Dwelling Place Page 52

  Niger, as the primary fisherman, spent long hours casting shrimp nets, hauling crab pots, digging clams, gathering oysters, and paddling his bateau through winding creeks, seeking special fishing holes. When the weather turned cold, Andrew and Cato oversaw the butchering of hogs. A large hog was hit in the head with a heavy blunt instrument, dipped into a cask of hot water to aid in taking off the bristles, and then hoisted high. Its throat was cut and its blood drained into a large pot in preparation for blood sausage. After its interior was gutted and cleaned, men and women working together washed the intestines, liver, and other organs, rendered the lard, and made the hams, bacon, and ribs ready to be salted and smoked. Charles and Gilbert brought cartloads of hickory to be split for the smokehouse, where the fires had to be carefully attended. Patience used a “large sausage stuffer” bought in Savannah to stuff pork scraps and chopped liver, together with selected herbs, into the washed intestines to make a variety of sausages. When a cow was slaughtered, not only was the meat carefully butchered, but some of the choice cuts were also corned, using salt, sugar, saltpeter, and red pepper, while the hooves were set aside for calves’-foot jelly, and the hide was carefully preserved for tanning. When Charlie or Joe shot wild turkeys, ducks, or geese, or brought home from their hunt ricebirds or quail, older children had to pick the feathers before the birds could be cleaned and made ready for cooking—and the same was true of chickens and domestic geese and turkeys.7

  For sugar and syrup, patches of sugarcane were cut and the cane was fed into a mill turned by a horse walking around and around. The rollers of the mill squeezed the sweet juice from the cane, and the juice was funneled through a cloth strainer into a barrel. A brick and clay furnace was prepared, and over it was placed a boiler box. The juice was strained a second time as it was poured into the box, where it was brought to a boil and the rising foam was skimmed off. Finally, the syrup was strained a third time as it was poured into barrels for storage or processing into sugar.8

  The products of all of this effort flowed toward Patience’s kitchen to serve not only the needs of the white family—including weddings and funerals and special holidays—but also as the foundation for the hospitality so generously shown to the many guests who came to Montevideo and Maybank. Patience needed both culinary art and extensive organizational skills to get large and finely prepared meals on the table at set times. Lucy—the daughter of Rosetta and Sam and the wife of Charles the oxcart driver—became, after the sale of Phoebe, Patience’s chief companion in the kitchen. Young Flora—she turned seventeen in 1856—became their apprentice and was kept busy peeling and plucking, scaling and scrubbing. And there were other younger ones who helped in various ways. While Patience thus had many helpers in and around the kitchen, she had no one who had taken her Uncle Jack’s place. He had managed much of the household and had played a major role in seeing that meals were served not only on time but also correctly. Consequently, much of his managing responsibilities had fallen on Patience.9

  For Patience, as for other low-country cooks, rice was the fundamental dish for most meals. Europeans had long regarded the rice grown on the South Carolina and Georgia coast as the finest in the world. It is, wrote an Englishman, “the best Rice which grows upon the whole Earth, as being the weightiest, largest, cleanest, and whitest, which has been yet seen in the Habitable World.” Called Carolina Gold because of the color of the ripe grain in the field, it was a long-grain rice of an exceptional fine quality. Before Patience could cook the rice, however, it had to be “graveled” or washed—she would place it in a piggin, slush it around, and carefully pour it into another pail. After several such procedures, and it had been soaked for about an hour, the rice was ready to cook. Water—two parts to one part rice, with salt added—was brought to a boil. The rice was added to the boiling water and cooked over low heat for about twenty minutes. The lid was then removed, the rice stirred and fluffed, and the lid placed back on the pot with a slight opening for the cooked grains to dry. The rice that was thus cooked and brought to the table was, in the words of a South Carolinian, “white, dry, and every grain Separate.” Patience’s way of cooking rice was a method that reached back to India and had traveled to Liberty County by way of Madagascar, the west coast of Africa, and South Carolina. In contrast to the method developed in China, which produced sticky rice for eating with chopsticks, the method Patience used eliminated loose starch and provided separate grains that were fluffy and white.10

