The USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world. With over two centuries of associated manifests, journals and logs, researchers consider the Constitution’s archives the mother lode of American maritime history. Despite the integrity of its records, USS Constitution history seems an unlikely source for the documentation of American foodways of the early 19th century. Yet it is. Carolina Gold rice was a staple aboard the USS Constitution from the time of its maiden voyage in 1798 until 1900.

On July 4, 2005, just seven weeks before the Carolina Gold Rice Symposium, the USS Constitution shipped Carolina Gold rice aboard for the first time in more than a century. This shipment, courtesy of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, validates the educational role of Carolina Gold rice today, and confirms its historic and pervasive role in American—not just in Southern—foodways.

This latest is one of a number of events that confirms the growing popularity and interest in the authenticity of Carolina Gold rice and its cuisine, the Carolina Rice Kitchen. Last summer, Thomas Keller, owner of The French Laundry and Per Se restaurants—and regarded as one of the world’s top chefs—served Carolina Gold Rice at the “Revolution in Food” event in London. This spring, PBS launched a pilot for its new series “Restoration Stories” with a segment featuring the restoration of Carolina Gold Rice. (The segment will air in 75 US cities in the next three months.) In May of this year, the Oxford American featured an article by John Martin Taylor on Dr. Richard Schulze’s repatriation of Carolina Gold rice in South Carolina.

And the Symposium has yet to take place!

At this moment dozens of Charleston’s best chefs and scholars the world over are putting the final touches on Symposium recipes and presentations. Sixty acres of Carolina Gold Rice (the first plantings of this magnitude in 80 years) ripen in fields along the South Carolina coast. Rare breeds squab and pork fatten on Carolina Gold Rice feed for the first time since the Depression. Artisan brewers are sourcing recipes for authentic ginger beer and rice wine. A local Sea Island grower tends olives in anticipation of the production of his estate oil for the Rice Bread Exhibition. The staffs of the CGRF, the Culinary Institute of Charleston, the Charleston Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art and Middleton Place are all engaged in preparations for your arrival.

Glenn Roberts
President & CEO

The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is pleased to announce that the Biltmore Estate Wine Company will be providing wines for the event receptions!

The Charleston Museum Reception on Thursday, 18 August from 6-7:30 will feature a Biltmore Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and the Biltmore Estate Chardonnay Sur Lies.

The reception at the Gibbes Museum of Art on Friday, 19 August from 5:15-6:30 will serve Biltmore Estate Wine Company’s Biltmore Estate Pinot Grigio and Biltmore Estate Merlot.

Biltmore Estate Cabernet Sauvignon
Suggestions:
Serve With: Beef stew, meatloaf and smoked Gouda
Serving Temp: 58-62°F

Cellar practices:
The juice is fermented in contact with the skins allowing for proper color and flavor development. After fermentation, the wine is pressed and transferred to French or American barrels. After 6-8 months of barrel aging, the wine is blended and bottled.

Description:
Color: Dark red cherry
Nose: Raspberries, cherries and plum
Taste: Soft tannins, medium bodied, round, fruity with vanilla

Biltmore Estate Merlot
Suggestions:
Serve With: Spicy chicken, tuna steak, crawfish and Reblochon cheese
Serving Temp: 58-62°F

Cellar practices:
The juice is fermented with skin contact allowing for proper color and flavor development. After fermentation, the wine is pressed and transferred to stainless steel tanks, French or American barrels. After 6-10 months of barrel aging, the wine is blended and bottled.

Description:
Color: Cherry red
Nose: Combination of fruit, spice, blackberries and vanilla
Taste: Very pleasant, fruity at first with soft tannins, slight woodiness and easy to drink

Biltmore Estate Chardonnay Sur Lies
Suggestions:
Serve With: Seafood, chicken, pasta, and light dishes
Serving Temp: 48 - 50°F

Cellar practices:
Fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks and wood barrels at a low temperature until fermentation is complete. After fermentation, the wine is stirred to allow for proper contact with the lees. About 10% of this blend has been aged in wood barrels. The wine is than blended and bottled.

Description:
Color: Yellow/green
Nose: Tropical fruit, pineapple, peach, persimmon, and mint
Taste: Fresh and fruity, buttery, smooth wine with a medium body

Biltmore Estate Pinot Grigio
Suggestions:
Serve With: Salmon, seafood, and pasta
Serving Temp: 48 - 50°F

Cellar practices:
Juice is fermented in stainless steel tanks at a low temperature until complete. This wine is then blended and bottled.

