Snacking State-by-State: South Carolina III - Good Morning, Baltimore, er, Charleston?

In one of the most well-worn cookbooks on my bookshelf, John Shields lists many of the desserts you will find in the Chesapeake, from Hot Milk Cake to Chess Pie.  And there's one glaring addition to Chesapeake Bay Cooking [1998] that should catch the eye of anyone living within five miles of Fort McHenry: the Lady Baltimore Cake itself.

Official Name: State of South Carolina
State Nicknames: The Palmetto State
Admission to the US: May 23, 1788 (#8)
Capital: Columbia (largest)
Other Important Cities: Charleston (2nd largest), North Charleston (3rd largest), Greenville (6th largest)
Region: South, Southeast, Lowcountry; South Atlantic (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Chestnut; Crabcake
Bordered by: North Carolina (north), Georgia (southwest), Atlantic Ocean (southeast)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: boiled peanuts (snack food), collard greens (vegetable), grits (food - okay, this is unofficial), milk (beverage), peach (fruit), rockfish / striped bass (fish), summer / wood duck (duck), white-tailed deer (animal), wild turkey (wild game bird)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Southern foods, particularly Lowcountry foods in the southern / eastern half of the state (especially purloo, Gullah cuisine); seafood (shrimp, crabs, typically boiled or in soups); Lady Baltimore cake; different types of barbecue, including its unique mustard barbecue (between Columbia and Charleston)

Shields notes that Lady Baltimore Cake is

...famous throughout the South...[and] is said to have originated as a centerpiece for afternoon teas in the late 1800's.  The ladies I've spoken to lately don't hold many teas, but they swear by this cake for first communions, bridal showers, and your more "upper crust" Tupperware parties. [Shields 1998:238]

While I admire Shields for trying to claim Lady Baltimore cake for the home team, and wished he were successful at it, the thing is: it isn't a Baltimore tradition.  In fact, I have never seen it served in Baltimore at all (maybe other parts of Maryland, but not here).  There's a simple explanation for this: Lady Baltimore cake comes from Charleston, South Carolina.  James Villas, author of The Glory of Southern Cooking, says the following about this almond-y cake with the meringue frosting and fruity filling:

What is for sure is that [Lady Baltimore cake] is in no way connected with the city of Baltimore but, rather, with Owen Wister's 1906 romantic novel Lady Baltimore, in which the cake is described.  In reality, the luscious cake was most probably created in Charleston, South Carolina, by Alicia Rhett Mayberry around the turn of the twentieth century and not named till after Wister's novel was published.  Some, on the other hand, believe it could have originated in a Charleston tearoom of the time called Lady Baltimore.  Whatever its origins, the cake's fame spread quickly throughout the South, and today the versions are multiple. [Villas 2007: 352; link added by me]

James Villas has more than a few recipes from Maryland in this cookbook, but his Lady Baltimore cake is not one of them.  Simply put: it ain't from Bawlmer, hon.  But don't you wish it was?

Out of the various recipes I found, including John Shields' and a fairly complicated one from Matt & Ted Lee in their cookbook The Lee Bros. Southern Cooking, I stuck with Villas' version, featured on pages 352 and 353 of his cookbook.  It's less complicated but still will take a while.  And you will need both a stand mixer and a hand mixer - or failing that, a hand mixer and a lot of patience.

The Recipe: Lady Baltimore Cake

For Villas' interpretation of Lady Baltimore cake you will need:

First, the recipe for the actual cake part of the cake:

* butter (had it - about a stick and a half)
* sugar (had it)
* vanilla and almond extracts (had 'em both)
* cake (or soft) flour (White Lily worked well with this)
* baking powder (had this too)
* milk (and this)
* egg whites (I needed to buy extra eggs for this, and I'm glad I did after that little accident with the egg yolks getting into the egg whites)

For the icing, a double boiler, Divinity-style icing:

* more egg whites
* water
* sugar
* cream of tartar
* vanilla and almond extracts
* figs (the recipe calls for seedless.  I did not get these.  I bought a dollar's worth of figs in the bulk foods section at Wegman's - typically $6 a pound)
* pecans (it's so nice to find this stuff in bulk - $1.50 for bulk pecans at Wegman's, typically $19 per lb but I didn't need a whole pound of them)
* golden raisins (again, bulk, Wegman's: about 50¢ for the quantity I bought, $3.30 per lb.)

