Interview by Glenn Roberts, April 6, 2008

Slow Food, an organization founded in Italy in 1986 and devoted to food diversity, is both benefactor and recipient in the recent explosive growth of worldwide interest in sustainability, small niche farming and local food. Slow Food’s sweeping popularity emanates from Carlo Petrini, Slow Food founder, in this simple philosophical declaration: “Support good, clean and fair food.” Petrini’s tenacious advocacy of Slow Food’s philosophy resulted in an astonishing grassroots gathering of five thousand small farmers from around the world in Turin, Italy, at Terra Madre, an event organized by Slow Food to promote local food in 2004. One of those farmers was Emile DeFelice, owner of Caw Caw Creek Pastured Pork in Columbia, South Carolina. “I arrived at the Turin airport and the diversity of farmers was amazing, almost Disneyesque…like a convention of hats from around the world…I’d never witnessed anything like it,” Mr. DeFelice exclaims. “You know how some people speak of epiphany in their lives? I had a series of daily epiphanies like pealing back the layers of an onion…every farmer I met at Terra Madre seemed to vault my thinking toward new ideas...I was completely overwhelmed.” “My experience at Terra Madre compelled me to reflect in earnest upon the way I farm and to consider why my life in farming until then had seemed so difficult,” says Mr. DeFelice. “I realized my challenges were very small compared to many of the farmers I met like the Yak herder who lived in the open for months every year to graze and protect his flock…who farms like that anymore? I realized I needed to commit to sustainable farming on a whole new level and I decided then and there to go for it,” declares Mr. DeFelice. “The decision I made at Terra Madre led me to successful, sustainable and humane pasture pork farming and wide ranging advocacy for the farming and food issues I believe in, and, you know what, life and farming is much easier, more exciting and definitely more rewarding now,” says Mr. DeFelice.

Fast forward four years and it is obvious that Emile DeFelice has nurtured a vigorous national platform for his farming and food advocacy efforts: five years as board member and advocacy coordinator for Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, candidate for Commissioner of the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, committee member for many national sustainable farming policy groups and one very special appointment …Board Member of The Ark of Taste for Slow Food USA. “The Slow Food Ark of Taste is just that”, says Mr. DeFelice, “a collection of foods that have remarkable flavor.” “But those foods the Ark of Taste supports are threatened in some way and benefit from the Ark’s focus on unique flavor and cultural importance.” “The power to improve and sustain these important foods evolves from a national and international audience that respects and responds to the activities of The Ark of Taste,” says Mr. DeFelice. “So Slow Food International and Slow Food USA promote these unique and flavorful foods by ‘boarding’ them onto the Slow Food Ark.” Mr. DeFelice says “the selection process for boarding foods onto the Ark is extensive and involves multiple tastings by professional chefs, submission and review of foodways documentation, verification and identy preservation and a rigorous discussion and voting protocol.” “Few foods are boarded onto the Ark of Taste with only one voting session and the Ark almost never boards a food with a unanimous vote,” says Mr. DeFelice.

“I was surprised and thrilled that Carolina Gold Rice was boarded onto the Slow Food Ark of Taste after my first submission with a unanimous vote,” exclaims Mr. DeFelice. “The chefs and Ark of Taste board members were knocked out by the flavor appeal and texture of our rice.” But Mr. DeFelice says he was not prepared for “the level of enthusiasm and fascination by the Ark of Taste chefs and board members with the foodways of Carolina Gold Rice Middlins (rice grits).” “We had to request additional rice for a second middlins tasting…that had never happened before as far as I know,” says Mr. DeFelice. “I’d say the Ark boarding of Carolina Gold Rice is a grand slam for South Carolina and the foodways of the Carolina Rice Kitchen,” declares Mr. DeFelice. “This is also an affirmation of the hard work by everyone at the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation.”

Emile DeFelice thinks Slow Food will become the primary grassroots change agent for food quality and environmental impact advocacy in the USA over the next decade: “Just think of it, five years ago New York was the only East Coast center for a Slow Food events…today there are three vibrant convivia (the term for local Slow Food membership groups) right here in South Carolina alone and over one hundred nationally.” “And, of particular importance for the future of Carolina Gold Rice, Slow Food Nation (the national Slow Food event planned for Labor Day weekend in San Francisco this year) will include Carolina Rice Bread, an oral history of Carolina Rice Farmers, chef demonstrations of Carolina Rice Kitchen dishes and food events incorporating our rice in ground-breaking regional food menus by the top chefs in America.” “Most of the information to support Carolina Rice at Slow Food Nation will come from the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation,” says DeFelice. “Inclusion in the Slow Food Ark of Taste and support within the Slow Food Nation series of food events has the potential to revive serious international interest in Carolina rice, something we all care deeply about,” declares DeFelice.

