I am using this book to launch a series of recipes that will be published on my blog page to allow to enjoy the coastal cuisine of Georgia and South Carolina. I will find items that allow your taste buds to visit and salivate our LowCountry cuisine.
Sallie Ann Robinson offers another fascinating look at the Gullah way of life in her second cookbook, Cooking the Gullah Way: Morning, Noon & Night (University of North Carolina Press, $22.50 hardcover).
Robinson grew up in a large family on Daufuskie Island, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. The Gullah is a group of blacks from the Sea Islands and Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia who preserved much of their African heritage in their language, beliefs and customs.
Author Pat Conroy immortalized Daufuskie Island in his book The Water Is Wide in 1974, and later in the movie Conrack, both of which chronicled a year that he spent on the island as a young teacher. Robinson was one of the children that Conroy taught, and that connection doubtlessly drew attention to Robinson’s first book, Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way, published by UNC Press in 2003.
Living off the land
The new book continues where the first left off, with more down-home Lowcountry Gullah recipes. Robinson, who lives in Savannah and works as a nursing assistant, also delves much more into the way of life she knew as a child.
She grew up poor on this isolated island. Her family didn’t have a telephone. Their house didn’t even have electricity until the late 1960s. Water was supplied by a pump in the yard.
The family also depended on the land for much of its food. Crab, shrimp and more came from the sea; chickens were raised in the yard. Vegetables were grown in a garden. Her father hunted for raccoon and other meat.
In the book, she talks about washing clothes in tubs on the porch and how they would freeze when they were hung up to dry in the winter.
She tells how she and her siblings spent much of their childhood working to help prepare food, keep up the house and take care of the animals. “For us it was not a way to get an allowance; it was a way of life and a means of survival,” she wrote.
Gullah culture, and recipes
One section that’s not in the first book concerns home remedies. Robinson explains that living on Daufuskie Island meant accepting and respecting nature, because of the relatively primitive existence compared with the rest of the United States. When she was a child, Robinson and her family didn’t have a television or radio to warn them of an impending storm. And it wasn’t easy to get a doctor in case of illness or injury.
She also tells of many superstitions that survived with this way of life. Rain shortly after a burial meant that the deceased’s “footprints were being washed from the earth.” Rain and sunshine at the same time meant that “the devil was beating his wife and she was crying.”
Superstitions, close ties to nature, poverty and isolation conspired to produce a belief in home remedies. Robinson talks of how her mother would go into the woods for just the right herb, piece of bark or root to treat a specific ailment.
After a strict admonition against careless use of home remedies, Robinson offers remedies for colds, ringworm, high-blood pressure and more.
For a cut from a rusty nail, the treatment is a penny and slice of fatback bacon tied on the cut. To clean wax from ears, her parents used feathers from a female chicken. (A rooster’s feathers, it was said, would make you crazy.) Hair from a horse’s mane or tail was used to cut off warts with minimal bleeding.
Though Robinson has included much more information on Gullah culture in this new book, its heart is still the recipes. This time they are sorted by mealtime: morning, noon and night.
Robinson says that despite being poor, she and her family “ate like kings and queens.”
“Hard work and good food went together; it was as if we had to do one to get the other.”
Even the breakfast dishes tend to be hearty in this book. Recipes include bacon-and-cheese grits, skillet-fried bread (just water, oil and self-rising flour), pancakes with fruit, fried fish with grits, and a string of muffins and preserves.
For lunch, Robinson includes a handful of recipes for sandwiches with fried shrimp, soft-shell crab, crabmeat, fried oysters and baked or broiled fish. Other noontime dishes include seafood gumbo, shrimp creole and black-eyed-pea soup.
The Night chapter begins with a selection of homemade wines, including persimmon and blackberry. The chapter also contains recipes for pork chops with corn-bread stuffing, Lowcountry seafood boil, boiled conch, and such desserts as sweet-potato pie and pecan crunch cookies.
Many of these recipes will be familiar to anyone knowledgeable about Lowcountry cooking. What makes them special are Robinson’s down-to-earth descriptions and her obvious love of the food.
To a certain extent, Cooking the Gullah Way is a historical record, because Daufuskie Island has changed since Conroy visited it in 1969 when Robinson was a young girl.
Robinson talks of the paved roads, golf courses, gated communities and the million-dollar homes that are there now. “But” she says, “none of these changes will ever erase the good times and close connections of the smaller community we once had.”
Recent Comments