Episode 62 Rice - In the Carolina Kitchen

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Listen to "062 Rice - In the Carolina Kitchen" on Spreaker.

 Link to the Episode:

You say to yourself - I'll keep the range small.  But when it comes to rice only the grains are small, the history is huge.  So no matter how small a range in space or time you chose, it's going to be a dive.  And what makes it worse is that the research on the travel of rice around the world is both vague, and there seems to be a lot of pride tied to it.  So even the way rice is going to be officially explained is stymied by different collections of what "everybody knows".

But this week was a look at the food history of the 18th century colonial rice.  Rice was (eventually) chosen because it could turn a profit - and it worked in the climate.

The worst part is that making it an export cash crop created some of the cruelest and deadliest conditions for enslaved workers in the colonies outside sugar.  The wetland rice fields required (literal) backbreaking labor to keep up the dams and dykes.  Workers in the flooded field were subject to bites from insects and other creepy crawlies, as well as subsequent infection and infestations.  As rice becomes more profitable and the cultivation more intensive, the captive workers have similar life spans to sugar workers - around 4 years.

What keeps getting lost is that despite all this - the rice culture, the rice cuisine and the rice community the descendants of these Africans kept alive are still with us.  And they have left footprints and whispers all over our food past.

Selling rice made a few people rich, but cooking rice in ways that were infused with West African culinary traditions has enriched American culture.  I'm starting to see that if we can stop stripping food from the roots that grew it - the whole system will work better.  So maybe rice for 3000 years instead of the (1670 - 1910) 240 years the US did.  I used food production to grind people into the earth - instead of working along with it.  Oh yeah - and when you don't have to pay workers, it absolutely ends innovation.

All that grousing aside - here's the stuff you came to see:

Savory Calas!  I had CSA box stuff to make tomatillo salsa.  It's an excellent accompaniment BTW.
Sweet calas recipes are everywhere, but I had savory rice.

Here's the Poppy Tooker savory recipe:

Oh - just look up Poppy Tooker, this a New Orleans name of note.  (I know the French are the Enemy right now, but its OK) https://www.poppytooker.com/this-weeks-show

The Lucayos Cookbook - a complete chimera, a bit of a nemesis, but an instructive phony all the same.

Published by an apparently fascinating crank - who might have been associated with a book thievery ring in the 1930's.  There's lots here, and will get to the bottom of it because it is so odd.

Self Published by Borden Clarke as from Old Authors Farm 1959
Nassau, Bahamas & Morrisburg, Ontario

So this is a little bit metaphotographic - a picture of a scan of the page
of the book where they took a picture of the original book?

Since it turns out the version I pulled of the internet is pirated, I won't be slapping up a PDF.  In the meantime, a fair selection of smaller University libraries seem to have a copy of the book, so maybe you can check it out.  And - it'll be out of copyright in 2054.  Which will get here sooner than you think?

 But here are the snowballs - at least done with peaches.  Which as a Carolina recipe make sense - but would not have been possible in England.

Modern-ish take on Carolina Snowballs with Turnspit & Table


If you want to see the dryland red rice - in person - here's a source.  Might it be related to the Asian "red cargo rice" possibly - but the history of that rice isn't particularly well known.  So there are a lot of questions of what is from where.

Regardless - a source of dryland red rice! (If you live in the US & Canada)

Moruga Hill Red Rice

NPR has a good article that explains more - including the murkiness of its pedigree.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/10/527449714/a-lost-rice-variety-and-the-story-of-the-freed-merikins-who-kept-it-alive




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