Description:
Color: Light yellow straw
Nose: Pears and mint
Taste: Lingering citrus aftertaste, well balanced fruit, good overall mouth feel, crisp and clean

Due to personal circumstances, Karen Hess will be unable to attend the Carolina Gold Rice Symposium to participate in a panel and speak on the “Carolina Rice Kitchen.” Not wanting to lose her valuable input to this event, the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation arranged for John Martin Taylor (Hoppin’ John) to travel to New York for a recorded interview with Mrs. Hess.

In lieu of personal appearances, a video recording of John Martin Taylor interviewing Mrs. Hess will be shown during the Symposium. The interview is just over thirty minutes long and has elicited a good bit of interest from the national culinary community. We appreciate all of the work that both Karen Hess and John Martin Taylor have done in this field and value the opportunity to record their discussion for posterity.

by Joseph Opala

I first heard about Priscilla on a boat trip. It was 1997, and Edward Ball had come to Sierra Leone to research his book Slaves in the Family. Ed asked me to take him to Bunce Island, the British slave castle, and as we cruised upriver he told me about his ancestor — Elias Ball II — the South Carolina planter who purchased a little girl he called “Priscilla” from a slave ship that came from Sierra Leone. Amazingly, Ed had managed to link Priscilla to her modern descendants, a black family still living in Charleston today. Now, he was taking his research back to Africa to the home Priscilla lost forever.

By then, I had lived in Sierra Leone for 17 years teaching at the university and doing research on Bunce Island. Cutting back the vegetation covering the ruins, I had identified the castle’s various structures: the fortification, “factory house,” offices, storerooms, watchtowers, and slave prison. Drawing on historical records, I had also learned that the castle shipped many of its captives to South Carolina and Georgia. Now, walking through the ruins, I showed Ed the various buildings in a conversation that later appeared in his prize-winning book.

My greatest pleasure, though, was sharing my historical findings with Sierra Leoneans. Years before Ed’s visit when I first announced that I had traced some of the slaves taken away from Sierra Leone to a particular place in America, people were ecstatic. Sierra Leoneans never dreamed of finding their lost family, and the response was so strong I was taken aback. Suddenly, every newspaper and radio station in the country wanted to interview me, and many schools and community groups wanted me to speak. Everywhere I went the questions tumbled out: How did you trace the slaves? Where were they taken? Why were they taken there? What are their descendants like today?

Tracing Sierra Leone’s lost people was possible because of one thing — rice. Rice was South Carolina and Georgia’s staple crop in the 18th century, and rice planters in the “lowcountry” region of those colonies were willing to pay high prices for Africans brought from the “Rice Coast,” the traditional rice-growing area stretching from what is now Senegal and Gambia down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Lowcountry planters even knew about “Bance Island,” as it was called then. I found auction notices in US archives advertising slaves from “Bance Island” and “Sierra Leon.” When rice planters saw those words, they understood the meaning — Africans with rice-growing skills.

Modern Sierra Leoneans still identify themselves as “rice-eaters,” and they were amazed to learn that the “Gullah” people, the African Americans living in coastal South Carolina and Georgia today, have preserved many cultural traits from their part of West Africa. Sierra Leoneans asked me when they could meet the Gullahs, and in 1989 I helped organize a “Gullah Homecoming.” Thirteen Gullah community leaders came to Sierra Leone for a week, attending a state dinner in their honor, touring a rice farm, and visiting Bunce Island. Sierra Leoneans were so overjoyed at having their lost family “back home” that their guests said the public attention made them feel like “movie stars.”

The Gullah Homecoming was such a big success I thought my work was done, but soon afterwards Sierra Leoneans began asking me if I could arrange another, more specific homecoming. They were delighted to meet the Gullah community leaders who came to their country, they said, but they pointed out that their visitors had no specific link to Sierra Leone other than the fact that some of their ancestors had likely come from the Rice Coast. They wanted to know if I could identify a specific family whose ancestors came from Sierra Leone.

At first, I doubted such a direct connection could be made, but the answer soon came in a form I never expected. I discovered that in 1931 a linguist named Lorenzo Turner found a Gullah woman who could sing a song in the Mende language of Sierra Leone, a song passed down in her family for generations. Locating Turner’s recording in a music archive in the US, I played it in one Mende village after another in Sierra Leone. Many people told me they recognized their language in the song, but not the song itself. Then, in the village of Senehun Ngola a woman named Bendu Jabati began singing along. “My grandmother taught me that song,” she said; it’s the oldest song we know.

