Page 28 →The Multicultural Nature of Eighteenth-Century Cooking in British America

Among more than four hundred recipes included in Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-Wife appears one for a southern rice pie, an interesting (and delicious) variation on the more famous rice pudding:

BOIL half a pound of rice in milk, until it is quite tender; beat it well with a wooden spoon to mash the grains; add three quarters of a pound of sugar, and the same of melted butter; half a nutmeg, six eggs, a gill of wine, and some grated lemon peel; put a paste in the dish, and bake it. For change, it may be boiled, and eaten with butter, sugar, and wine.¹

Randolph’s recipe, which adapts easily to today’s kitchen (see recipe, “Southern Rice Pie”), captures the ingenuity and sophistication of early American cuisine. Her collection as a whole, America’s first regional cookbook and the first published work on southern cooking, provides a record of both her considerable culinary skills and her impressive business acumen.² This recipe in particular and the book in which it is found bring to light a type of knowledge that often remains obscured in the history record: women’s domestic craft. Hidden behind the recipe, moreover, is another form of knowledge that has too often been left in the shadows: the agricultural skills of enslaved Africans, who taught their enslavers to grow the rice that became a staple in many of Randolph’s recipes and a crucial economic engine for early South Carolina. This essay explores the complicated cultural history of Randolph’s cookbook, examining both what the text reveals and inadvertently hides. In doing so, the essay presents two related stories. The first concerns a resourceful and talented woman with a tenacious desire to support her struggling family. The second concerns generations of Africans whose accumulated wisdom made her success possible. At once intertwined and distinct, these stories show how America—and, particularly, South Carolina—depended on people who were forcibly oppressed by those most dependent on their knowledge.

Page 29 →Following in a long tradition of women copying their recipes into journals or binding them together into books, Mary Randolph assembled her collection of recipes she used regularly over the course of a lifetime. As a child, she learned the domestic skills necessary to run a plantation household, including the knowledge of culinary skills. She put that knowledge to use after she married her cousin David Meade Randolph in 1780. As a wedding present, David’s father gave the newlyweds Presqu’île, a plantation along the James River. There, Molly, as she was known in the family, took charge of the domestic operations, overseeing the household, among which numbered forty enslaved servants—including those who did the day-to-day cooking—and handling the finances. She utilized her skills not only to provide for her family (four of the couple’s eight children reached adulthood) but also to entertain guests in the manner expected of a member of one of Virginia’s oldest and wealthiest families.³

In 1798, the Randolphs moved to Richmond, where David felt he could pursue a political career, and there built a large house a friend dubbed Page 30 →“Moldavia,” combining Molly and David’s names. The couple entertained Richmond society lavishly, and, thanks to Molly’s legendary culinary skills and intelligent conversation, people flocked to her table. Chronicler of Richmond society Samuel Mordecai proclaimed her to be “one of the remarkable and distinguished persons of her day.”⁴

Beyond its role in Richmond’s social whirl, Moldavia became a center for political debate as the new republic was forming. Although the nation’s founders hoped it would never happen, politicians started dividing into political parties. The divide affected families as well. With the assistance of his cousin, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, David got an appointment as a US Marshal and served through the Washington and Adams administrations. He naturally fell into the Federalist Party, putting him at odds with his cousin’s politics. The strain on the family grew, even after Molly’s youngest brother Thomas Mann Randolph married Jefferson’s daughter Martha. But when Jefferson became president in 1801, though he must have known what the move would do to family relations, he fired David from his government job.⁵

David’s dismissal could not have come at a worse time for his family; it coincided with a crash in the tobacco market and a recession. Molly and David’s extravagant lifestyle became a thing of the past, and they had to watch their finances carefully. David was forced to sell lots and rental properties he owned in Richmond; his plantation; and finally, even Moldavia. Things got so bad that, in 1808, David moved to England to study the coalmining industry. An amateur inventor, he also pursued patents and sought sponsors to finance new business ventures. He remained in England for seven years.⁶

Left in dire financial straits, Molly refused to throw herself on the mercy of relatives and instead decided that she would flaunt social convention and start a business. Banking on her reputation as a consummate hostess and cook, in 1808, she opened a boarding house in rented accommodations on Cary Street. Although family members, including her sister-in-law Martha Jefferson Randolph, were convinced the venture would fail, Molly’s business was a success. Her friends supported her, and she profited from the lack of good accommodations for fine ladies and gentlemen in Virginia’s capital. Once again, Molly’s home became the center for Richmond society, which dubbed her “The Queen.” According to Samuel Mordecai, “The Queen soon attracted as many subjects as her dominions could accommodate, and a loyal set they generally were. There were few more festive boards than the Queen’s. Wit, humour, and good-fellowship prevailed, but excess rarely. Page 31 →Social evenings were also enjoyed, and discord never intruded.”⁷ Randolph ran her business from 1807 until she retired in 1819, operating it even after her husband returned home in 1815. Through her ingenuity, determination, and skill, she had become the family’s breadwinner. Her reputation spread far and wide, attracting genteel customers, including South Carolinian Harriet Pinkney Horry, who herself kept a personal manuscript recipe collection, and stayed in Randolph’s boarding house in 1815.⁸