  Patience frequently made a pilau, or pilaf, with the rice. A chicken or a wild duck or a piece of beef would be boiled with bacon. The broth—with onions and proper spices added—would be used instead of water for the cooking of the rice. Once the rice was ready, it would be placed in a large serving dish, and the meat that had provided the broth would be carefully arranged on top or sometimes chopped and stirred into the rice.11

  Cakes, puddings, and various breads were also made from the rice. Mary wrote out the recipes in a neat hand as a record for future use. For rice bread Patience would take “1 pint of rice flour, 3 eggs, a heaping spoonful of butter, ½ pint of milk, and 3 teaspoons of yeast powder mixed in the flour.” She would mix it altogether and “bake quickly.” For simple rice cakes, she would use “3 cups of boiled rice, 2 eggs, milk and a little salt, 1 tablespoon or dessert spoon of butter.” She covered the rice with milk, stirred them together, being careful not to mash the rice. She beat the eggs and stirred them in, adding flour enough to make a thick batter but one thin enough to pour from her bowl. She poured the batter in a biscuit tin and baked it in a hot oven until brown and firm on the top. She then cut the rice cake in square pieces, buttered them, and served them hot to those taking afternoon tea on the piazza.12

  Of course Patience also served sweeter and more elaborate cakes to those having tea on the piazzas at Montevideo and Maybank: ginger cake, lady cake, cheesecakes, and one called flirtation cake, which apparently had some story or at least some hopes associated with it. An eccentric concoction called sea foam cake called for “4 cups flour, 1 butter, 2 of sugar, 3 eggs, and 2 teaspoons sea foam.” Pound cakes of various sorts were favorites of those who enjoyed the view of the North Newport flowing by, or of the Medway marshes in the afternoon. A “plain pound cake” called for “3/4 lb. Butter, 1 lb. of sugar, 10 eggs, juice of a lemon, and a glass of brandy.” A more adventuresome pound cake—one that came suspiciously close to a fruitcake—took “12 eggs, 1 lb. of butter, 2½ lbs. of sugar, 4 lbs. of raisins, 4 lbs. of currants, 1 lb. of citron, juice of 1 lemon, 1 spoon ground cinnamon, 2 spoons of nutmeg, glass of wine, glass of brandy, glass of rosewater.” These pound cakes would be made at any time of the year and enjoyed with tea in the afternoon or as dessert. The genuine fruitcake, however, was made in the early fall in preparation for the holiday season. Patience laid out on her work-table three pounds of flour, three pounds of sugar, three pounds of butter, two pounds of citron, six pounds of raisins, and four pounds of currants. After tossing and rubbing the fruit in flour, she stirred all the ingredients in a large bowl and added one ounce of nutmeg, one half-ounce of cloves, one half-ounce of cinnamon, one ounce of mace, thirty eggs, and three full glasses of brandy. She then mixed all into a batter and poured it into pans lined with oiled paper dusted with flour. When the cakes came out of the wood oven, she carefully wrapped them in oiled paper for storage. During the coming weeks Mary would keep the cakes moist and fresh by pouring a little brandy over them at regular intervals—she kept the brandy locked in a cupboard with other medicines—until the time finally came to eat them. By then the cakes were a potent force for holiday cheer.13

  The preparation of such delicacies required of Patience long hours of work, yet her cooking was much more than work—it was a powerful art. She was creating with meticulous care food that delighted all the senses and that nourished human life both physically and spiritually. A simple recipe for “light rolls” she learned from Cora, the cook at Social Bluff, and written down by Mary as “Cora’s Light Rolls,” gave hi
nts of both the hours involved and her art:

  Take half a yeast cake and dissolve it in a cup of luke warm water, letting it stand half an hour. Pour the water off (throw away the dregs) and work into that water flour enough to make a thick batter (about as thick as pound cake batter). Let that batter stand to rise about an hour. When it looks well risen, work it into your flour a pint and a half or a quart of flour with a dessert spoon full of lard and the same of butter and a table spoon of Brown Sugar. This set to rise about nine o’clock at night. At six in the morning work them well again and put them in the pan in which they are to be baked. Let them rise an hour; then bake about half an hour.14