Excited by finding Bendu in Sierra Leone, I traveled to the US with my research colleague, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, to search for someone who might still know the song in America. In Harris Neck, a tiny village on the Georgia coast, we met Mary Moran, 69, daughter of the woman who sang the song for Turner in the 1931. Mary remembered her mother’s song, and was stunned to learn that a woman in Africa could also sing it. Then, seven years later during a lull in Sierra Leone’s terrible civil war, I arranged for Mary and her family to come to Africa. On a bright dry season day in 1997 they flew by helicopter to Senehun Ngola and met Bendu Jabati. Sierra Leoneans followed the “Moran Family Homecoming” avidly on their local radio and TV.

Edward Ball arrived in Sierra Leone just a few weeks after the Moran Family Homecoming, and as he told me about Priscilla, I realized that he had done what I could never do working mainly on the African side. Sierra Leoneans were already asking me to organize yet another even more specific Gullah homecoming: Could I go beyond a family? Could I identify a specific person taken from Sierra Leone during the slave trade and find his direct descendants in America? Ed told me about Thomas Martin, Priscilla’s modern descendant, in Charleston. I wondered if Mr. Martin wanted to come to Africa. I knew that if Sierra Leoneans heard about him, they would certainly want him to come.

But Sierra Leone’s civil war erupted once again, and I was forced to flee the country. Then, six years later while living in the US, I returned to Sierra Leone after peace was restored to tell the government about Edward Ball’s discovery and to obtain a letter of invitation for the Martin family. Working on a documentary video on Bunce Island with filmmaker Jacque Metz, I hoped the Martins would come to Sierra Leone as part of our film project. Sierra Leonean officials were excited at the news, and gave me a warmly written letter. Thomas Martin had passed away by then, but traveling to Charleston in 2003, I presented the letter to his daughter, Thomalind Martin Polite. She was delighted.

Then, a year later while doing research for our documentary film, I found what I never expected see — the original records of the Hare, the slave ship that took Priscilla to America. Sitting in the ornate reading room of the New-York Historical Society I held the dispatch Captain Godfrey sent from Sierra Leone on April 8th, 1756, the day before he sailed for Charleston, and another he wrote on June 25th soon after arriving in America. Then, to my utter astonishment, I was holding the actual records of the sale of the Africans from the Hare. Running my eyes quickly down the list of buyers, I saw it: “Elias/St. John’s/Ball — 3 boys — 2 girls.” There was Priscilla: one of the two little girls.

But the Hare’s records held yet another surprise — the ship’s homeport. Edward Ball had concluded that the Hare was a British ship owned by Bunce Island, but the records showed that while the Hare stopped at Bunce Island and conducted some of its business there, it was actually a Rhode Island vessel owned by Samuel and William Vernon, wealthy merchants in Newport. The foremost center in North America for ships engaged in the Atlantic slave trade, Newport sent nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and exiled almost 100,000 people to bondage in the West Indies and the Southern Colonies.

I knew that some Rhode Island community leaders had been trying to tell the story of the Newport slave trade for years, but were meeting resistance. I was sure that the story of Priscilla — the story of just one little girl exiled by a Newport ship — would be the best way to get the message across, and so I shared my findings. Community leaders soon established “Project Priscilla” with the goal of raising one dollar each from 10,000 Rhode Islanders to send Thomalind Martin Polite to Sierra Leone and then bring her up to their state after she returns. Project Priscilla aims at joining together all three communities — Rhode Island, Sierra Leone, and South Carolina — in an “act of remembrance.”

When Thomalind goes to Sierra Leone this year, and then later to Rhode Island, I think my work finally will be done. After all, I don’t see how it can get more specific than this.

Joseph Opala, an anthropologist from James Madison University, has been added to the symposium program. Opala, who has recently returned from filming for the documentary based on this Lowcountry connection and homecoming, will present “PRISCILLA'S HOMECOMING: A Gullah Woman Returns to the ‘Rice Coast’”

For additional information on Opala’s research and Priscilla’s Homecoming, visit the following websites:

http://www.yale.edu/glc/priscilla/

http://www.statehouse-sl.org/pris-homecom-may30.html

http://www.africanaheritage.com/Priscillas_Homecoming.asp

The Carolina Gold Rice Bread Exposition at the Culinary Institute of Charleston will kick off with tastings of Rice Bread made from traditional recipes and discussion of the history and process of baking Rice Bread. Taking part are:

