CHARLESTON, S.C. - Charleston is just full of ghosts. Everybody you meet in this historic, ethereally beautiful South Carolina seaport seems to have a Confederate soldier stomping around the house at night or a displaced plantation owner (killed by a pirate, shot in a duel) loitering in the garden under a crape myrtle tree.
After all, history left a bit of unresolved business for Charleston's aristocratic ancestors, who watched the Confederacy's 33-hour bombardment of Fort Sumter from their porches and rooftops back in 1861, as if it were a tragic opera. When the Yankees retreated, the townsfolk assumed their troubles were over. But the Civil War had just begun, of course.
Today, Charleston is also full of tourists, and everybody you meet has had one of them, too, rattling his or her ornate, wrought-iron gate, or peering through the windows from a horse-drawn carriage.
And much like the Civil War, the Charlestonians brought the invasion on themselves. Oh, if only they hadn't launched that campaign 30 years ago advertising themselves as the country's "best-kept secret," with their gloriously livable climate and exquisite architectural treasures - an encyclopedic array of preserved and protected Colonial, Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival and Victorian buildings - and gardens that essentially reflect the history of the city.
Then maybe Charleston would still be a virtually private enclave, rather than one of the most trod-upon tourist cities in the U.S. With all the restoration, gentrification and new population that the commercialism has brought, the streets and churches and Spanish moss-draped cemeteries seem so self-consciously pristine and pretty that longtime locals must feel as though they're living on the stage set for "Charleston! The Musical."
Which is probably why they so often reminisce about the humbler days brought on by hard times (wars, a devastating fire, a 7.2-level earthquake and hurricanes), when the city was "too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint." It is a tack that seems slightly insane in the face of such dazzling beauty.
But nostalgia for bygone times is everywhere in this perfect walking city. If you get lost or, for that matter, pushed out of a van blindfolded, you end up in front of something great to see, and it's often marked by a plaque: where DuBose Heyward found his inspiration for the novel "Porgy"; where George Washington slept; where Robert E. Lee took refuge; where the ghost of Confederate Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard still hangs around in City Hall.
As a native Southerner, I was also on the lookout for losses to weep over when I returned to Charleston with my cousin Toni.
What I was worried about was the food. Who, I wanted to know, was preserving and protecting the hush puppies, the hoppin' john, the okra gumbo, the cooter pie (I don't really care about this one - it's turtle pie - but it's fun to say), the frogmore stew, shrimp and grits, bread-and-butter pickles and the benne-seed wafers from the onslaught of "foodies" who have been descending on the city's restaurants like, well, foodies (they're much worse than locusts). I'd heard rumors of collard and benne-seed egg rolls; I'd seen "New Southern" menus listing tiramisu and tuna carpaccio with passionfruit vinaigrette.
Traditional Low Country cooking reflects the personality of the region, which stretches down the coast to Savannah, Ga., as well as its history. Native tomatoes, peppers, corn; shrimp, crab and oysters pulled from the ocean, estuaries and low-lying marshes; pork, limas and chicken from the French and English; and more exotic ingredients-peanuts, benne seeds, okra, yams and black-eyed peas-from African slaves, who taught Carolinians to cultivate rice. Along with the slave trade, rice helped make Charleston one of the richest cities in Colonial America.
But according to my old college friend Mary, a Charleston native who introduced me to the city 25 years ago, there was no grand old restaurant tradition to mourn.
"There were three restaurants in Charleston as recently as when I was a child, if you don't count Hardee's or Bessinger's BBQ," she wrote me.
Low Country cooking, like any true regional cuisine, was simply living off the land - an old-fashioned idea modern foodies seem to think is so new ("We support local farming!").
As Mary wrote, in imitation of an old-time Charlestonian: "Did you buy your speckled butter beans at Deenie's stand in the market? She had some good ones today. Was your red meat from Mr. Burgage? Were the tomatoes and corn from a Wadmalaw Island stand? Did your daddy catch the shrimp this morning in the creek? Are those Mr. Huck's boiled peanuts? He has the best."
It all sounded delicious. But now, I demanded of Mary, tell me where to get it.
"The new locals are rich Yankees," she responded. "They don't want to sweat when they eat and they want to impress with big tabs. Who cares where they want to eat?"
Not me. Damn Yankees. But, like most tourists, Toni and I didn't have time to be off picking our own speckled butter beans.
With very little effort, though, we discovered chefs whose restaurants in the historic district are celebrating both local produce and Low Country traditions without Disney-fying - or mummifying - the food.
Before Toni and I tasted our first bite at chef Robert Carter's Peninsula Grill, however, we asked the waiter where the real Low Country restaurants were, just to be safe. But he proved Mary right.
"We didn't eat out much when I was a kid," he said. "There was no use. My grandmother cooked it too good. But she's dead."
Grandmothers, like ghosts, are huge down here.
But my Southern grandmother never served anything as sublime as Carter's salad of sweet lump crab, julienned tomato and spinach atop a perfect, smoky-fried green tomato. And I can't imagine that the waiter's grandmother, unless she was African-American Southern-cooking legend Edna Lewis, fed him wild mushroom grits topped with a rich oyster stew. Or lobster-basil hush puppies, which were on the plate with exquisite bourbon grilled shrimp, hoppin' john and creamed corn. Carter's famous coconut cake is, however, adapted from a recipe that belonged to his grandmother, and it's the best in the universe. Seriously. Toni became dreamy-eyed days later about the seven-layer, light-yet-poundcakey concoction, with its not-too-sweet frosting.
