CRESCENT Things: James Beard Award Winner Ted Lee (Part 3)

SHARING CULTURE

You learn a lot by serving people your food and seeing responses.  I served Huguenot Torte which is like a classic Charleston dessert.  Really easy like egg whites, apples and sugar.  Bake it and I served this food editor who was the food editor for the New York Times Magazine. I have never seen her eat like she at that Huguenot Torte.  She was like scraping her plate, she could not get enough of the stuff.  And it’s like, cool.  That’s like, we love Huguenot Torte and all, but to see what connects.  And she ended up writing a story or having one of her writers write a story getting into the history of it.  It’s something that’s made a lot in Charleston in the tea rooms.  You know, there are all these tea rooms that have opened in Charleston in the church parish halls and they serve old school, South of Broad family recipes.  There is so much to discover.

ANOTHER GREAT THING ABOUT SOUTHERN FOOD

Another great thing about Southern food is it’ll never be dated. There is always something you haven’t heard about.  Somebody who is doing amazing work.  I don’t think I’d really reacted as deeply with South Carolina strawberry growing history as I did this year.  I just happened to be introduced to some strawberry growers.  It’s such an early crop, and it’s such a great group.  And it’s been known since the 1800s.  There is this really cool guy who used to write about it, David Shields at the University of South Carolina.  He’s a professor of American Studies and he’s doing a lot of research into what was grown in the South Carolina like the history of growing in South Carolina.  With a special focus on the time when farmers were experimenting because they had just come over from wherever they came from and didn’t know what would grow in South Carolina.

Very trial and error, experimental, innovative.  What he does is study the letters farmers were writing to each other like saying “This is what I was growing here and was all right.  This didn’t grow so well.”  He can really geek out on what was grown in South Carolina.  There’s not anyone who does as much as he does on history on agriculture in South Carolina.  The changes that are happening now in farming.

There’s a farmer who’s a fourth generation who turned all his field organic 6 years ago.  He’s completely diversified.  He was growing mostly tomatoes.  Johns Island in the 80s, everyone was trying to get the fast food tomato dollar, but that bottomed out.  In the 50s, it was the potato and everyone started growing potatoes and the market bottomed out.  The great thing about food culture, it is always changing.

EXPECTING BETTER FROM WHAT WE EAT

It doesn’t change over night.  It takes education.  People sort of reorient themselves and that’s why, you know, it just takes a lot until you realize you’re not going to be able to buy South Carolina produce every day of the week or every time of year, but if you know the produce is South Carolina grown, it sort of psyches you up, you get into it.  This asparagus came in, the grapefruit came in, there is all this citrus.  Grapefruit was just going out, asparagus was just coming in.  You can tap into that rhythm.  I’m always thinking from a home cook’s perspective because that’s what I do.  The more you’re excited to cook, the more you’re going to do it because you can create every reason in the world to not cook.

CHANGING FOOD CULTURE ACROSS THE STATE

There’s this great chef, Charlotte Jenkins at Gullah Cuisine.  She grew up 6 miles north of Charleston in a Mount Pleasant community called Six Mile.  Her husband grew up on Yonges Island which is like 12 miles south of Charleston.  She wrote a cookbook, and her husband was talking about some of his food traditions on Yonges Island. She was talking about some of hers, and it was clear they were a little bit different and I talked to her daughter in Greenville at a book festival and I said, “It was so interesting to see the differences in where your mom grew up and where your dad’s parents lived.”  “Oh, my God, my dad’s family, they were some country people.  I’m telling you, we don’t cook like them.”  It was really interesting. Here are two elements of African-American culture who grew up 18 miles apart and yet it’s like, “No, we don’t cook like them.”  Just small little differences.  He was using seaweed for seasoning.  He told us about using seaweed to season a pot of shrimp when he was growing up.  To his daughter, this was just so country.

It’s just discovering how differently people cook from place to place.  People are always telling us “Oh, not another Southern cookbook.”  It’s like, “There are as many Southern cookbooks as there are Southern cooks.”

And I don’t mean just home cooks.  Some of the best treasures I see are family cookbooks.  Family recipes that have been handed down.  Who knows where they came from?

Stay Tuned for the Final Part Next Week. Read Part 1 HERE and Part 2 HERE.