  If breads and cakes were demanding, so were the meats and seafood, and with these dishes Patience’s art reached its pinnacle. When the weather turned cool and Niger came in with his bateau filled with oysters, they had to be shucked before an oyster pie or oyster soup could be made. The oysters, fresh from the cold waters, would be placed close to the fire long enough for the oyster shells to open slightly. Taking up a steaming oyster, the shucker would insert a sharp knife into the opening, give the knife a twist, and pry the shells apart. The oyster liquor would be poured into a pot and the oyster cut out of the shell. Patience would take two quarts of the shucked oysters and mix them with three pints of milk, one pint of oyster liquor, one quarter-pound of fresh butter, three dozen cloves, three blades of mace, and two dozen black peppercorns to make a delicious oyster soup. Or when Niger arrived with a basket of shrimp, Patience would first pick up a shrimp in each hand and using her thumbnails cut their heads off. Once they were all headed, she dropped the shrimp in boiling water for a few quick minutes until they turned pink. After they had cooled, she peeled the shells from the shrimp and removed the dark vein that ran down the shrimp’s arched back. The clean, pink shrimp she could send to the table at Maybank cold, or she could mix them with cooked rice and butter, salt and pepper, before baking and serving. When Niger arrived with trout and spots and other small fish, she would generally fry them in a large skillet in grease obtained from frying out fat-back. When he brought in a big sheephead or drum, Patience would typically broil it after scaling and cleaning it. As for the crabs, she would drop them live in boiling water and cook them until they turned a rosy pink. Then she and her helpers would begin the laborious task of picking out the sweet meat before it could be made into a casserole or baked with rice or made into crab cakes of great delicacy. But in the fall, when Niger would bring in the “peelers,” then Patience would sauté the soft-shell crabs and serve them on big platters to the delight of many guests at Maybank.15

  High on the list of favorite foods among both family and guests was the game brought from the fields, woods, and swamps of the plantations. Venison was readily available when Charlie or Joe went hunting. In the fall, ducks descended on rice fields in great numbers as targets for eager hunters, and Stepney would shoot not only ducks but also migrating geese in the rice fields at Arcadia. In the spring Andrew would often shoot wild turkeys for the table. All of the game took special preparation and offered their own special flavors to the cuisine of May-bank and Montevideo. No game, however, was as distinct to the low country or seemed to gather up in its body the wild and sweet taste of the land as much as the ricebird—Dolichonyx oryzivorus. Louisa Cheves Stoney, the granddaughter of Charles’s friend Thomas Smyth in Charleston, later described the peculiar delight of the low-country way of eating ricebirds:

  Select the fattest birds, remove the entrails, bake them whole or split them up the back and broil. Permit no sacrilegious hand to remove the head, for the base of the brain of the rice bird is the most succulent portion. Or the birds may be placed in either shape in a round bottom pot with a small lump of butter, pepper and salt, and cook over a quick fire. Use no fork in eating. Take the neck of the bird in the left hand and his little right leg in the right hand. Tear away the right leg and eat all but the extreme end of the bone. Hold the bill of the bird in one hand and crush your teeth through the back of the head, and thank Providence that you are permitted to live. Take the remaining left leg in your right hand and place in your mouth the entire body of the bird, and then munch the sweetest morsel that ever brought gustatory delight. All that remains is the front portion of the head and the tiny bits of bone that formed the ends of the legs. To leave more is to betray your unappreciativeness of the gifts of the gods.16

  With his growing weakness, Charles was afraid of the tiny bones of the rice-birds, so years earlier he had stopped crushing the backs of their heads with his teeth or putting a whole bird in his mouth, but otherwise he enjoyed enormously the food prepared by Patience’s hard work. On one occasion he wrote of breakfast: “Mother has come down. We have just had worship and breakfast is ordered in and such a breakfast—hominy, rice, corn bread, eggs, honey, fresh butter, milk, cream, crackers, johnnycake, potatoes, clabber, flowers and roses in abundance, coffee and all so forth.” On another occasion he said: “Niger succeeded in procuring some fine fish for two dishes; we had also an excellent oyster pie and roasted chicken and a dessert…. The gentlemen particularly relished the fish and oysters.” And Mary would write when company had arrived for dinner at Maybank, “They were all prepared to do ample justice to a joint of boiled lamb, a sirloin of roast beef, a large juicy ham, fish, crabs and shrimp to say nothing of several varieties of vegetables fresh from the garden.” And she would tell of having for dinner a “nice corned beef,” a wild duck Joe had shot, a turkey presented by Andrew, together with “a dish of fried oysters, rice, potatoes, and turnips, with a dessert of oranges and sugared oranges.” It was consequently no wonder that Frederick Law Olmsted—the traveler, writer, and future landscape architect—wrote of low-country cuisine that it contained “delicacies which are not to be had in perfection … anywhere else than on a rice-plantation.” If such a cuisine had many sources, and if it had behind it the hard labors of many in the settlements, it was the work and imagination of Patience and other plantation cooks that drew the various sources and ingredients together into a coherent and distinct cuisine whose essence was drawn from the rich flavors of the land and from the dark waters and salt marshes of the low country.17

