Lowcountry Highs
From the column "Ravenous," Ulster Publishing
We really just went down there to eat. I mean I’ve wanted to go there for years, to experience its great architecture, the old European style streets oozing history and southern charm. But as I found myself saying en route to one of my little kids, who had just asked me why we were going to Charleston, South Carolina, “We’re going to eat seafood.”
And we loved the sunny skies, our visits to five beaches where the kids could dig holes and chase seagulls and run, and we loved walking around historic streets with beautifully restored houses while the kids took the rare simultaneous nap. While it wasn’t quite shorts weather, usually a sweater sufficed, and in the middle of this especially harsh winter in the Northeast it was a treat to experience temps in the 60s. I loved the flat landscapes, all those bridges over all that water, the flowers blooming everywhere, but most of all the ubiquitous sprawling live oaks dripping with great plumes of the silvery filigree stuff called “Spanish moss.” Even though it’s neither Spanish nor moss, it’s still gorgeous, and just looking at it makes you want to sit on the porch and sip a mint julep.
But it was really all about the seafood. Soon after our plane landed, we headed for Hank’s, a restored disco that was once a restored warehouse, and dug into piles of fresh seafood: a dozen sweet, sweet oysters on the half shell, creamy she-crab soup (it traditionally included the roe of the crab but I have heard no longer does), a custom platter of incredibly fresh mixed seafood, fried lightly without any greasiness, and the signature dish of the “Holy City” of Charleston, shrimp and grits. This originated as breakfast shrimp simply sautéed in butter and served with “hominy,” the traditional Charleston way to refer to prepared grits (as they come from the mill they’re called “grist”), but has evolved into something that often includes swine and/or tomato. Hank’s version of shrimp and grits was the perfect way to usher in a week of Lowcountry life: fat fresh shrimp with the texture of lobster, not mealy like frozen is, bathed in a tomato-based sauce that had layers of flavor as fine as any soupe de poisson from France. I scouted out the reason and it turns out that Frank McMahon, Hank’s chef, trained at Le Bernardin.
Armed with editors’ and readers’ picks from the local alternative weekly, the Charleston City Paper, personal advice from chefs and other members of charlestonfoodcompany.com, message boards on eGullet.com and roadfood.com, I was ready to eat my way around the Lowcountry. The cuisine is famed for right-off-the-boat seafood and the hearty, stick-to-your ribs, complexly delicious Gullah food, the cuisine of a people descended from African slaves, with much of their culture and cooking methods preserved intact. Besides Africa, the food of the Lowcountry has multicultural roots from the Caribbean, France, Spain, England, the Far East and Native America.
Oysters were in season and we had them occasionally fried but mostly simply raw on the half shell--every day but one of our week down there. We had a few crab cakes that were savory and un-stingy with crabmeat. We had local fresh fried grouper and flounder. At one Charleston venue, Hyman’s, famous for its seafood, the whole flounder was bigger than the plate, scored so that big fat crispy squares popped out to be dipped in spicy sweet red pepper jelly. A buttermilk flounder I had at Ollie’s in Beaufort, south of Charleston, was tasty, too, although the service was nightmarish and the she-crab soup lame. The grouper I had in a chain-like place in Charleston called A.W. Shucks was coated with a disconcertingly odd spice mixture, but the oysters were good.
Our last three nights we went to three different seafood restaurants, two of them really good. At one, The Steamer, I tried Frogmore stew, also known as Lowcountry boil, a mixture of fresh shrimp, sausage (in this case kielbasa but probably not originally), red potatoes and corn on the cob, all steamed in a tasty seafood spice mix.
I grew not too shy to order raw and fried oysters at the same meal, both very different but both delicious. The most common way the locals eat their oysters is at an oyster roast and we saw signs advertising them all through the countryside. Communities and churches seemed to be throwing them left and right, like we do chicken BBQs. Sometimes it was for tsunami relief, sometimes just because it was oyster season. The week before we showed up, there had been a huge one for 10,000 people at one of Charleston’s plantations, but the oysters were brought in from elsewhere. I regret that we didn’t try any roasted oysters, which are actually covered with wet burlap sacks and grilled on barbecue grates. I bet they’re just as good as raw or fried.
There was also great southern cooking to be eaten--I was raised on southern food and I love it: fried chicken, greens, cornbread and hush puppies, rich vegetable casseroles, macaroni and cheese. At another famous, much-written-up place, Jestine’s, we combined seafood and soul. Cheap in spite of its fame, it had nice home-cooked style food. My pecan whiting was great but hubby’s steamed shrimp wasn’t as good as most, perhaps overcooked or frozen at some point in its life. The fried okra was a hit with us all, even the kids. We enjoyed the appetizer of fried green tomato with its crunchy, very underripe sliced fruit coated in a thin crispy batter rather than the corn meal I’m used to.
Much better was Gullah Cuisine in Mount Pleasant, a residential area just outside Charleston. The $6.95 buffet was huge and every bite scrumptious: unbelievably good fried chicken, baked chicken, okra gumbo, Gullah rice, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, collards, amazing smothered cabbage, even a salad bar—sorry, no room on the plate.