The Board of Directors, Officers and members of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation are grateful for the advocacy and passionate support of Carolina Gold Rice repatriation by Emile DeFelice. Mr. DeFelice has rendered a remarkable and lasting contribution to our efforts. We salute and thank him.

MORE INFORMATION: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/ark/gold_rice.html

CONTACT EMILE DEFELICE: (803) 917-0794, emile.defelice@gmail.com

by David S. Shields

“If you grow it, they will come.” From the early 18th century to the early 20th century, they came in clouds, arriving lean and hungry from the breeding grounds of the north in August, just as the panicles of rice ripened in the fields of Carolina and Georgia. Planters dispatched squads of noisy children to scare off the hungry feeders, rigged networks of bells and mechanical clappers in their fields, or discharged guns when a flock was spotted descending on a paddy. It inspired a multitude of names: butter-bird (Jamaica), bobolink (in the north), reed-bird (Pennsylvania), ortolan de ris (Louisiana), rice bunting (American ornithologists). In Carolina it has ever been called rice bird, the name the English naturalist Mark Catesby found in use when he resided in Charleston from 1722 to 1726 researching his Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas. Even its scientific name—emberiza orizivora—linked the creature to its avidity for consuming rice. From August to April they haunted the skies of the Lowcountry filling the fields with their resonant songs. “Their notes are few, but the intonation is more distinct than that of any other bird; it resembles the tones produced by a musical box more than any other thing to which I can compare it.”

The males are changeable in appearance. In summer their feathers turn brownish yellow, like that of the female, with the back streak brown-black and the undersides dull yellow. This is how they appear when they arrive lean in late summer. In Carolina they gorge and fatten, and their plumage transforms. The upper part of the head, wings, tail and sides of the neck turn black. The back of the head becomes cream colored. The Scapulars, rump, and tail turn white, and the lower segment of the back bluish white. When fully mature the average rice bird is seven and one half inches long with a wing span of almost a foot. It rarely appears alone. When one descends upon a rice stalk, the tail tucks in for stability and operates as a stabilizer as it perches on the flexible panicles.

While the rice planters dreaded the depredations of the bird on their crops, the arrival of the rice bird was not treated as entirely negative thing. One salubrious effect of their whole grain diet was the mellowness of their flesh. Rice bird ranked with the canvasback duck as the premier avian delicacy on the southern table. In the foremost sporting magazine of the 19th-century, The Spirit of the Times, a reporter rhapsodized about the culinary virtues of rice birds: “They are served in several styles, a la cuisine, in the most notable restaurants; however different may be the methods of treating their rich, fat bodies, in the cooking and dressing, they always please the exquisite taste and palate of the gastronomist. Yet I know no better mode of cooking and dressing them than to place them in rows strung above a moderate fire, and under them a dripping pan well supplied with pieces of toasted bread, to received the rich and luscious drippings, that will exude from them. Allow them to cook thus gently, occasionally turning, so as not to have them over-roasted, as to one’s taste determine the portion of salt and black pepper should be put into each bird.

They also afford an excellent pie, by the addition of a half-pint of rice, boiled, half pint of milk, add the yolks of two eggs, then place the birds, seasoned with all the usual spices, into the pie-pan; let it bake slowly until perfectly done. Oh! Ye Gods! What a pie! What a dish!” [29, 36 (October 15, 1859), 425]. The intensity of this gourmand’s enthusiasm suggests one reason why the rice bird suffered a precipitous fall in its population over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Market gunners decimated the population at the same time that hurricanes and market forces caused the decline and commercial collapse of southeastern rice culture. Habitat destruction doomed the big flocks. By the mid-20th century the rice bird was a rare visitor to the skies of Carolina and by the end of the century, a protected species.

So when the rice birds appeared for the first time in any living person’s memory over beds of Carolina Gold this last growing season, there was cause for celebration.

