Charleston

Charleston's cooking is the kitchen record of the Lowcountry rice economy. Carolina Gold rice, middlins (rice grits), stone-ground grits and benne wafers persist as staples of the Historic Charleston City Market, and Gullah Geechee foodways underlie the dishes now taken as canonical, among them she-crab soup and shrimp and grits. Scholarship on African American culinarians, including the recreation of Nat Fuller's 1865 post-Emancipation feast, has worked to restore that authorship. The Junior League's "Charleston Receipts" (1950), 750 recipes interleaved with Gullah verses, is the oldest Junior League cookbook still in print.

The mid-century dining room is well documented. Henry's opened in 1932 as Henry's Cafe at 54 Market Street under Henry O. Hasselmeyer, a German-born grocer and liquor salesman connected to the city's Prohibition-era "blind tiger" trade; by the 1950s it was a fine-dining fixture built on she-crab soup and "Seafood a la Wando," and its 1945-1977 records are held at the College of Charleston. Perdita's, from about 1953, and the Colony House followed with continental menus.

The regional turn is traceable through Frank Lee at Slightly North of Broad, who applied French technique to collards, field peas and ham hocks; Robert Stehling's Hominy Grill (1996-2019), a James Beard winner trained under Bill Neal at Crook's Corner; and Husk, which from 2010 cooked exclusively with Southern products.