Similar was Po’ Pigs Bo-B-Q in Edisto, a beach community about an hour south of town, with another heaping buffet featuring incredible chopped pork barbecue with four sauces from mustardy to vinegary to spicy—I kept sampling all of them, trying to pick a favorite. On the side was puréed “hash,” a savory mixture of chicken, pork butt, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onion and barbecue sauce.
We also had amazing barbecue and sides at a tiny back-alley place in Savannah, Georgia called Wall’s BBQ. It was the only place that has gotten lots of write-ups but didn’t have them plastered all over the walls, so we really felt like we’d stumbled across a secret. The kids both slept once again, so we stuck the stroller in a corner of the tiny place, with only three tables, and dug into luscious “devilcrab,” meaty ribs, rutabaga, collards and sweet potato pie. It was a real highlight of the trip.
Rice is the southern staple, especially in South Carolina, which was its birthplace in this country, introduced by slaves. There you’ll find it plain and topped with that smooth hash, or fancied up with tomato and bacon and called Red Rice.
We were usually too stuffed for dessert, with a couple of exceptions, that killer sweet potato pie at Wall’s, and the local Charleston-area specialty, benne wafers, which are tiny, buttery, brown-sugary cookies full of sesame seeds.
I’ll bet there are plenty of Yankee dissenters out there when I say that the best way to wash down all that great seafood and soul food is the “table wine of the South, “ sweetened iced tea. Now generally I prefer my iced tea unsweetened, with plenty of lemon, but when in Rome and all … I like it not too sweet, though, and at the help-yourself buffets I would mix sweetened and unsweetened together. If you’re still not convinced, then the local brew called Palmetto Beer went well with the food, too, both the hoppy Pale Ale and the smoother Amber.
One of things I love best about eating Down South is the classic southern breakfast. I adore grits and fluffy biscuits and the southern way with swine, whether salty strong country ham or carefully spiced sausage. But I’m picky, and want it done at least as well as I’d do it myself. Every place we tried was a little different, but in one the grits had far too much cream, in another the whites of my over-easies were runny, in another the singular sausage patty was dry and tiny. The last three breakfasts we had were at our hotel in Beaufort, and free with the room but yucky: fake eggs out of a carton, fake sausage gravy ditto, greasy little links. At least the biscuits were edible.
I brought home some White Lily flour and am experimenting with making my own. The stuff is much fluffier than what I’m used to and I’m having trouble getting it right, like the crispy without and tender within biscuits they serve up in South Carolina. I brought home some stone ground white grits, too, which are excellent. More about them next week.
We really just went down there to eat. I mean I’ve wanted to go there for years, to experience its great architecture, the old European style streets oozing history and southern charm. But as I found myself saying en route to one of my little kids, who had just asked me why we were going to Charleston, South Carolina, “We’re going to eat seafood.”
And we loved the sunny skies, our visits to five beaches where the kids could dig holes and chase seagulls and run, and we loved walking around historic streets with beautifully restored houses while the kids took the rare simultaneous nap. While it wasn’t quite shorts weather, usually a sweater sufficed, and in the middle of this especially harsh winter in the Northeast it was a treat to experience temps in the 60s. I loved the flat landscapes, all those bridges over all that water, the flowers blooming everywhere, but most of all the ubiquitous sprawling live oaks dripping with great plumes of the silvery filigree stuff called “Spanish moss.” Even though it’s neither Spanish nor moss, it’s still gorgeous, and just looking at it makes you want to sit on the porch and sip a mint julep.
But it was really all about the seafood. Soon after our plane landed, we headed for Hank’s, a restored disco that was once a restored warehouse, and dug into piles of fresh seafood: a dozen sweet, sweet oysters on the half shell, creamy she-crab soup (it traditionally included the roe of the crab but I have heard no longer does), a custom platter of incredibly fresh mixed seafood, fried lightly without any greasiness, and the signature dish of the “Holy City” of Charleston, shrimp and grits. This originated as breakfast shrimp simply sautéed in butter and served with “hominy,” the traditional Charleston way to refer to prepared grits (as they come from the mill they’re called “grist”), but has evolved into something that often includes swine and/or tomato. Hank’s version of shrimp and grits was the perfect way to usher in a week of Lowcountry life: fat fresh shrimp with the texture of lobster, not mealy like frozen is, bathed in a tomato-based sauce that had layers of flavor as fine as any soupe de poisson from France. I scouted out the reason and it turns out that Frank McMahon, Hank’s chef, trained at Le Bernardin.
Armed with editors’ and readers’ picks from the local alternative weekly, the Charleston City Paper, personal advice from chefs and other members of charlestonfoodcompany.com, message boards on eGullet.com and roadfood.com, I was ready to eat my way around the Lowcountry. The cuisine is famed for right-off-the-boat seafood and the hearty, stick-to-your ribs, complexly delicious Gullah food, the cuisine of a people descended from African slaves, with much of their culture and cooking methods preserved intact. Besides Africa, the food of the Lowcountry has multicultural roots from the Caribbean, France, Spain, England, the Far East and Native America.