Chef Bernd Gronert of the Culinary Institute of Charleston is a native of Germany, where he was educated. A certified Chef and a certified Master Pastry Chef with additional certifications in the art of sugar work, he started a private school (together with his twin brother) in marzipan, chocolate and sugar design, leading towards the master degree program in pastry arts in Germany. After two years, he accepted a position with Johnson & Wales in the United States and taught pastry arts for ten years at various J&W campuses. Chef Gronert has competed successfully in multiple food shows around the country and has been teaching pastry arts at Trident Technical College (now known as the Culinary Institute of Charleston) for the past 8 years. Aside from teaching, Gronert owns and operates both Rococo Bakery (locations in West Ashley, Summerville, Kiawah, and Florence, SC) and a micro farm where he produces fruits and berries to use in his baking and to sell at the Farmers Markets. As Chef puts it, “Being as single father of a now 14-year-old rounds out my every busy day.”

Chef Kay Rentschler holds a degree in English literature and graduated from Madeleine Kamman’s Professional Chef’s Course in Newton, MA. After working in Boston and New York restaurants and as a test cook for The Ladies Home Journal, Kay moved in 1988 to Berlin, where she worked as a pastry chef for Gaston Lenôtre. In 1994 she returned to the United States to open and operate The Storm Cafe in Middlebury, VT, a small, European-style restaurant. In 1997 she returned to Boston, joining the staff of Cook's Illustrated in 1999, first as test kitchen director and later as food editor. At Cook’s Kay wrote numerous articles and developed recipes for both the magazine and cookbooks. She co-scripted two seasons of the PBS show, America’s Test Kitchen, appearing on-camera in the first season and serving as Culinary Director and executive chef in the second. Since leaving Cook’s Illustrated in 2001, Kay has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Dining Section. Her articles have also appeared in Gourmet Magazine. Currently she lives on Folly Beach outside Charleston.

Dr. Theodore Rosengarten is a noted scholar of southern history and an award winning author living in McClellenville, SC. Along with consulting for museums, municipalities, public schools, colleges and universities on projects relating to African-American history, environmental studies, and the Holocaust, Rosengarten has taught at the University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has written numerous books and articles, including All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, and A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life, edited with Dale Rosengarten. In 2003, he wrote the article “Remembrance of Things Past: Rice Breads of the Lowcountry” with Rafael Rosengarten, his son, for Kiawah Island Legends Magazine. Rosengarted received the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest honor, in 2002.

Dr. David S. Shields is the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina where he holds dual appointments to the departments of English and History. Active in many scholarly organizations, Shields has published numerous books and articles plus keeps a busy lecture schedule. Dr. Shields is also an aficionado of food—good food. His interest in food has gradually shifted from recreation to a focus on its role in the culture and society of early America, documented in his research and writing. While serving as Executive Director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston, he organized Charleston’s first serious conference on food in March 2003. The conference, which mixed scholars with practitioners, was called “Carolina Lowcountry and Caribbean Cuisines.”

Taking part in the Brunch are:
Chef Aaron Seigel, Blossom Café
Chef Robert Dickson, Robert's of Charleston
Chef Ryan Herman, fish restaurant
Chef Keith Clark, Bookstore Café
Chef Lenny LaForgia, The Mustard Seed
Chef John Scoff, Charleston Cooks!
Chef Richard King, Old Village Post House
Chef Ciaran Duffy, Tristan
Chef Chris Thomas, CAKE
Chef Kevin Jordan, Kennedy’s Market and Bakery
Just Fresh Bakery and Café (Palmetto Food Groups)

More than 4 million people visit Charleston every year, but only a fraction of them travel less than half an hour north of the city to the legendary plantations along the Ashley River. Of the three surviving plantations, Middleton Place, a National Historic Landmark, offers the most complete picture of 18th- and 19th-century plantation life: the rice culture, its dependence upon slave labor, and the opulence to which the Carolina planter families grew accustomed…

Middleton Place was featured in the June 25th edition of US News & World Reports in an article entitled “Ins & Outs: Charleston’s Ashley River Plantations.”

William Rubel and Glenn Roberts have been busy documenting and creating a recipe for a traditional beverage to be served at the traditional plantation lunch on Friday during the Carolina Gold Rice Symposium. Both an authentic, low-alcohol Ginger Beer—based on recipes in The Carolina Housewife—and a Huguenot recipe for a cold rice drink are under consideration. The latter is a non-alcoholic punch that is related to the Central American/Mexican “Horchata”.

