The City That Rice Built

Dear Pros,

You've got Hunter here today, at home in Birmingham after a thrilling few days of work in Toronto, followed by a quick stop in Atlanta to meet one of our new Best New Chefs. After so many Delta terminals, I relish these quieter Saturday mornings back home and a return to my rituals of provisioning that include a trip to the farmers market, the butcher shop, and the wholesale flower market. There is dinner to cook and catching up to do around the table during the holiday weekend ahead.

Mine is a rice family. Our weeknight staples are jasmine or sushi rice, but when the occasion feels celebratory — like tonight, with family in town from New Jersey — I'll upgrade to Carolina Gold from Anson Mills, rinsing the starch off the rice until the water runs clear so each grain will fluff up and retain its individual character. Popping the lid off the rice cooker and inhaling the earthy, popcorn-y fragrance of the steamed rice has always been a ritual to savor, but it's even more so now that I know the origin story of this particular noble grain.

Last year, I visited the new International African American Museum on the waterfront in Charleston, which overlooks the harbor that once served as the portal for an estimated 40% of all enslaved people who were trafficked to these shores. As I learned at one of the museum's exhibits, plantation owners in the Lowcountry region didn't know how to grow rice, so West Africans who did were sought out, kidnapped, sold, and forced into labor. Their intellectual property, energy, and lives fueled an economy that turned Charleston into one of the wealthiest cities in the world and yielded the heritage grain we now know as Carolina Gold. These people's knowledge and creativity also gave rise to the canonical dishes of Gullah Geechee cuisine like Okra Purloo with Bacon and Red Rice, as George McCalman and Jeff Gordinier detail in their powerful feature "The City that Rice Built" in the new September issue of Food & Wine.

We sent McCalman and Gordinier down to Charleston earlier this year to talk with chefs, home cooks, family matriarchs, and farmers about rice. What they came back with is something different than we've ever published in these pages — part tragedy and part love story, about a complicated, beautiful place. We debuted the story a couple of weeks ago at Sheila Johnson's and Kwame Onwuachi's Family Reunion in Middleburg, Virginia. It's a magical event that celebrates Black excellence and diversity in the culinary industry and McCalman joined me on a panel conversation about the legacy of rice, alongside legendary restaurateur and author Alexander Smalls and the New Orleans chef Serigne Mbaye of Dakar Nola.

If the energy and conversation of that moment is any indication, then attendees will be in for a treat next month when we continue the conversation with McCalman, Gordinier, Smalls, and the Charleston chef and writer Amethyst Ganaway at a panel and a Sunday brunch at the new Food & Wine Classic in Charleston. Those are just two of the dozens of programs, cooking demonstrations, seminars, tastings, and parties we’re producing with Southern Living and Travel + Leisure to celebrate Charleston's vibrant foodways and culture. Some of the recipes from the story will be available there to taste. And as I've shared in this space before, you can purchase half price tickets to the inaugural festival by using this code during checkout: EDITCHSFW. (Should you want to steam a pot of Carolina Gold rice in your own kitchen, we include our most trusted mail-order sources at the bottom of the scroll here.)

I love Charleston and its people deeply. And what I've learned as a born-and-raised Southerner who has lived and cooked all over the country — and what was reinforced for me during the making of this story — is a truth that underpins the quote from William Faulkner that McCalman and Gordinier cite in their article: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past."

There's no reason to hide from our nation's past. Let's embrace and learn from it and be better to one another. And let's celebrate the legacies that nourish and sustain. No matter what part of the country we call home, we're all connected to Charleston.

Warmly,
Hunter