In this photograph taken over the fields of the Clemson Agricultural Research Station, we see them as they appear in every literary memoir of plantation life—bunched, colorful, hungry, and excited, with their eyes on the prize—ripening rice.
Photos: Merle Shepard

At its October meeting, the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation Board agreed toallocate $900 to underwrite a search of the rice fields of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in the hopes of finding the primitive form of Carolina Gold in its original locale of cultivation. While the circumstantial history of Carolina Gold’s transit to the Lowcountry remains obscure, there is circumstantial evidence about where the grain originated; on the south end of a long peninsula on the south coast of an orchid-shaped island in east Indonesia, known as South Sulawesi. Once the center of maritime commerce on the South Asian seas, and still the home of a robust ship-building industry, South Sulawesi has long exported rice grown in the fields inland from the port of Ujang Pandang (now known as Makassar). Rice cultivation dominates the province’s agriculture. The Board hopes that among the several strains currently in cultivation one might be the progenitor of the elegant, flavorful gold seed rice that came to dominate the Lowcountry landscape sometime after the 1770s. Support from the CGRF will pay for the transportation, lodging, and labor expenses of an Indonesian assistant professor, Mr. Carolus Rante, from Sam Ratulangi University, Manado, N. Sulawesi. Mr.Rante is from the Tanah Toraja area of S. Sulawesi where Carolina Gold might have originated. He will survey and collect local seed varieties. Because much of the material culture of the area, including the distinctive funeral ceremonies, is traditional, Board members hope that agriculture too may retain a strong traditional component, preserving old strain rice varieties. Because the international transit of seeds and agricultural materials is subject to rigorous regulation, the Board has taken care to secure the proper permits through the Plant Protection and Quarantine Service of the U. S. Department of Agriculture that will enable the transportation of any discovered material to the U.S.A. for genetic and field testing. Dr. Anna McClung, rice geneticist at the USDA/ARS facility in Beaumont, TX will carry out tests to determine if the seeds send from S. Sulawesi are related to the Carolina Gold grown in the Lowcountry.

More information on South Sulawesi

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

by Barbara Doyle, Historian, Middleton Place Foundation

When rice was introduced to colonial Carolina as a commercial crop in the late seventeenth-century, preparing the harvested grain for market was an extremely arduous chore, laborious, exhausting and debilitating. Whether milled by hand or by animal power, or a combination of both, for almost a century the system remained unsatisfactory. But about 1787 Jonathan Lucas, an English settler in the Lowcountry, built a water-powered pounding mill for a planter on the Santee River . It was immediately hailed for the improvement it promised, and other planters were quick to avail themselves of this new rice-pounding system. The second mill Lucas built on the Santee was for Frances Motte Middleton (later Mrs.Thomas Pinckney), the widow of Arthur Middleton’s cousin John Middleton. (The plat of her plantation, Washo, is on view in the Library of the Middleton Place House.)

Lucas continued to refine his design, and, according to David Wallace’s history of South Carolina, by 1793 he was building mills run continuously by the incoming and outgoing tide and equipped with such laborsaving devices as endless conveyor belts, etc., so as to multiply six to ten times the previous output.

In February 1793 Arthur Middleton’s widow Mary Izard Middleton ordered two mills built at Hobonny, one of the family’s rice plantations on the Combahee River . “As I could wish it possible to have them finished for the approaching crop,” she wrote to Lucas in a letter now at The Charleston Museum, she requested details concerning the millstones, which she planned to order from England . Among her slaves, she wrote, she had “a wheelwright, a blacksmith, bricklayers and a number of carpenters to assist.” And on a framed 1834 plat of Hobonny in the Rice Mill at Middleton Place , there is a large-sized mill shown at the tip of a triangle of land that juts into the river between two canals, well situated to take advantage of the rise and fall of the water.

Their Combahee rice lands continued to be the source of the Middletons’ income, but after his father’s death in 1846, Williams Middleton began more intensive planting at Middleton Place and built a mill in 1851, to be operated by the tides of the Ashley River . Although variously altered in modern times, the now-restored building shows that in concept it was similar to the “Water Rice Machine” illustration found in Governor John Drayton’s 1802 A View of South Carolina . In his book, Drayton boasted that the rice mills in this state are now arrived to a perfection, unequalled by those of any part of the world.