Actually, the most famously "authentic" spot in Charleston proper, Jestine's Kitchen, is a shrine to the grandmotherly ghost Jestine, the daughter of a freed slave, who died in 1997 at age 112. It also honors Gullah cuisine - Low-Country soul food. Gullah is the African-English language of the former slave community that evolved on the surrounding sea islands.
A noon-hour line of patrons was wrapped around the corner when Toni and I showed up at Jestine's for lunch, so we returned mid-afternoon for some cheap and absolutely delicious bread-and-butter pickles; huge corn fritters; fried green tomatoes cooked to death and silky inside; soupy shrimp creole; and a huge fried seafood platter featuring fat and juicy oysters, and good and slimy okra gumbo.
I tried to engage our waitress on the food's origins, its authenticity and its relation to modern Charleston cooking, but she stared out the window, looking bored.
"You better hit that banana pudding real fast before it gets warm," she said, then refilled my glass of sweet iced tea, which was so sweet it may have been made with fudge.
It was the smartest thing I heard during the entire trip: Shut up and eat. If you spend all your time worrying about the way things used to be, you'll miss what's right in front of you.
At Anson's, for instance, chef Kevin Johnson seems to have little interest in building a culinary museum, but he grinds his own grits. Toni tried a bowl of classic shrimp and grits practically everywhere we ate, but Johnson's version, with bacon and roasted tomatoes, was so creamy, mellow and flavorful, we liked it best.
He seems to be the kind of respectful young chef any 100-year-old Southern home cook would love: Each dish features a local-farm flourish - onion-corn relish, field peas with ham hock sauce, succotash, Carolina Gold rice pudding with tiny black beech mushrooms, tender peppery collards. His roasted oysters brought back the piquant memory of my first Charleston oyster roast (with my friend Mary, using oysters we'd pulled from the marsh ourselves), but frankly these tasted much better. It must have been the buttery leeks, country ham and sherry mignonette.
The chef who made me seriously consider moving back down South, despite tangled Faulknerian feelings about the place, was Robert Stehling, of Hominy Grill, to me the perfect modern Charleston restaurant: casual but not hee-haw homey, creative but still bound to tradition, open all day, inexpensive, dedicated to local produce.
Despite a barrage of outsider accolades, locals continue to treat it like a corner drugstore, where they might come in for breakfast and just hang around until it's time for lunch.
We kind of did the same. After an early breakfast - high-rise biscuits with homemade strawberry jam, fried eggs and homemade sausage - Toni and I wandered down to the waterfront to tour the historic, Regency-style Edmondston-Alston house, built in 1825 (Gen. Beauregard watched the Civil War bombings from the piazza) and the neoclassical Nathaniel Russell House, built in 1808 by a rich merchant, with a stunning floating staircase and patterned formal garden. Afterward, during a dramatic and sudden storm, we were nearly electrocuted. For real.
After that, life seemed too short for zucchini blossoms with lobster mousse and nilgai antelope chop with sweet potato mousseline, so I canceled our reservation at the fancy-pants Charleston Grill, and we headed back to Hominy for mod adaptations of some of my favorite childhood snacks: pimiento cheese and pickled okra; Krispy-Kreme-addictive jalapeno hush puppies with green tomato ketchup. We happily dined on pecan-crusted pork loin with peach barbecue sauce and slightly spicy sweet-potato spoonbread. (The spoonbread made me really appreciate not being killed by lightning.) Dessert was peach-blueberry cobbler with fresh whipped cream, another gift.
But the dish that I'll never forget (pardon the Southern cliche) is Stehling's jalapeno-spiked okra and shrimp beignets, which are served quite hot with a thin, crisp exterior and an almost custardy, savory interior, offset by a bright and sharp heirloom tomato salsa and cooling lime cilantro sour cream.
Charlestonians love their ghosts, who linger quite happily among the living. But miles away from the Low Country, here in Chicago, I'm still quite haunted. By Stehling's beignets.
SHRIMP AND OKRA BEIGNETS
Makes 16 to 18 beignets
1/2 cup cooked rice, preferably jasmine
2 cups sliced okra, fresh or frozen (thawed slightly makes slicing easy)
1/2 cup diced green pepper
1/4 cup diced yellow onion
1 jalapeno pepper, finely chopped (seeded, if desired)
1 egg
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8 ounces raw shrimp, peeled, and coarsely chopped
Peanut oil for deep frying
1. Combine cooled rice with okra, green pepper, onion, jalapeno pepper, egg and heavy cream. Sprinkle flour over mixture and stir until flour is incorporated. Allow to sit for at least 20 minutes, then stir vigorously 1-2 minutes until mixture becomes glutinous from the okra. Season with salt and pepper, add shrimp and stir until thoroughly mixed in. 2. Heat peanut oil to medium-hot, between 325 and 350 degrees in a deep-sided pot. Working in several batches, carefully drop tablespoonfuls of the batter into the oil, cooking 3 to 4 minutes. Test one beignet to ensure shrimp has cooked through. Drain on paper towels and serve with tomato salsa and cilantro sour cream.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryn ... 603522.htm
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