After closing down the business, Molly and David left Richmond and retired to Washington, DC, where they lived with their son William Beverly Randolph. David continued to dabble in inventing, but Molly was occupied caring for their youngest son, Burrell Starke Randolph, a midshipman in the US Navy, who had fallen from a mast in 1817, breaking both legs, which never healed properly. Burrell described his mother as “a victim of maternal love and duty.”⁹ But Molly embarked on another vocation while she cared for her son. She began to write her cookbook, in one sense, the culmination of her lifetime of cooking. Indeed, commenting in the preface of the book, Molly observed, “The greater part of the following receipts have been written from memory, where they were impressed by long continued practice.”¹⁰

Randolph’s rice pie recipe is intriguing because of what it reveals about the multicultural nature of cooking in British America during the eighteenth century. This is even reflected in its title, “Rice Pudding,” although the recipe is for what Americans would refer to as a pie. Randolph means pudding here in two senses. Although in British English, pudding or “pud” is rather a generic form for dessert, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the earliest reference to it as a sweet or savory dish in pastry as early as 1543. Before that, the word was used to refer to boiling various ingredients in an animal’s stomach or entrails—1287.¹¹ But notice, at the end of Randolph’s recipe, “For change, it may be boiled, and eaten with butter, sugar, and wine,” implying the later North American meaning, which is more of a custard-like dessert without pastry.¹²

In colonial America, desserts generally were part of the realm of the elite, served in wealthy households as a symbol of status and refinement. This was especially true for recipes calling for large amounts of sugar, which would have been too costly for most households.¹³ Instead, typically, eighteenth-century desserts were simple and light and included things such as fresh fruits and other items intended as palette cleansers. In wealthy homes, a silver or earthenware epergne set on the dining table served as a centerpiece, and people would have had their desserts in front of them for the entire meal. Even elaborate desserts like rich cakes, which were reserved for special Page 32 →occasions or important guests, tended to rely more on dairy products—milk, butter, and eggs—than refined sugar. Although sitting somewhat in that category, pies were exceptional. They were not only desserts. Colonial Americans also served pies as main courses. In colonial New England, for example, fruit pies—particularly apple—appeared on tables at breakfast, dinner (at noon), and supper, especially during the winter, when people were relying on dried fruits stored away during harvest.¹⁴

Colonial desserts included any variety of ingredients. The go-to American ingredient today—chocolate—was expensive and typically was used as a drink at breakfast. Although Mary Randolph included more than a dozen flavors of ice cream in House-Wife, that would have been expensive because of the ingredients (ice, sugar, etc.) and was also labor intensive.¹⁵ Instead, colonial desserts tended to remain fruit based, although some included vegetables such as corn. Until the price of sugar began to drop around the time House-Wife came out in the next century, bakers tended to sweeten their desserts with molasses, or in New England, maple syrup. There are certainly regional variations in the ingredients people used in their desserts based on what items were readily available: New Englanders relied primarily on fruits and maple syrup; Germans in the Middle Colonies contributed doughnuts and the molasses-based shoofly pie, a variation on the treacle tart to American cooking; and in the South, cooks were using corn, sweet potato, and peanuts in desserts, as well as rice.¹⁶

African foodways account for the development of Randolph’s rice pie recipe (along with explaining the use of sweet potatoes and peanuts in other southern pies). Rice consumption in England and France was limited before the modern era. In the Medieval Period, rice was largely used—again only in wealthy households, because it was imported from Africa—as a starch and thickening agent in dishes like blancmange. Perhaps it was the expensive nature of rice imports that led some of the first British colonists to try cultivating the crop in Virginia in 1609, just two years after founding Jamestown.¹⁷

But it was not until seventy-six years later, when, according to tradition in 1685, Charleston physician Henry Woodward obtained rice seed from Colonel John Thurber, who had arrived in Charleston from Madagascar, that successful rice cultivation began in British America. Rice planting spread quickly, and within ten years, the grain was so plentiful that it was being used as currency, much as tobacco was in Virginia. In 1691, Carolina’s lords proprietors granted planter Peter Guerard a patent for a pendulum engine that removed rice hulls. By the turn of the eighteenth century, South Page 33 →Carolina was exporting four hundred thousand pounds of rice each year. In 1710, that number had risen to 1.5 million pounds, and by 1720, to 20 million. In 1714, the colony adopted a standard-size barrel to help in the regulation and sale of the crop; the “barrel,” at one hundred sixty-two pounds, is still used in measuring rice yields today.¹⁸ None of this would have been possible without African technology.

