Years again, on a night in Awendaw, South Carolina, a nine-year-old woman named Charlotte made dinner for her household. Charlotte’s mom had simply stepped out to are likely to an emergency, and the kid took it upon herself to gentle the range and prepare dinner up a meal of rice and fried liver, full with a wealthy, brown gravy created from the fond left behind within the skillet. Now at age 81, the famend Gullah Geechee chef Charlotte Jenkins says, “I all the time watched my mom prepare dinner and loved being together with her within the kitchen, so I figured it could be no downside for me to prepare dinner as I’d seen her do.” And she or he was proper. When her mom known as to test in, Charlotte’s brother answered the cellphone and let their mom know that Charlotte had not solely capably ready their dinner, however she’d performed very effectively—and the gravy was excellent.
From that early second, a spark was lit in chef Jenkins that couldn’t be extinguished. She held her brother’s opinion in excessive regard, and he inspired her to proceed cooking. In 1962, simply after graduating from highschool, she moved to New York Metropolis, becoming a member of different African People within the Nice Migration, a time when many Black Southerners moved north and west searching for a launch from the grips of the extremely oppressive Jim Crow South. She ultimately returned to South Carolina in 1973 to lift a household together with her late husband Frank, a fellow Lowcountry native, and in 1997, the 2 of them opened Gullah Delicacies in Mount Nice, a restaurant that served the Jenkins household’s genuine Gullah Geechee meals—pink rice, okra gumbo, shrimp and grits, and seafood casserole—for nearly twenty years.
Like Jenkins (in addition to my grandmother and most of my elders), I additionally had fond childhood reminiscences of cooking, consuming, and feeding my household. Regardless of rising up in Charleston, simply throughout the river from Mount Nice, I by no means had a chance to eat at Jenkins’ restaurant, which closed when she retired in 2014. Honestly, I didn’t find out about her work till I started my very own journey as a chef, after I began trying into the culinary historical past of my hometown. Alongside the way in which, I got here throughout a mess of Black girls cooks who, similar to Jenkins, had largely been omitted of conversations within the media round Southern cooking.
This previous March, on the annual Charleston Wine + Meals competition, I had the nice pleasure of main a cooking class with Jenkins and her daughter Kesha, the place we taught our friends find out how to prepare dinner an ideal pot of rice, in addition to conch stew and marriage ceremony punch, two recipes from her seminal 2010 cookbook, Gullah Delicacies: By Land and By Sea. “The conch stew to me was all the time an genuine Gullah dish,” Jenkins tells me, “one thing that wasn’t even an on a regular basis factor for us as a result of conch was generally arduous to get. And again within the days once we received conch, it was thrilling to arrange it. It’s on this odd shell, and you must work to get the meat, and to me, the ultimate product is scrumptious.” The marriage punch was a recipe of Kesha’s, a refreshing, celebratory concoction of moonshine, recent sliced fruit, and Kool-Support that packed a robust punch (pun supposed). Jenkins stored a watchful eye on me as I prepped and cooked the stew alongside her. After working so a few years in skilled kitchens, I’m nice underneath stress, however no chef in any restaurant gave me the sensation that Jenkins gave me then—a glance that stated, “I belief you to make this, however I’m holding my eye on you simply in case.”
Kesha, Jenkins, and I additionally mentioned the function that Gullah Geechee tradition performed in creating American delicacies and its roots within the African diaspora. When enslaved West Africans had been first introduced from their fertile rice-growing homeland to the low-lying barrier islands of South Carolina, they retained their tradition and group as a lot as they might. Many recognizable Southern American dishes, comparable to collard greens, cornbread, and candy potato pie, had been developed throughout this time, and are emblematic of the Gullah tradition’s enduring affect.Â
Regardless of current for hundreds of years within the South Carolina Lowcountry, Gullah Geechee cooking remains to be thought of a brand new idea to many, and Jenkins acknowledged that the buyers and revenue her restaurant required merely weren’t there when she wanted them. “I didn’t get that help,” Jenkins tells me. “The help I received was from my household, my financial savings, and our group—that’s what stored us going.” However whereas it was round, her Gullah Delicacies restaurant was instrumental in placing the area’s foodways on the map. “No person appeared to learn about Gullah meals then, or that Gullah Geechee individuals exist and have a mode of cooking,” Jenkins says. “The restaurant woke individuals as much as that.”
Regardless of being retired, Jenkins continues to reply the decision she felt as a younger woman and hasn’t stopped cooking since; after a few years, she’s nonetheless mentoring younger cooks, cooking for household and pals, and catering non-public occasions with Kesha at her facet. At 2023’s Charleston Wine + Meals competition, a yr earlier than our cooking class collectively, Jenkins and different Gullah matriarchs from throughout the Lowcountry had been honored at a dinner ready by younger girls cooks with ties to the area people. “I noticed all of the work I’d performed didn’t go in useless,” Jenkins says. “It means loads to me to show others about our delicacies and tradition,” she provides, “as a result of if I don’t share, it dies. However by sharing, I can maintain it alive.”Â
