Parker Milner is the Food Editor of The Post and Courier. He is a Boston College graduate and former professional hockey player who joined The Post and Courier after leading the Charleston City Paper's food section.
South Carolina visitors have certain expectations when they come to the Palmetto State. They yearn to dig into the area's history, culture and waterfront setting. At the intersection of those three draws is South Carolina's vibrant culinary scene.
The state is known for its produce -- collards, tomatoes, peaches and more -- but most casual diners are looking for the specific dishes, snacks and condiments they associate with the Upstate, Midlands and Lowcountry. While not all of these items are still served at South Carolina restaurants, each provides a historical backdrop for the food that's put Greenville, Columbia and Charleston on the culinary map.
Barbecue
South Carolina's barbecue scene has undergone a renaissance in recent years. Prominent pitmasters like Rodney Scott, John Lewis and Hector Garate are demonstrating their ability to serve some of the country's top smoked meat in a state with a history of barbecue prowess.
Historians largely agree that Native Americans, who created a method for cooking meats over an indirect flame, paved the way for modern barbecue preparation methods to flourish in the South. Enslaved African Americans were also early adopters of South Carolina barbecue cookery, said James Beard Award-winning writer Adrian Miller. It was labor-intensive work; they had to dig the trench, chop down trees for wood to start a fire, kill and cook the animals, and provide entertainment after the feast concluded.
When experts talk about South Carolina barbecue today, they are often referring to Midlands-style. That pork-centric barbecue cookery originated in an eight-county region surrounding Columbia, according to Robert F. Moss, contributing Post and Courier restaurant critic and author of "Barbecue Lover's Carolinas."
A few places in the Midlands cook whole hogs, but shoulders and hams are the most common. More than anything, though, the distinctive characteristic of the South Carolina barbecue style is its eye-catching bright yellow sauce. Built on a base of yellow mustard, it's sometimes liberally sweetened and given a touch of tang from apple cider vinegar -- as in the case of the Carolina Gold made famous by the Bessinger brothers.
And don't forget the hash, perhaps South Carolina's greatest contribution to the barbecue canon.
Food How does a new Charleston barbecue restaurant stack up against the competition? By Robert F. Moss Special to The Post and Courier Benne
Few tourists get through Charleston without buying a benne wafer, a staple cocktail party snack throughout the 20th century. Its featured seed came to the South by way of the African diaspora.
African people used benne seeds as a cooking oil, condiment and flavoring for stews, wrote Kevin Mitchell and David S. Shields in "Taste the State," a book highlighting 82 of the state's "most distinctive ingredients." They brought it to the U.S. during the transatlantic slave trade; White settlers instantly valued benne for its high smoke point and lengthy shelf life, Mitchell and Shields wrote.
James Beard Award-winning cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee chronicled benne for the Oxford American, describing its oil as "excellent" for salads.
"It had more antioxidants, which meant that it was less subject to rancidity given the climate of the Carolinas," they wrote. "This was an altogether different oil from the dark-colored, deeply flavored sesame oil we know from Asian cuisine, the one used drop by drop."
Sweet benne wafers are a staple in the Lowcountry, and the seed is also used in restaurants like Minero, which still serves the benne salsa chef Sean Brock conjured up years ago.
Boiled peanuts
The practice of boiling peanuts likely originated in West Africa. In South Carolina, they're boiled shell-on in salty water that can be supplemented by seasoning.
Sold at gas stations across the state, boiled peanuts are so popular at Charleston RiverDogs games that the minor league baseball team dedicates an entire apparel line to them. Anthony Wright, better known as Tony the Peanut Man, was a local fixture at RiverDogs games for years before he died in 2016. He was known for singing and dancing while wearing his trademark bow tie and woven sweetgrass hat.
Chicken bog
Over the years, Chicken bog has been served in home kitchens across the state. Its name may differ depending on whom you talk to; it's also known as chicken pilau, chicken purloo or just plain chicken and rice.
At its core, the dish is made up of nothing more than those two ingredients, plus onion, celery and garlic for flavor. Some versions include sausage.
To make the dish, the chicken is boiled and shredded. The rice and shredded chicken are tossed into a pot with all of the broth from the chicken and simmered until the rice is just cooked, soaking in all the flavor of the chicken.
The origin of chicken bog's name has many stories. Some believe it's related to the rice, linking the soggy nature of the dish to the very field the rice grows in. Folks in the Pee Dee region of the state, where chicken bog is most popular, have also connected the name to the area, comparing the dish's sauciness to the Pee Dee's swampy environment.
