High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [32]
Charleston may have had an African aspect, but it was the wealthiest city in British North America in the late eighteenth century, and nothing was too rich or outré for the wealthy. European taste prevailed in the city’s drawing rooms, which were painted in fantastic hues that mirrored the latest styles in London and Paris. Dinner tables of mirror-shined mahogany were laden with blue and white China trade tureens and French porcelain platters filled to overflowing with the bounty of the region. But on each table, there was always a bowl of the fluffy grain that created the colony’s wealth and an ornate silver spoon with which to serve it. No fine Lowcountry table was fully set without rice, for the good planters understood that rice was their gold. As one former slave put it, “Rice been money, them day and time.” Charleston’s planters knew that they owed their wealth to the agricultural know-how of their slaves. Beyond Charleston’s in-town houses on King and Church and Bay streets, where planters dined nightly on oyster soup and shrimp and venison from the land, out in the lagoons and inlets of the marshy coastal area known as the Lowcountry, out on the Sea Islands, African knowledge took over and reigned supreme—its power so all-pervasive that the masters depended on it.
South Carolina legend states that rice first arrived in the colony on a ship from Madagascar; the story may be apocryphal, as others suspect that the grain that created the colony’s enormous wealth was actually oryza glaberrima, from the West African area that is today known as Senegambia. No matter where its African origin, in South Carolina, rice was produced by a uniquely African system of agriculture. From the flooded alluvial plains where it was grown, to the system of dikes and sluiceways, to the system of assigning specific production-calibrated jobs (known as “tasks”) to workers, Africa shows its hand in Carolina’s rice cultivation. Africans whose names rang with the sonorities of Senegambia and the Grain Coast brought this knowledge with them in the holds of slave ships to the Charleston docks, where it was sold at a premium in the slave marts that flourished in the small area bounded by Broad, East Bay, Queen, and Meeting streets on the peninsula. There, Charlestonians vied for the pricey slaves from the Windward Coast whose heads and hands had the expertise that would grow and maintain the colony’s wealth.
In the kitchens, African hands also prevailed, and for generations, whether in plantation kitchens or in-town backyards, they turned the wooden spoons in the pots. Along with the roasts of Sir Loin and Baron Beef that turned up on grand tables, they began to feed the colonists a creolized diet that placed the emphasis on the rice that was the source of their wealth. Rich rice-based dishes like Hoppin’ John (the black-eyed peas and rice dish) and the emblematic Charleston red rice maintained strong culinary connections to Senegambia; there, the former is called thiébou niébé, and the latter is similar to Senegal’s national dish, thiébou dienn.
These and other rice dishes entered the Lowcountry culinary repertoire and made the transition smoothly from West Africa to slave cabin to Big House kitchen. This transition was aided in no small measure by the fact that many of the original settlers in the region boasted plantations in the Caribbean as well, and there they may have already become acclimatized to a more African palate, with its taste for the spicy and its use of rice and beans and okra and the like. Over time, the culinary omnivores that were the South Carolina plantocracy came to claim African-i nspired dishes like Hoppin’ John, red rice, and roux-less Charleston gumbo as their own.
If Charleston had a northern counterpart in style, it was Philadelphia. In the colonial period, Philadelphia was known for its