  Those who lived at Carlawter and in the settlements at Maybank and Arcadia also developed a distinct cuisine with their more limited resources. To be sure, there were direct overlaps between the way food was prepared in the settlements and what was prepared in the plantation kitchens and served in the plantation houses. It would have been surprising, after all, if there had not been such overlap since African-American cooks were doing the cooking in both places. Never-theless, there were distinctions, and the distinctions had to do with Charles and Mary’s ability to command resources—especially of time and food—that were not available to those who were raising the rice and corn, catching the fish and crabs, and doing the cooking in the settlements.18

  All those living in the settlements had provisions of corn, rice, red peas, bacon, and cane syrup, largely drawn from their own labors, controlled by Charles, and distributed by Cato, Andrew, and Stepney. In addition, milk was often supplied from the dairies, especially to make corn mush for the young children. To these provisions, settlement cooks such as Mom Rosetta added the vegetables they grew in their gardens and the chickens and domestic ducks raised around the settlement cabins. Children gathered wild fruits, berries, and nuts. And the men raised hogs and secured by their own skill and effort fish and game—rabbits, possums, turtles, raccoons, an occasional deer, mullet, and catfish. Because they had so little time for themselves, however, the cooks of the settlements necessarily developed a cuisine that was generally simple and relatively easy to prepare. This meant that such one-pot meals as pilaus, stews, and soups would be especially common and practical. Most of the time the women of each family prepared the food for their family members, but when the work in the fields was especially heavy, a great wooden trencher of rice and bacon would be prepared in the plantation kitchen and taken to those in the field.
19

  The cooks at Carlawter and in the settlements at Maybank and Arcadia made use of a variety of cooking utensils. Cassius and Phoebe, for example, had at the time of their sale “3 pots, 1 oven, 1 pail, 1 piggin, 3 plates, 1 new bucket,” which were left for Cassius’s son James and daughter Nancy. The pots could be used for cooking rice and grits, soups, stews, and vegetables. The oven could be used for baking in the fireplace. And the pail, piggin, and bucket could be used for holding water or milk. In addition, they no doubt had a variety of baskets made by Cassius that could be used for storage of corn, peas, and rice, and perhaps gourds, which were widely used in low-country settlements as dippers and utensils of various sorts.20

  Corn and rice provided the two most important ingredients for the settlement cooks. The corn could be used for corn bread—a pint of cornmeal could be mixed with a pint of milk, a couple of eggs, and if available a little soda, and the mix baked before the fireplace. More common were johnnycakes and hoe cakes. For johnnycakes, cooked grits were mixed with a little rice flour and milk and the dough placed on a board before a fire. When those who were working in the fields carried the dough with them and cooked it on a hoe for their lunch, then it became a hoe cake. And of course the grits themselves, a staple in both the plantation house and the slave cabin, were relished, especially for breakfast. A Native American dish, grits were prepared by pouring water through wood ash to make a diluted lye solution. Ground corn was then soaked in the lye to remove the hulls. After several washings, the grits were ready to be boiled. At Montevideo and Maybank a pint or pint and a half of grits, “after being prepared by divers washings,” would be put into a pint and a half of water and boiled rapidly for fifteen or twenty minutes. In the settlements, syrup or butter—when available—would be stirred into the grits with a little salt. A special breakfast would include with the grits a piece of fried bacon or salt pork and eggs from the hens that were kept in coops behind the cabins and allowed to scratch around the settlement.21