Jimmy Hagood (of Tidewater Foods & Catering, LLC, Specialty Foods South, LLC, and the BlackJack Barbecue Cooking Team) has joined the planning committee for the Carolina Gold Rice Symposium and will play a vital role in preparing both the Friday plantation lunch at the Charleston Museum and the Rare Breeds lunch at Middleton Place. Hagood, a Charleston native, is well-known for his penchant for good food and his interest in preserving and re-invigorating regional foodways.

This past spring, Hagood cemented his stature in the barbecue world with his team’s performance in the Memphis in May World Barbecue Cooking Championship. The Symposium Planners knew without a doubt that the Ossabaw Island Pigs from Caw Caw Pastured Pork would be in the right hands when they received this email from Jimmy:

This past weekend 250 teams competed in the Memphis in May World Barbecue Cooking Championship. The BlackJack Barbecue Cooking Team placed 5th in the very competitive Pork Shoulder category. After a first place finish in the North Carolina State Championship last summer, we knew we were closing in on a top five finish in Memphis and our hard work has paid off.

The Super Bowl of Swine in Memphis is the grand daddy of all cooking contests in the world and we knew we had to be on top of our game to compete. We had an 8th Place finish in 2001, our first year, but this year we topped most of the competition. It’s very gratifying to know that we worked together as a team, each person doing his or her part, and the sum of all this work is much greater than I envisioned. We even had an opportunity to be filmed by the Food Channel as we were preparing our product for cooking and then again as we were preparing our site for judging.

All in all the past week was exhilarating and we are looking forward to participating in future contests. I want to thank my fellow team mates Andrew Hagood, JB McCarty, Dever McCarty, Doug Jones and my wife Anne Marie. I also want to thank our sponsors for their contributions to our success.

Congratulations to Jimmy & the Blackjack Barbecue Team!

Tidewater Catering’s and BlackJack Barbecue Cooking Team’s Big Red Rig – The Ultimate Barbecue Experience. This newest addition is 27’ long and has 2 state-of-the-art wood burning cookers.

by Emile DeFelice

I knew I was getting in deep when I started feeding our heritage pigs heritage food scraps! But then again, the community aspect of food production and consumption is not new at all, so a small time rare pig grower and an artisinal miller are a fairly predictable pair, but like their products, a little rare these days.

That’s one of the small ways Caw Caw Creek Pastured Pork effects big changes, and allowed us to cut costs, capture value in waste, conserve rare breeds, improve the environment, all the while providing better meat.

Our pigs enjoy an enormous space with pasture, crops to glean, and forest to mast. When I first started raising pigs for home use, I carted away two van loads of organic refuse from the local health food supermarket a week, and made some delicious pork. As the numbers of pigs grew, I knew that being smart about procuring food would lower costs and make pigs happy—and tasty. Our main supplemental food gift comes from my old friend Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills.

Glenn has been a major supporter of our farm since I began as one of his purveyors in his former career as an executive with a group of fine dining establishments, during my former career as a produce grower. We both developed specialties arising from that time, and now work together in a new context of historical and slow food production, and waste disposal service!

From the mill, we receive weekly truckloads of corn tailings, wheat middlings, rice hulls, and rice bran. We mix this with one day expired certified organic dairy, egg, and tofu products, for a meal that pigs literally stack themselves three high to get at. Pigs just love the crazy mixture of chocolate milk, yogurts, eggs, half and half, and the mill by-products serve to congeal the mix and provide extra energy with small bits of grain throughout. Transforming waste into a core ingredient of our feed program benefits both giver and receiver, and most of all the pigs. We also receive periodic organic whole corn, wheat, and rice from Anson Mills, making our pork not only delicious, but inimitable.

And—it is positively the best job ever for farm children, opening and dumping containers and making a solid mess of themselves!

In addition, Glenn and I have planted different crops on certified organic fields such as heritage corn, wheat, peas, and rice, in a minimum impact setting and in the case of the peas and rice, hoping to naturalize these plants for different environmental and forage benefits.

This summer, we thought it would be fun to serve you heritage meat raised on heritage grains. Carolina Gold Rice Foundation will serve some of the rarest pigs in the world, the Ossabaw Island Pig, that will be finished on Carolina Gold Rice. The dark and well marbled Ossabaw meat is prized in New York City and by the greatest chefs in the United States—but, for the most part, they can’t get it. You will though, and we hope you enjoy it.

Emile DeFelice of Caw Caw Creek Pastured Pork in St. Matthews is the current president of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.