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A Treasured Folk Staple

© Virginia Marin

South Carolina was founded by King Charles II in 1663. It was a gift to the eight Lords Proprietor for the good deeds they had done for their king. The colony generally had nice weather with short, mild, winters and long, hot, summers which gave farmers a long growing season. Notwithstanding the threat of maleria and yellow fever from coastal mosquitoes, its Low Country boasted a superior economy from cotton, indigo and rice.

Rice. Sometimes called white gold, rice is grown in one hundred countries and on every continent except Antarctica. Asia is the world's leading rice-producing region, supplying the needs of their people yet having copious leftovers to trade with other countries.

Rice plants could have come into colonial South Carolina via European immigration, but more to fact is that they were introduced by Africans who were brought to the colony on Dutch slave-trade ships. After all, it was they who brought to us okra and sweet potatoes, so why not rice?

The early rice culture of the colonial South Carolina Low Country represented a lucrative and poetic period in our history, with rice planters living in a world of Mint Julips, gentlemanly grandeur and perfect manners.

From the beginning, rice has been a dietary staple. When George Washington visited Charleston in 1791, he dined on rice dishes he had never before imagined, and reportedly enjoyed all of them.

There were two important meals of the day in eighteenth-century Charleston--breakfast and three o'clock dinner. Breakfast always included grits with butter, eggs, bacon leftover cold meat or shrimp, and sliced tomatoes. It also included left-over rice. It was often fried with beaten eggs, similar to what we now know as Chinese fried rice.

Dinner at three o'clock was due to the daily schedule of plantation life as well as to the area's semitropical climate. Plantations had two kitchens--a summer kitchen and a winter kitchen. Which ever kitchen was in use, rice was on every dinner menu and if recipes were used at all, they came from the best-known Charleston recipe book, The Carolina Housewife by Sarah Rutledge, the daughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Sarah, born in 1782, was taken to England in 1792 for her education. When she returned to America, she brought home many French, Spanish and English recipes, all of which featured rice. She also included many plain cooked dishes such as oyster soup and shrimp pie featuring rice as well as several different rice breads.