No matter what you call it, chicken bog -- a staple on Forrest Parker's renowned Undiscovered Charleston food tours -- reflects the region's history with rice, said the chef, whose take on the dish is made with Carolina Gold rice, poached chicken, kale, squash and toasted farro.
Parker suggests there's a connection between this South Carolina one-pot dish and others from around the world. The root of that influence is the transatlantic slave trade that brought Africans to the Caribbean islands before being transferred to the American South.
Fried chicken
Unlike many of South Carolina's signature dishes, fried chicken is not African in origin, said Miller, who authored a book titled "Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time." It details the history of traditional African American cuisine rooted in the South -- and an entire chapter is dedicated to fried chicken.
Miller dined at 150 restaurants in 35 cities and studied cookbooks from cuisines around the world to become an expert on fried chicken. Its English origins surprised him.
Fried chicken recipes showed up in some of the earliest British cookbooks, Miller said, pointing to European roots. Plus, West African people traditionally don't cook fried chicken in the way we think of the dish -- their method is to lightly fry then braise the poultry.
So how did it get to the U.S.?
English colonists likely made enslaved Africans cook their version of fried chicken, and Miller has the evidence to prove it. During his research, he found the first widely accepted printed recipe in the U.S.; it came in 1824, appearing in "The Virginia House-Wife" cookbook. It was authored by a White distant relative of Thomas Jefferson from a slaveholding family.
During that time, chicken was generally breaded in flour or breadcrumbs. It was fried in lard; otherwise, the recipes used then look a lot like the ones we see at South Carolina restaurants today.
News Bertha's Kitchen will stay open as owners take iconic turquoise building off the market By Parker Milner [email protected] Groundnut cake
Despite the name, groundnut cake is not actually a cake. It's a piece of confectionary that's similar to the New Orleans praline. Instead of sugar and pecans, Charleston's version uses the resurrected Carolina African runner peanut and molasses.
The simplicity of this style of candy across the African diaspora made it easy for women to sell in the streets. The price of a groundnut cake was just a penny for almost 50 years, according to Mitchell and Shields' writing in "Taste the State."
But in 1914, the city of Charleston passed a fly ordinance under pressure from the federal government. The Navy wanted candy sellers that lined Charleston's streets gone because they said they made sailors sick due to unsanitary conditions, Shields told The Post and Courier.
Many of these sellers were older Black women who shouted from street corners throughout the peninsula with open trays of candy. They carried a whisk to bat away insects. By 1919, local law enforcement drove the sellers off the street, Shields said. The candy went back into bakeries and homes, losing its prominence.
Today, many are still familiar with groundnut cakes. But preparing them has become a lost art, said chef Christina Miller, who revived the Gullah sweet for the menu on her Bert and T's Desserts food truck.
Huguenot torte
Like the groundnut cake, some iconic South Carolina dishes have disappeared from the mainstream. Count the Huguenot torte among them.
Charlestonians long assumed this beloved rumpled apple nut cake represented a sticky sweet link to the city's French Protestant past. Food historian John Martin Taylor debunked that theory in the 1980s when he tracked down one-time Huguenot Tavern employee Evelyn Florance, the woman who submitted the torte recipe to the Junior League's "Charleston Receipts" cookbook.
As Florance told Taylor, she'd first tasted the dessert at a church supper in Galveston, Texas. She experimented with the recipe for a few years before putting it on the menu at Charleston's Huguenot Tavern in 1942. She named it Ozark pudding in honor of her employer.
"The irony is that it's neither Huguenot or a torte," said Parker, the Undiscovered Charleston chef who occasionally serves the dessert during his food tour.
According to the late Southern food chronicler John Egerton, the dish "apparently originated in the mountains of northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri." Missouri native Bess Truman bolstered the dessert's national profile by submitting an Ozark pudding recipe to the "Congressional Club Cookbook" in the 1950s.
Like Ozark pudding, Huguenot torte is rarely found in restaurants and bakeries, despite some locals' affection for it.
Food 'Lost art': Bert & T's food truck revives Charleston's Gullah street candy past By Alan Hovorka [email protected] Pimento cheese
At its heart, pimento cheese is a simple combination of grated cheese, pimento peppers, mayonnaise and seasoning. You might be surprised to learn that it is believed to have originated in New York, not the South.
In the late 19th century, pimento peppers became a popular import from Spain. Pimentos were combined with cream cheese to form the first known versions of a pimento cheese spread.
The South's iconic variation developed in the 20th century when Spanish peppers became a big industry in Georgia. Some experts have suggested that a combination of the Depression Era-popularity of hoop cheese and mayonnaise led to pimento cheese as we know it today.
Rice
Rice culture permeates South Carolina's past and present. Charleston was once the epicenter of the rice production world. It was because of enslaved labor and agricultural know-how that led to a profitable industry and a Lowcountry-specific type of grain that's featured prominently on contemporary restaurant menus today: Carolina Gold.
Carolina Gold rice's roots can be traced back to the 1690s, when it was established as a cash crop. Harvested on the backs of enslaved workers who were brought to the United States on transatlantic journeys, Carolina Gold was a coveted crop until the Civil War broke out in 1861.
Without an enslaved labor force to farm the land, the rice industry fell into steep decline. The rice plantations, mills and traders that once brought so much wealth into Charleston largely ceased operations by the late 1800s.
Food Slightly North of Broad has served Charleston for 30 years. Does the Southern staple still deliver? By Robert F. Moss Special to The Post and Courier
Yet rice stuck around in home kitchens over the next century before Carolina Gold rice was restored in the 1980s by Richard Schultz. Red rice, among the state's most widely adored rice dishes, is now so Southern that South Carolina dedicates the last Saturday of each September to the iconic Gullah-Geechee dish.
A staple in the home cook's repertoire in the Lowcountry, red rice also shows up at classic soul food joints, fish camps and meat-and-three restaurants. It's often served as a sidekick to fried pork chops, fried or baked chicken, baked turkey wings or fried fish. The dish, which closely resembles West African jollof, is another example of the lasting impact of enslaved peoples on the South's cuisine.
Traditions surrounding rice dishes like Hoppin' John continue in households across the state today. The Lowcountry ritual of serving Hoppin' John on New Year's Day to ensure good luck for the year ahead goes back more than 200 years. It's made by combining field peas -- which are native to West Africa -- with rice, usually seasoned with some form of pork. Food historians say it's a dish with African roots, possibly with French and Caribbean connections.
As for the name, some speculate it came from the old custom of inviting guests to eat with the request to "hop in, John." Academics suggest "Hoppin' John" is a corruption of foreign words, such as "pois de pigeon," French for "pigeon peas."
She-crab soup
In the 1950s, a place named Everett's Restaurant became the first eatery in Charleston to serve she-crab soup. It was Everett's signature dish because the restaurant had hired its inventor, William Deas, as chef.
Deas' special touch was adding the female crab's roe to the pot. He first did so while working as a butler for Charleston Mayor Goodwyn Rhett. The story goes that when President William Howard Taft was visiting the Rhetts in the early 20th century, Deas dressed up the crab soup with the orange eggs, or roe, and a daring drizzle of sherry.
The hearty soup is still served at restaurants across the Lowcountry, including 82 Queen and Fleet Landing.
Oysters
South Carolina's love of oysters isn't by accident -- we've got the history for it. There's archeological evidence of people eating oysters in what is now South Carolina for thousands of years: piles of discarded shells, or shell mounds, along the coast date back to 2000 B.C.
Oysters were a lucrative business in South Carolina from the 1800s up until World War II. At the time, they were cheap, and there were plenty of them to go around.
South Carolinians' fascination with the small creatures continues today at popular restaurants like Chubby Fish, The Ordinary and 167 Raw.
Unlike the oysters found in Massachusetts, New York, Canada or the Pacific Northwest, South Carolina bivalves are sweet, small and simple. Though they live in silt and pluff mud, they taste clean and pure.
When summer turns to fall, it's oyster roast season. The rich culture surrounding the centuries-old social event can be seen in the sheer number of official oyster roasts hosted each season. Take into account all the private parties, backyard gatherings and corporate shindigs, and you've got a whole heap of oyster roasts.
At a South Carolina oyster roast, you'll find a long wooden table piled high with buckets of fresh roasted oysters. Attendees lined elbow-to-elbow around the table can be seen pulling apart the clusters and shucking them with an oyster knife.
Aside from mounds of discarded shells, you'll likely find saltine crackers, hot sauce and maybe some lemon wedges on the table.
Shrimp and grits
For a city steeped in history, the Lowcountry's most famous dish is relatively new -- at least according to historic publications. The odd pairing of shrimp and grits first appeared in the "Charleston Receipts" cookbook in 1950. But most historians and authors say it was cooked in Africa and Lowcountry homes well before the mid-20th century.
The origan of shrimp and grits may have been circumstantial, as some suggest -- a custom born on boats when fishermen were hungry for breakfast and fresh shrimp were nearby. Food historian and James Beard Award-winner Michael Twitty says the dish was first eaten in Mozambique. It eventually made its way into plantation kitchens, where enslaved cooks built the foundation for the Lowcountry cuisine we know today.
Seafood like shrimp, catfish and oysters also have West African provenance, said Miller. For his next book, he's studying street vendors, or urban hucksters, who sold items like ground-nut cakes, monkey meat, raw oysters and boiled shrimp in Southern cities like Charleston from the 1700s into the 20th century.
The earliest iterations of shrimp and grits were called "breakfast shrimp," Miller said. The dish generally combined freshly caught shrimp with grits and a basic butter sauce.
"It started as something very, very simple," Miller said.
While the origin of combining shrimp and grits is less certain, we know that the broken corn kernels themselves were first utilized by Native Americans.
In "Grits: A Cultural and Culinary Journey Through the South," author Erin Byers Murray paints a picture of settlers arriving on the shores of Virginia in the 1600s. Tribes indigenous to the area greeted them with bowls of maize, sharing food to ease tensions during a frightening moment.
"It also opened up the door to the settlers who would bestow their European name -- grist, previously applied to hulled, ground grains, and likely formed from the words grytt (for bran) and greot (for ground) -- on the bowls of cracked, cooked maize set before them," Murray wrote.
Like many of the dishes that are considered traditionally Southern, grits' story is filled with "theft, slavery, appropriation and loss," Murry wrote. Over the years, grits have fed indigenous people, enslaved Africans and plantation owners. Now, they fill the bellies of diners at contemporary restaurants in every corner of the state.
My Charleston These restaurants help define Charleston's increasingly diverse dining scene By Parker Milner [email protected] Frogmore stew
Shrimp, potatoes, corn and summer sausage strewn on newspaper. Friends and family gathered around the table, pulling the tails off the boiled shrimp in between swigs from cans of beer. This scene is distinctly Lowcountry, where celebrations call for Frogmore stew.
Named after a small community on St. Helena Island in Beaufort County, the dish is also referred to as Beaufort Stew or Lowcountry Boil. There are variations in ingredients, but it's usually prepared with chunks of big link smoked sausage, corn on the cob, potatoes, fresh shrimp and a spicy seafood seasoning mix.
One recipe printed in a 1977 edition of The News and Courier calls for hot sausage, four ears of corn, fresh shrimp and a bottle of beer.
"If there is another beer available it makes for a very good accompanying beverage," said Richard Rettew, who submitted the recipe.
Richard Gay of Gay Seafood Company takes credit for inventing Frogmore Stew. He claims that when on National Guard duty in the early 1960s and flush with fresh shrimp, he began boiling the shellfish with corn and sausage. It was easy, tasty and would feed a crowd quickly. Fellow guardsmen teased Gay about being from Frogmore; that's how the name became attached to the stew.
Food & Drink A look at sandwiches across the world -- and where to get them in SC By Jane Godiner [email protected] Bonus ingredient: Duke's Mayonnaise
If you're using mayonnaise in a Southern kitchen, it better be Duke's. And while the famed condiment isn't a dish by itself, Duke's mayonnaise is an essential component of many well known South Carolina foods, from pimento cheese to a proper tomato sandwich.
The history of the popular Southern mayonnaise brand began right here in the Palmetto State more than a century ago. An enterprising woman named Eugenia Duke started selling sandwiches to soldiers stationed near Greenville.
Duke didn't set out to start what would later become part of a condiment conglomerate. At first, she was just selling sandwiches slathered with homemade mayonnaise to soldiers stationed at Fort Sevier. In 1920, she would set up shop in downtown Greenville at the now-demolished Ottaray Hotel, selling sandwiches through the tearoom.
By that time, she was vending more than 10,000 sandwiches a day. But that legacy pales in comparison to the one jarred with a yellow lid and produced nationwide. She sold her sugar-free mayonnaise recipes to C.F. Sauer in 1929, who opened the first Duke's factory on the banks of the Reedy River in downtown Greenville. And, well, the rest is history.
Duke's uses abound in the kitchen -- there is even an entire cookbook dedicated to Duke's recipes. The United States' most popular condiment (yes, it beats out ketchup) can be used to concoct everything you'd find at a Lowcountry picnic, from coleslaw to pimento cheese to chicken salad.