According to culinary historian Karen Hess, this volume is quite simply “a hymn of praise for Carolina rice,” based on the concept of a rice kitchen, a household where “rice appears on the table every day and is treated with due respect as one of our oldest and most prized grains.” Hess, who died in Page 221 →2007, is well known for having annotated and edited historic recipe collections and cookbooks by people such as Martha Washington (unpublished until 1981), Mary Randolph (1824), Amelia Simmons (1796), Abby Fisher (1881), and Hannah Glassie (1805), which she introduced with thoroughly researched historical analyses. In some respects, Carolina Rice Kitchen follows that same formula in that it includes a facsimile of a collection of two hundred thirty-seven recipes compiled by Mrs. Samuel G. Stoney under the title Carolina Rice Book, which was offered as a twenty-five-cent souvenir for the not-particularly successful South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition of 1901–02. However, unlike her other works, in Carolina Rice Kitchen, the historic cookbook is almost an afterthought. Instead of an introductory essay, Hess devotes a full one hundred fifty-five pages to describing the history of rice in South Carolina, discussing its preparation and use in pilau, casseroles, Hoppin’ John, soups, breads, desserts, and medicines. In this book, she takes a folkloric approach, using, as food writer John Martin Taylor notes in his foreword to this new edition, “linguistics, demographics, geology, geography, climate, politics, religion, botany, agriculture, and kitchen gardens … in her efforts to define the Carolina rice kitchen.” Hess freely admits that she delves into areas of speculation as she attempts to trace the origins of Carolina rice dishes but asserts, “my hypotheses hold up from every point of view, culinary, historical, and linguistic, but there is an element of conjecture, hence possibility of error.” She fills her investigations with recipes from across cultures and time, adding personal asides. She documents her chapters with footnotes (after thanking an impressive list of people in her acknowledgements), but she also introduces “a great deal of material into my text in a parenthetical manner,” often involving digressions she feels are “illuminating in some way,” because, as she explains, “I have learned … that few people read the notes.” The result is that Carolina Rice Kitchen reads more as a conversation than an academic study, as Hess escorts the reader on her personal pilgrimage through Lowcountry rice culture.

One theme that runs throughout Carolina Rice Kitchen is the importance of the roles played by African and African-American women, “who created the celebrated rice kitchen of the South Carolina Low Country,” even though “save for an occasional slave name, such as Maum Sarah, their names are forgotten.” Indeed, Hess argues that “most of the peculiarly South Carolina culinary splendors were Asian and African in origin, and African American in execution.”

As she explores the origins of different Lowcountry rice dishes, Hess devotes most of her time in discussing pilau, “the most characteristic dish Page 222 →of the Carolina rice kitchen.” She investigates its origins in Persian cuisine, traces its movement to France, and its transition through the hands of African-American cooks into a uniquely Carolina experience, declaring, “The classic pilau is not so much a receipt as a culinary concept.” She posits that pilau arrived in seventeenth-century South Carolina thanks to French Huguenots from Provence, who moved to the colony seeking relief from Catholic persecution. After discussing various incarnations of pilau, she moves onto related dishes such as jambalaya and Jewish saffron rice and devotes an entirely separate chapter to the evolution of Hoppin’ John in its diverse forms.

Carolina Rice Kitchen is an engaging and entertaining study, but one cannot help but think there was a missed opportunity here. Although the University of South Carolina Press published this as a second edition, it is simply a reprint of the original with the addition of John Martin Taylor’s brief foreword. Many scholars have conducted excellent research on rice culture over the thirty years since the book first appeared in 1992. Taylor himself was involved with the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, an organization that helped lead to the restoration of the famous strain as a viable crop. Scientists have mapped the DNA of varieties of rice from Africa and Asia, allowing for new explorations of the origins of rice in South Carolina. Also, there are any number of recent studies greatly expanding knowledge about enslaved people and their vital history in the development of South Carolina and rice culture. Were she still alive, Hess undoubtedly would have revised and updated many of her original themes and ideas. It is a shame that another writer did not do that for her. It would have been an appropriate tribute to this champion of “one of our oldest and most prized grains”—rice.

Christopher E. Hendricks, Georgia Southern University