The ethnic cultures of the Senegambia region of Africa developed the rice farming techniques that were exported to colonial America. As rice production increased exponentially in colonial South Carolina and, later, in Georgia, slavers sailed to the west coast of Africa, seeking both labor and knowledge, intentionally capturing people from rice-producing communities to enslave and bring to America. Forty percent of all slave imports passed through Charleston, and 40 percent of those people came from the rice-growing regions.¹⁹ One advertisement of a shipload of slaves specifically touted that it was made up of “a choice cargo of Windward and Gold Coast Negroes, who have been accustomed to the planting of rice,” and such people brought a higher price, making an initial outlay for a rice plantation incredibly expensive.²⁰ An estimate at the end of the eighteenth century stated that a planter would require a minimum of two hundred acres of swamp, forty slaves, housing, storage, and milling facilities to turn a profit.²¹

Page 34 →Rice production is complex, because during certain times of the growing cycle, the fields have to be dry and at others, flooded. Thus, Africans developed a complicated system of dikes and trunks, allowing the fields to be flooded and drained at the appropriate times. Because the enslaved people were teaching the Europeans, a unique labor system developed in colonial rice culture. Africans designated the correct size of the fields, the locations of the dikes, etc. These rules became standardized from plantation to plantation, so much so that they even included how much labor would be performed during the day. Thus, the task system was born.

Whereas in tobacco-producing regions of British America, the gang system predominated, with bands of enslaved workers going out to the fields at sunrise and returning at sunset, under the task system, enslaved people in South Carolina and Georgia received their orders as a list of tasks at the beginning of each week. This enabled enslaved laborers flexibility in how they organized their time, making it possible to complete their work before the end of the day and to have remaining daylight hours for rest or personal work. Or they arranged their time so that they could complete their labor early, leaving a full day or so at the end of the week for themselves. That allowed these people to plant gardens; catch fish; raise poultry, pork, and cattle; and so forth. Not only did this improve their diets but individuals also carried the products they produced beyond their personal needs into the markets of Charleston, Savannah, and other colonial cities and earned cash or bartered for other goods in an elaborate system of exchange.²²

Although the task system may have allowed enslaved workers to improve their lives somewhat, the geography of the rice-producing regions took its toll. Working conditions were horrific. In 1775, one writer observed, “the cultivation of it is dreadful: for if a work could be imagined peculiarly unwholesome, and even fatal to health, it must be that of standing, like the negross, ancle, and even mid-leg deep in water, which floats an ouzy mud; and exposed all the while to a burning sun, which makes the very air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furness of stinking putrid effluvia: a more horrible employment can hardly be imagined.”²³ Planters often provided inadequate housing, food, and clothing. Mosquito-borne diseases—particularly malaria and yellow fever, whose causes were not yet understood—poisonous snakes, alligators, and brutal treatment took such a toll that up to one third of enslaved people in the Lowcountry died within a year of their arrival. However, because a single worker could produce rice worth six times more than his or her value in one year, planters Page 35 →felt that they could afford such losses.²⁴ The nature of diseases, though, had an unforeseen benefit for those people who survived. During the malarial season, planters and their families often retreated into the cities or traveled north, allowing for a level of autonomy, and meant both the greater retention of African folkways and the creation of unique cultural traditions, such as the Gullah language.²⁵

Before 1750, planters in colonial South Carolina and Georgia typically avoided tidal areas when constructing their rice fields. That is because sea water would render fields useless. But, by 1758, Mckewn Johnstone, a planter near the Winyah Bay region close to Georgetown, developed a system of water gates. These allowed him to capture fresh water to flood his fields while keeping out seawater, opening thousands of new acres up to rice production, although these were vulnerable to hurricane damage caused by tidal surges. Tides became useful when Charlestonian Jonathan Lucas realized he could use them to run water-powered mills. One operation could mill more than one hundred barrels of rice a day, and mills sprang up across the Lowcountry.²⁶

Two types of rice predominated in South Carolina. The first was the African Oryza glaberrima. Not surprisingly, its production in West Africa matches the area where the British captured people to bring them to the colonial South. Although this was the rice that arrived in Charleston in Page 36 →1675, it was present in the Portuguese colony of Brazil by the mid-1550s. The second type, the famous Carolina Gold, was the more desirable because of its distinct color and nutty flavor. Scholars traditionally believed this strain originated in Southeast Asia but were stymied when trying to discover how it got to South Carolina. However, recent genetic research suggests that Carolina Gold may not be Asian at all but rather developed from a strain of rice from Ghana.²⁷

