Charleston Receipts
Junior League of Charleston, 1950
Working from home I rarely get to see my colleagues, but
once a year the American Society for Indexing has a national conference, and I
usually try to go. This year, the conference was in Charleston, SC, which would
have been impetus enough to attend, in addition to all the excellent continuing
education, trade talk, and just plain fun of being with other people who
actually get what I do for a living.
Historic Charleston is charming with its lovingly preserved
old homes and gorgeous gardens, plus many great restaurants and rich food
traditions. One of those traditions is Charleston Receipts, by some accounts the oldest Junior League community
cookbook. My copy is from the thirty-fourth printing in 2009. I think it can be
deemed a success.
A friend gave this to me after he served our book group the
Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau. Though it looks sort of plain on the page, it
is a mixture that is greater than the sum of its parts--all savory, shrimp-y
and bacon-y rice. I only wish I had had leftovers to fry up the next day for
lunch.
Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau
By Mrs. Paul Seabrook (Harriott Horry Rutledge)
Charleston Receipts, 1950
4 slices bacon
1 cup rice (raw)
2 Tbs. butter
½ cup celery cut small
2 cups shrimp (cleaned)
2 Tbs chopped bell pepper
salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp. Worcestershire
1 Tbs. flour
water for rice
Fry bacon until crisp. Save to use later. Add bacon grease
to water in which you cook rice. In another pot, melt butter, add celery and
bell pepper. Cook a few minutes; add shrimp which have been sprinkled with
Worcestershire sauce and dredged with flour. Stir and simmer until flour is
cooked. Season with salt and pepper. Now add cooked rice and mix until rice is
"all buttery" and "shrimp." You may want to add more
butter. Into this stir the crisp bacon, crumbled.
I believe my friend adds more Worcestershire sauce to taste
and usually doubles or triples the batch, which serves 6.
I think one of the reasons for Charleston's Receipts longevity is it pre-dates the convenience foods boom
of the 50s. There are no name-brand recipes in here or canned cream soups.
Plain gelatin, canned vegetables and commercial mayonnaise are about it for
pre-made ingredients.
There are recipes for
punches made by the gallon, crab and shrimp done in myriad ways, a huge section
on desserts, and a small, but intriguing, assortment of pickles and preserves.
I love the historical reach, including a White Soup that would be at home in a
Jane Austen novel.
The book captures several levels of cuisine including Low
Country, Gullah, and the French-influenced cuisine of the upper class. Class
and race are definitely present in the book. The illustrations are beautiful
drawings and paintings, but they romanticize (and possibly caricature) the hard
work of Black Charlestonians. Most of the recipes are signed, but given the
social structure of Charleston at the time of publication, it can be safely
assumed that many of the recipes were created not by their presenters but by
the cooks of those presenters.
The Lee brothers, who were the ASI conference keynote
speakers and are native Charlestonians, noted this fact in their address and
offered some other fun tidbits about the book including the existence of a
precursor pamphlet called Charleston Recipes
and that the Junior League sued the creator of White Trash Cooking for plagiarism. Oh scandal!
More on the Lee brothers themselves next time….
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