08/22/2024
How a Single Grain Shaped the History of This City — and Holds the Key to Its Future
A hunger for rice laid Charleston’s foundation. Could a love for the grain — and the city that grew from it — be the way to a more unified future?
By Jeff Gordinier and George McCalman Published on August 20, 2024
Excerpt: Drive out to Edisto Island, about an hour from Charleston, and you’ll sense those rituals and that magic close at hand in a house that once belonged to Emily Meggett.
In 2022, after decades of using her personal kitchen to feed her community, Meggett published a cookbook, cowritten with Kayla Stewart and Trelani Michelle, called Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island. A year later, at 90, she died.
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The complicated history of Charleston — and in many ways, of the United States – can be understood through the history of one ingredient: rice. The past lives on through multigenerational rice farmers like Rollen Chalmers, home cooks and chefs like Charlotte Jenkins, and in food like purloo and ...