By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice culture dominated South Carolina and Georgia to such an extent that it made its way into the decorative arts for both Black and white inhabitants. For example, during the milling process, enslaved women frequently used sweetgrass baskets for winnowing. Sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia filipes) is a native long-bladed grass that grows among secondary dune lines, on the edges of marshes, and in other wetlands in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Appearing in the historical record as early as 1730, this form of basketry, produced originally by male craftsmen, consisted of small bundles of sweetgrass (with sections of longleaf pine and black rush added occasionally for color) sewn together in coils with thin strips of palm.²⁸ The creators of these sweetgrass baskets helped them evolve from practical tools into an artform, often combining African and European shapes.

For those living on the opposite end of the economic scale, the famous Charleston cabinetmaker Thomas Elfe is credited with developing the rice bed, whose name comes from the decorative carvings of bundled rice on tall bedposts. The bed sits high off the ground and features a low (and sometimes detachable) headboard to allow for greater air circulation during hot weather but could be dressed with a canopy and bed skirt for heat retention during the winter months.²⁹

Of all of rice’s cultural gifts to eighteenth-century America, food reigns supreme and once again reflects and sometimes blends African and European cultures. Soon after Henry Woodward planted his field of rice, English colonists began trying to figure out ways they could incorporate rice into their diets. Planter John Stewart suggested substituting rice for barley to brew beer. Others proposed using it to feed poultry and livestock. And South Carolinians began to grind rice to produce flour and to substitute it for wheat and corn.³⁰

Meanwhile, it was natural that people of West African descent used rice in their cooking; it was part of their cultural heritage. According to African-American culinary historian and winner of the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Michael W. Twitty, in African households, “Rice for savoury Page 37 →purposes was nearly always paired with the Afri-Creole ‘trinity’ of tomatoes, onions, and bell or hot peppers, or was laid out as the bed for traditional West African staples like okra, peanuts, black-eyed peas, greens or stews made from a combination of these or starring seafood or chicken.”³¹ And these people were not just creating these dishes for themselves. Just as in Virginia, enslaved cooks in South Carolina and Georgia were preparing the meals for their master’s households. This meant that “Mende, Temne, Fula, Limba, Loma, Bassari, Sherbro, Kru, Balanta and other West African peoples” were preparing foods from their unique culinary traditions and sharing them with members of the dominant English culture.³² Such foods traveled north into regions that did not produce rice, so that in 1824, when Mary Randoph published The Virginia House-Wife, it should be no surprise that she included special instructions on “How to Cook Rice” to serve with dishes like Ochra Soup, as well as her recipes for johnny cakes, rice milk, rice bread, rice waffles, rice blanc mange, and, of course, rice pudding/southern rice pie.

Although historians are unsure whether she learned her recipe from an enslaved cook at Presqu’île or even what type of rice she used—Oryza glaberrima or Carolina Gold—Mary Randolph’s recipe conceals a complex story. It is part of the tale of a determined woman who faced penury and worked to save her family from financial ruin in an age that normally would have frowned on a member of her class “lowering” herself into business. It also encompasses the story of an oppressed people forcibly taken into bondage for their knowledge who nonetheless survived in their new land and contributed significantly to its development and its culture. Exploring this recipe, drawing as it does on female agency and African technology and ingenuity, helps expose forgotten and often neglected parts of the history of South Carolina and the larger United States.

A modern version of the recipe for Mary Randolph’s Rice Pudding:

Southern Rice Pie

(Serves 6)

2 cups whole milk

½ cup uncooked rice

¾ cup sugar

8 tablespoons butter

Page 38 →2 eggs

½ teaspoon nutmeg

2 ounces white wine

½ teaspoon grated lemon peel

1 pastry shell

Prepare the pastry shell.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Scald the milk in a saucepot over medium heat, but do not bring to a boil. Stir in the rice, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook for 25–30 minutes, or until the rice is tender. Mash well with a potato masher or whip in blender or food processor.

In a bowl, stir together the sugar, butter, eggs, nutmeg, lemon peel, and wine and add this to the pot of rice.

Pour into the pastry shell and bake for 20–30 minutes, until top is brown.³³

Christopher E. Hendricks is professor of history at the Armstrong Campus of Georgia Southern University in Savannah, where he specializes in early American history and material culture. He is currently completing a manuscript about the colonial towns of Piedmont, North Carolina.