A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [35]
Although 12-ounce shaker bottles of Texas Pete Hot Sauce are tabletop staples across the South, it is only one of the sauces the T. W. Garner Food Company produces today. Others include Buffalo wing sauce, honey mustard, seafood cocktail sauce, chili sauce, a meaty chili starter called Chili No Beans, and, of course, the barbecue sauce that set a teenager on the road to riches more than seventy-five years ago.
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SHE-CRAB SOUP
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
Apparently this Charleston classic was created between 1908 and 1912. I find no mention of it in early South Carolina cookbooks: A Colonial Plantation Cookbook: The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry (1770); Sarah Rutledge’s Carolina Housewife (1847); or Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book (1872). Nor does it appear in Mrs. Samuel G. Stoney’s Carolina Rice Cook Book (1901), even though the original She-Crab Soup is said to have been thickened with rice. “Judging from the pasty versions served in most restaurants you would think its major ingredient is flour,” writes Lowcountry culinary sleuth John Martin Taylor in Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking. Taylor (a.k.a. Hoppin’ John) believes that She-Crab soup descends from the rice-thickened Partan Bree, a crab soup popular in Scotland. Still, the She-Crab Soup in Blanche S. Rhett’s Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking (1930), created by her butler William Deas (“one of the best cooks in the world”) and believed to be the original, contains no rice. It is thickened with a small amount of flour. Rhett’s husband, R. Goodwyn Rhett, was the mayor of Charleston soon after the turn of the twentieth century and during his term, President William Howard Taft visited the Rhetts’ Broad Street home several times (it is now the John Rutledge House Inn). One evening, the Rhetts asked Deas to dress up his crab soup; he did, adding the orange roe to enrich the color and flavor. From that evening onward, She-Crab Soup has been “quintessentially Charleston.” Charlestonians consider she-crabs sweeter and finer in every way. Taylor maintains that in the Lowcountry it is not illegal to take “sooks” (mated she-crabs) on hand-lines or to dip them up as long as they are at least five inches across the back. She-Crab Soup is a winter delicacy here because that’s when the females are full of roe. Unfortunately, most of us living beyond the Lowcountry aren’t likely to find she-crabs or live crabs, period, in the dead of winter and must settle for lump or backfin—scarcely a hardship. Needless to add, there are many versions of She-Crab Soup, three alone in that landmark Junior League cookbook, Charleston Receipts (1950). The recipe that follows is one that I’ve evolved over time—ever since I first tasted this delicacy in a Charleston restaurant. I now order She-Crab Soup whenever I visit Charleston, Beaufort, Pawleys Island, or any other Lowcountry locale.
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DUNCAN HINES (1880–1959)
He was a traveling salesman, Kentucky-born, endlessly on the road, and forced to grab meals wherever he could. Hines found some of those meals so superb that in 1935 he and his wife, Florence, compiled a list of 167 favorite restaurants and gave it to friends and colleagues at Christmas along with this note:
“I am passing this information on to you, hoping that it may yield enjoyment and delectation, should you find yourself in the vicinity of one of these ‘harbors of refreshment’ as you travel hither and yon.”
A year later, Hines published Adventures in Good Eating: A Guide to the Best Restaurants along America’s Highways, a brisk seller because car-loving Americans welcomed this voice of experience. Soon RECOMMENDED BY DUNCAN HINES signs appeared in the top-rated restaurants, and travelers sought them