Okra tomato fritters recipe offered in Taste the South cookbook

In the Field

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Part food history, part cookbook, and part compendium of somewhat-bizarre bygone recipes, Taste the State is a deep dive into South Carolina’s foodways, complete with dozens of recipes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a few contemporary versions sprinkled throughout. While some may not inspire you to revive centuries-old traditions, they provide an unparalleled understanding of the state’s food history and how some of the dishes we enjoy today have evolved with the times.

For example, a section on pilau—a risotto-like dish also known as pilaf, pillau, perlo, perloo, and purlieu—includes recipes for versions you’d often see on menus around Charleston today, studded with chicken or crab, and classic variations like hoppin’ john. But it also includes options for dove pilau and fish kedgeree (made with “one-half box of shredded codfish”). Apparently, squirrel pilau was also a common occurrence according to historical records, though no recipes have survived.

With the book coming out this October, we sat down with its food historian authors, Culinary Institute of Charleston instructor Kevin Mitchell and University of South Carolina professor David S. Shields, to hear more about this unique project.

Tell us a little about what brought you two together for this project.

David Shields [DS]: Kevin and I have collaborated on lots of projects in the past and we both have scholarly food interests. I got a query from
USC Press, a new director had come in and asked if I wanted to do an introduction to South Carolina food, going in-depth on ten ingredients or so. I didn’t want to do that. If we were going to do South Carolina food, I wanted to do it with someone who is as passionate about history as me and knows more about the actual cooking of things. There was only one person who came to the top of the Rolodex with that thought in mind.

Kevin Mitchell [KM]: We write about food in the same way but we write from very different perspectives and points of view—him a true scholar-historian, me a budding scholar-historian from a chef’s point of view. When we started on this path, initial conversations were about
trying to decide what dishes, what ingredients. We had an extensive list, far more than what made the book. Through going back and forth, we initially had over one hundred things. Looking at how many photos they wanted included, we whittled it down to around eighty-six.

DS: We actually wrote one hundred, but complete ones were left on the cutting room floor.

Image of Mitchell Kevin, coauthor of Taste the South — Image courtesy of Elizabeth Ervin

How did you decide where to make those cuts?

KM: We had to go back and see what things were really true to South Carolina. David posted something on Facebook to get a little public opinion on what we should write about and listed things we were including and we heard from people who asked about pimento cheese or fried chicken. We had to explain that we weren’t doing something broad, things had to be tied to South Carolina.

DS: Pimento cheese depends on the “perfection pimento” from Griffon, Georgia, and it’s a huge industry in Georgia. It’s more appropriate for a book like this on Georgia. South Carolina did invent the pimento cheeseburger so we had to determine if that was so resonant a dish that it had to be included or not. In the end, we decided it didn’t.

This book toes the line between cookbook and a scholarly food history. What led you to shape it in that way?

KM: Our difference in writing style made for a really cool effect, we really feed off one another and counterbalance one another. David would say things like “Kevin, yes you’re a chef but you’re also a scholar and your writing should represent that.” Then I tampered David down in not making entries overly scholarly—we wanted people to definitely get some history but also make the book fun and allow for people to maybe try these recipes if they so choose. We wanted to really think about our audience and with these books, the audience could go either way—scholarly or a cookbook. Yes it is a book that has recipes from the 1700s and 1800s and some contemporary recipes by myself or some we were able to reprint from people, like the Lee brothers’ boiled peanuts and Michael Twitty’s soup. Our writing styles and approach of looking a history and food made us the right duo to write about this great food that comes from our great state.

DS: My initial research into Southern food was finding extinct but one-time essential ingredients so traditional dishes could be brought back and their splendor restored. What’s interesting about that is that a lot of food history is done through the cookbook. It’s either the labor history of who does the food or what the recipes are and what they mean.

Image of David Shields, coauthor of Taste the South — Imagers courtesy of James Kiblel

One of the great aspects of this book is that it goes beyond the classics to encompass more of the state’s foodways and historical recipes. Were there recipes that stand out as emblematic of the state’s foodways, even if they’re lesser known?

DS: What really interests me is that South Carolina had different signature foods over different periods. In the 1890s the greatest dish was roasted rice birds—rice birds are now an endangered species. We’re shrimp-centric, but the first ever soft-shell crab farm in the South was created by an African-American fishmonger at a Charleston fish market; softies are part of the very fabric of Lowcountry food. Tannia, the root of the elephant ear, was so central to Charleston that in the nineteenth century, your neighbor would bring a bag of tannias to you when you moved to the neighborhood.

KM: There were things I learned that I had no clue they had a connection to South Carolina. When David first gave me the list, the first thing was asparagus. It didn’t compute for me until reading about the entry David wrote and understanding that originally South Carolina was king
for asparagus and it was shipped to the North. There are things we associate of being from somewhere else but they have roots here.