Mills were a major investment for property owners, and rather than build their own, some planters sent their rice to a mill in town for processing. The first steam-driven mill in Charleston was built about 1817, but, whether steam or water-powered, on a plantation or in the city, rice mills continued to be an impressive improvement. In February 1819 a young lady, visiting friends, wrote to her mother in Charleston that her host took us to see the Rice Mill work, which is [not] more than 80 or 90 yards from the House, which is not more than 30 yards from the river. We were very much delighted with the Mill which was a new scene to us, and we could not but observe the contrast between a rice and cotton plantation, such plenty, and everything in a bustle about it, the poultry, etc – as fat as they could be . . .

The Foundation’s Demonstration Rice Field is currently being prepared for spring planting, marking the fourth annual renewal of a traditional plantation agricultural cycle. In the latter part of April or early May a stalwart group of volunteers will carefully plant the precious seed gathered from last year’s crop of Carolina Gold. Middleton Place visitors will then be able to observe the on-going progress of this year’s crop. New signs near the Demonstration Field observation platform succinctly explain and illustrate the various phases involved in the culture of rice, from planting to harvest.

by Kay Rentschler


Nearly a decade ago, author and hearth cooking expert William Rubel—invited to dinner at his friend Marco Floriani’s family home in Trentino—watched Lina Floriani stir a nubby, crimson-flecked porridge in a big pot. When the mass thickened to a slow smolder, she poured it onto a wooden board to cool, cut it into squares and served it wreathed with foraged wild mushrooms, bits of crisp sausage and bronzed roasted chicken. This poured porridge, called polenta integrale—aromatic, slightly sweet, and complex enough to take big flavors—was produced from red Trentino flint corn grown in the family garden. A culinary first for Mr. Rubel, red flint (Spin rosso della Valsugana ) had been grown and milled into polenta around Trentino for centuries. By the time he dined with the Floriani’s, however, both the corn and the dish were, for all practical purposes, extinct.

Though hard flint corn varieties from the Caribbean took hold in Italy in the 1500s—becoming the preferred mill corn for rural Italian cuisine—by the 1960s Italian growers abandoned open-pollinated heirlooms for high-yield modern hybrids. The fate of red trentino flint—and the cuisine that evolved around it—was left solidly in the hands families like the Florianis. Marco’s father continued to grow and mill red flint corn; his mother, Lina, continued to cook it.

William Rubel was romanced by the food and stirred by the traditions that sustained it. He left the Floriani dinner with debt of gratitude and a spray of seeds in his pocket.

As it happened, the red flint did not thrive in Mr. Rubel’s garden. But the photograph of a single crimson cob in his book The Magic of Fire (Tenspeed Press, 2002) caught Glenn Roberts’ eye. (Mr. Roberts is president and CEO of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation (CGRF), missioned to restore and repatriate heirloom grains.) What struck Mr. Roberts, in particular, was the Italian flint’s resemblance to pre-Columbian Mayan flint varieties, historically bred for flavor. Mr. Roberts phoned Mr. Rubel and together, with the help of the Floriani family, they arranged an internship for 400 seeds of trentino flint in the United States.

The seed thrived —and continues to thrive. Currently in production in more than 6 states under the stewardship of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, red trentino flint has blazed its way into some of the finest restaurants in the country as well.

On October 27 and 28, 2004, in Berkeley California, Oliveto Restaurant and chef Paul Bertolli, hosted a harvest dinner to celebrate both the repatriation of this venerable corn to the Americas and the Floriani family, who made its voyage possible. Over two evenings, some 500 guests—including William Rubel, Glenn Roberts and the entire Floriani family—made their way through course upon course of vivid flavors, stunning presentations—and polenta integrale in every guise.

It came crisp in crouton form, shaped into gnocchi, and stirred in a fine stream into a rich chicken soup. It came poured and firm, layered with gorgonzola or spicy pork ragout.

It played host to a full range of side dishes including braised lamb shanks sharpened with gremolata, artichokes stewed with garlic and tomatoes, charcoal grilled pigeon and giblets, and poached salt cod in bianco.

Finally it came sweet, in pastry chef Julie Cookenboo’s crisp cornmeal cookies, red wine pear tart with sweet cornmeal crust, and cornmeal and hazelnut torte.