Oysters were in season and we had them occasionally fried but mostly simply raw on the half shell--every day but one of our week down there. We had a few crab cakes that were savory and un-stingy with crabmeat. We had local fresh fried grouper and flounder. At one Charleston venue, Hyman’s, famous for its seafood, the whole flounder was bigger than the plate, scored so that big fat crispy squares popped out to be dipped in spicy sweet red pepper jelly. A buttermilk flounder I had at Ollie’s in Beaufort, south of Charleston, was tasty, too, although the service was nightmarish and the she-crab soup lame. The grouper I had in a chain-like place in Charleston called A.W. Shucks was coated with a disconcertingly odd spice mixture, but the oysters were good.
Our last three nights we went to three different seafood restaurants, two of them really good. At one, The Steamer, I tried Frogmore stew, also known as Lowcountry boil, a mixture of fresh shrimp, sausage (in this case kielbasa but probably not originally), red potatoes and corn on the cob, all steamed in a tasty seafood spice mix.
I grew not too shy to order raw and fried oysters at the same meal, both very different but both delicious. The most common way the locals eat their oysters is at an oyster roast and we saw signs advertising them all through the countryside. Communities and churches seemed to be throwing them left and right, like we do chicken BBQs. Sometimes it was for tsunami relief, sometimes just because it was oyster season. The week before we showed up, there had been a huge one for 10,000 people at one of Charleston’s plantations, but the oysters were brought in from elsewhere. I regret that we didn’t try any roasted oysters, which are actually covered with wet burlap sacks and grilled on barbecue grates. I bet they’re just as good as raw or fried.
There was also great southern cooking to be eaten--I was raised on southern food and I love it: fried chicken, greens, cornbread and hush puppies, rich vegetable casseroles, macaroni and cheese. At another famous, much-written-up place, Jestine’s, we combined seafood and soul. Cheap in spite of its fame, it had nice home-cooked style food. My pecan whiting was great but hubby’s steamed shrimp wasn’t as good as most, perhaps overcooked or frozen at some point in its life. The fried okra was a hit with us all, even the kids. We enjoyed the appetizer of fried green tomato with its crunchy, very underripe sliced fruit coated in a thin crispy batter rather than the corn meal I’m used to.
Much better was Gullah Cuisine in Mount Pleasant, a residential area just outside Charleston. The $6.95 buffet was huge and every bite scrumptious: unbelievably good fried chicken, baked chicken, okra gumbo, Gullah rice, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, collards, amazing smothered cabbage, even a salad bar—sorry, no room on the plate.
Similar was Po’ Pigs Bo-B-Q in Edisto, a beach community about an hour south of town, with another heaping buffet featuring incredible chopped pork barbecue with four sauces from mustardy to vinegary to spicy—I kept sampling all of them, trying to pick a favorite. On the side was puréed “hash,” a savory mixture of chicken, pork butt, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onion and barbecue sauce.
We also had amazing barbecue and sides at a tiny back-alley place in Savannah, Georgia called Wall’s BBQ. It was the only place that has gotten lots of write-ups but didn’t have them plastered all over the walls, so we really felt like we’d stumbled across a secret. The kids both slept once again, so we stuck the stroller in a corner of the tiny place, with only three tables, and dug into luscious “devilcrab,” meaty ribs, rutabaga, collards and sweet potato pie. It was a real highlight of the trip.
Rice is the southern staple, especially in South Carolina, which was its birthplace in this country, introduced by slaves. There you’ll find it plain and topped with that smooth hash, or fancied up with tomato and bacon and called Red Rice.
We were usually too stuffed for dessert, with a couple of exceptions, that killer sweet potato pie at Wall’s, and the local Charleston-area specialty, benne wafers, which are tiny, buttery, brown-sugary cookies full of sesame seeds.
I’ll bet there are plenty of Yankee dissenters out there when I say that the best way to wash down all that great seafood and soul food is the “table wine of the South, “ sweetened iced tea. Now generally I prefer my iced tea unsweetened, with plenty of lemon, but when in Rome and all … I like it not too sweet, though, and at the help-yourself buffets I would mix sweetened and unsweetened together. If you’re still not convinced, then the local brew called Palmetto Beer went well with the food, too, both the hoppy Pale Ale and the smoother Amber.
One of things I love best about eating Down South is the classic southern breakfast. I adore grits and fluffy biscuits and the southern way with swine, whether salty strong country ham or carefully spiced sausage. But I’m picky, and want it done at least as well as I’d do it myself. Every place we tried was a little different, but in one the grits had far too much cream, in another the whites of my over-easies were runny, in another the singular sausage patty was dry and tiny. The last three breakfasts we had were at our hotel in Beaufort, and free with the room but yucky: fake eggs out of a carton, fake sausage gravy ditto, greasy little links. At least the biscuits were edible.
I brought home some White Lily flour and am experimenting with making my own. The stuff is much fluffier than what I’m used to and I’m having trouble getting it right, like the crispy without and tender within biscuits they serve up in South Carolina. I brought home some stone ground white grits, too, which are excellent. More about them next week.