Years again, on a night in Awendaw, South Carolina, a nine-year-old lady named Charlotte made dinner for her household. Charlotte’s mom had simply stepped out to are inclined to an emergency, and the kid took it upon herself to gentle the range and cook dinner up a meal of rice and fried liver, full with a wealthy, brown gravy produced from the fond left behind within the skillet. Now at age 81, the famend Gullah Geechee chef Charlotte Jenkins says, “I all the time watched my mom cook dinner and loved being together with her within the kitchen, so I figured it could be no downside for me to cook dinner as I’d seen her do.” And he or she was proper. When her mom referred to as to verify in, Charlotte’s brother answered the cellphone and let their mom know that Charlotte had not solely capably ready their dinner, however she’d finished very nicely—and the gravy was good.
From that early second, a spark was lit in chef Jenkins that couldn’t be extinguished. She held her brother’s opinion in excessive regard, and he inspired her to proceed cooking. In 1962, simply after graduating from highschool, she moved to New York Metropolis, becoming a member of different African Individuals within the Nice Migration, a time when many Black Southerners moved north and west in the hunt for a launch from the grips of the extremely oppressive Jim Crow South. She ultimately returned to South Carolina in 1973 to lift a household together with her late husband Frank, a fellow Lowcountry native, and in 1997, the 2 of them opened Gullah Delicacies in Mount Nice, a restaurant that served the Jenkins household’s genuine Gullah Geechee meals—purple rice, okra gumbo, shrimp and grits, and seafood casserole—for nearly twenty years.
Like Jenkins (in addition to my grandmother and most of my elders), I additionally had fond childhood reminiscences of cooking, consuming, and feeding my household. Regardless of rising up in Charleston, simply throughout the river from Mount Nice, I by no means had a chance to eat at Jenkins’ restaurant, which closed when she retired in 2014. In truth, I didn’t study her work till I started my very own journey as a chef, after I began wanting into the culinary historical past of my hometown. Alongside the way in which, I got here throughout a mess of Black ladies cooks who, identical to Jenkins, had largely been disregarded of conversations within the media round Southern cooking.
This previous March, on the annual Charleston Wine + Meals competition, I had the good pleasure of main a cooking class with Jenkins and her daughter Kesha, the place we taught our company learn how to cook dinner an ideal pot of rice, in addition to conch stew and wedding ceremony punch, two recipes from her seminal 2010 cookbook, Gullah Delicacies: By Land and By Sea. “The conch stew to me was all the time an genuine Gullah dish,” Jenkins tells me, “one thing that wasn’t even an on a regular basis factor for us as a result of conch was typically onerous to get. And again within the days once we acquired conch, it was thrilling to organize it. It’s on this odd shell, and it’s important to work to get the meat, and to me, the ultimate product is scrumptious.” The marriage punch was a recipe of Kesha’s, a refreshing, celebratory concoction of moonshine, recent sliced fruit, and Kool-Support that packed a strong punch (pun supposed). Jenkins saved a watchful eye on me as I prepped and cooked the stew alongside her. After working so a few years in skilled kitchens, I’m nice below strain, however no chef in any restaurant gave me the sensation that Jenkins gave me then—a glance that stated, “I belief you to make this, however I’m retaining my eye on you simply in case.”
Kesha, Jenkins, and I additionally mentioned the function that Gullah Geechee tradition performed in creating American delicacies and its roots within the African diaspora. When enslaved West Africans have been first introduced from their fertile rice-growing homeland to the low-lying barrier islands of South Carolina, they retained their tradition and neighborhood as a lot as they may. Many recognizable Southern American dishes, corresponding to collard greens, cornbread, and candy potato pie, have been developed throughout this time, and are emblematic of the Gullah tradition’s enduring affect.
Regardless of present for hundreds of years within the South Carolina Lowcountry, Gullah Geechee cooking remains to be thought-about a brand new idea to many, and Jenkins acknowledged that the buyers and revenue her restaurant required merely weren’t there when she wanted them. “I didn’t get that assist,” Jenkins tells me. “The assist I acquired was from my household, my financial savings, and our neighborhood—that’s what saved us going.” However whereas it was round, her Gullah Delicacies restaurant was instrumental in placing the area’s foodways on the map. “No one appeared to learn about Gullah meals then, or that Gullah Geechee individuals exist and have a method of cooking,” Jenkins says. “The restaurant woke individuals as much as that.”
Regardless of being retired, Jenkins continues to reply the decision she felt as a younger lady and hasn’t stopped cooking since; after a few years, she’s nonetheless mentoring younger cooks, cooking for household and pals, and catering personal occasions with Kesha at her aspect. At 2023’s Charleston Wine + Meals competition, a yr earlier than our cooking class collectively, Jenkins and different Gullah matriarchs from throughout the Lowcountry have been honored at a dinner ready by younger ladies cooks with ties to the local people. “I noticed all of the work I’d finished didn’t go in useless,” Jenkins says. “It means so much to me to show others about our delicacies and tradition,” she provides, “as a result of if I don’t share, it dies. However by sharing, I can maintain it alive.”