The CGRF is pleased to be able to advance its mission to increase public awareness of heirloom grains such as this Trentino Flint corn through partnerships with food professionals like William Rubel, chef Paul Bertolli, and the staff at Oliveto.

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Kay Rentschler is a former chef and a journalist.

Image is courtesy van Ackere Productions in Boston, MA, For more information, visit www.danieljvanackere.com.

For more information on Oliveto Café and Restaurant or chef Paul Bertolli, visit www.Oliveto.com.

For additional information William Rubel and his new book The Magic of Fire, visit www.WilliamRubel.com.

by David S. Shields

In preparation for the rice bread contest that will highlight the Carolina Gold Rice Symposium in August it might be worthwhile to look back to its origins and the original method of its making. Chapter 7 of Karen Hess’s celebrated The Carolina Rice Kitchen is devoted to Rice Breads of various sorts. There are three brief recipes from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but sparse instructions on the method of preparation and baking from original sources. Recently I unexpectedly came across a heretofore unknown and thorough description of the method dating 1803, translated from a French source, and derived from “the natives of America.” The account confirms a number of Hess’s canny suppositions about the character of the first leavened pure rice breads. Here for you hearth and brick oven cooks, is a complete and exact method for “Bread of Rice”

Bread of rice might occasionally be of great use in many countries during a scarcity of wheat; but the method of making it is not generally known. It is indeed impossible to make bread from the flour of rice, which is harsh and dry like sand or ashes, by treating it in the manner in which wheat flour is generally treated; and therefore it has been proposed to mix it with an equal quantity of the flour of rye. But this method of using the flour of rice is a very uncertain remedy in time of want; since we can have no rice bread if we have not rye. We are taught, however, in the Journal des Sciences, des Lettres, and des Arts, how to make excellent bread from rice alone, by a method which the author of the memoir says he learned from the natives of America.

According to this method of making the wished-for bread, the first thing to be done to the rice is, to reduce it to flour by grinding it in a mill, or, if we have not a mill it may be done in the following manner: Let a certain quantity of water be heated in a saucepan or cauldron; when the water is near boiling, let the rice we mean to reduce to flour be thrown into it; the vessel is then to be taken off the fire, and the rice left to soak till the next morning. It will then be found at the bottom of the water, which is to be poured off, and the rice put to drain on a table in an inclined position. When it is dry, it must be beat to a powder, and passed through the finest sieve that can be procured.

When we have brought the rice into flour, we must take as much of it as may be thought necessary, and put it in the kneading-trough in which bread is generally made. At the same time we must heat some water in a saucepan or other vessel, and, having thrown into it some handfuls of rice, we must let them boil together for some time; the quantity of rice must be such as to render the water very thick and glutinous. When the glutinous matter is little cooled, it must be poured upon the rice-flour, and the whole must be well kneaded together, adding thereto a little salt, and a proper quantity of leaven. We are then to cover the dough with warm cloths, and to let it stand that it may rise. During the fermentation, this paste (which, when kneaded, must have such a proportion of flour as to render it pretty firm) becomes so soft and liquid that it seems impossible that it should be formed into bread. It is now to be treated as follows:

When the dough is rising, the oven must be heated; and, when it is of a proper degree of heat, we must take a stewpan of tin, or copper tinned, to which is fixed a handle of sufficient length to reach the end of the oven. A little water must be put into this stewpan, which must then be filled with the fermented paste, and covered with cabbage or any other large leaves, or with a sheet of paper. When this is done, the stewpan is to be put into the oven and pushed forward to the part where it is intended the bread will be heated; it must then be quickly turned upside down. The heat of the oven acts upon the paste in such a way as to prevent its spreading, and keeps it in the form the stewpan has given it.

In this manner pure rice bread may be made; it comes out of the over of a fine yellow color, like pastry which has yolk of eggs over it. It is as agreeable to the taste as to the sight; and may be made use of, like what-bread, to be put into broth, &c. It must, however, be observed, that it loses its goodness very much as it becomes stale.

It may be here remarked, that the manner in which Indian corn is used in some countries, for making bread, can only produce (and does in fact produce) very bad dough, and of course very bad bread. To employ it advantageously, it should be treated like rice; and it may then be used, not only for making bread, but also for pastry.

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Supplement to the Enclyclopaedia or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1803). Vol. 1: 146-147.

David S. Shields, Ph.D., is Professor of English and History and the McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina.