about hospitality—the door is always open, offering a beverage—it’s not about the food part for her, but she has the spirit of entertaining.”
Recipes
Red Pea and Collard Fritters With Smoky Tomato Jam
Lamb Mafé
The post The Women Carrying the Torch of Gullah Geechee Cuisine appeared first on Saveur.