Start by buttering ypour cake pans - I had two 8" pans, though Villas suggests 9" ones.

With your stand mixer, not your hand mixer, cream the butter and some of the sugar together (exact measurements in Villas' recipe).

Next add the vanilla and almond extracts and continue to blend.

Next, alternate by adding sifted cake flour and baking soda...

...and milk.

Mix until smooth and set aside.  If you only have one bowl with your stand mixer, scrape out the batter into a bowl and clean it out so you can whip your...

...egg whites!  You will need four.

Mix those egg whites (the highest setting on mine was what I needed to use) until stiff peaks form.

Add sugar and continue to mix until smooth and shiny.

See?  Stiff and shiny.  Er...

Fold the sugary egg whites into the rest of the dough.

Divide the dough evenly into your cake pans...

...making sure to thump them on the bottom to get rid of gas bubbles.

Bake in a preheated 350° oven for about 40 minutes.

Now would be a good time to make that icing.  Start with a double boiler - I went with one of the stand mixer bowls in a glass pot.  Put the egg whites, water, sugar and cream of tartar.into the double boiler and...

...mix with your hand mixer on a fairly high setting (I alternated between the "icing" and "egg whites' settings) until it forms peaks, about five minutes.  Do this while the water is simmering underneath.

Stir in your vanilla extract.

Chop your figs and pecans...

...and mix with a third of the icing.

This part ended up less like icing with fruit and nuts and more like fruit and nuts coated in icing.

Let's take those cakes out of the oven.

Turn them out onto a cooling rack.

Assemble the cake when cooled: put one layer on a flat plate and smooth out the fruity icing.

Place the other cake on top, smoothing out any goopiness as needed.

Ice the top and sides with the fruit-free icing.

How to describe this unusual, delicate and gorgeous cake?  I can't.  It is something for a special occasion, lush almond flavoring in the cake, the fruit and pecans jumping out in the middle, and light whipped Divinity frosting all over.  Wow!  Let's hear it for this Lady Baltimore!

- - - - -

Next, we're heading northwestward from the Lowcountry to the Black Hills.  And it's safe to say that most of the foods of South Dakota are more or less unknown, well, anywhere outside of South Dakota.

Sources:

Food Network.  "True Grits".  Episode of the show Good Eats (Alton Brown, host). Food Network, 2004.

Dabney, Joseph.  The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland.  Cumberland House: Naperville, Illinois, 2010.

DiRuscio, Mike.  "Transcription of Good Eats: True Grits".  Good Eats Fan Page (GoodEatsFanPage.com), 2004.  Includes correspondence between DiRuscio and Alton Brown about the episode.

Lee, Matt, and Ted Lee. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners.   W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006.

Opala, Joseph A.  "Introduction to The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection".  The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection, online version of the pamphlet, United States Information Service: Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1986.  Online access available through the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University.

Prather, Ramsey.  "Lowcountry Cuisine: South Carolina's coast is home to one of the country's richest culinary traditions."  Coastal Living Magazine.com (CoastalLiving.com).  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Time Inc. Lifestyle Group. All Rights Reserved.

Shields, John.  Chesapeake Bay Cooking.  Broadway Books: New York, 1998.

Villas, James.  The Glory of Southern Cooking.  John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2007.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "South Carolina" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "South Carolina".

Snacking State-by-State: South Carolina II - True Shrimp and Grit

(* Titled "True Shrimp and Grit" because someone already used "True Grits".  Gee thanks, Alton Brown.)
Most Southerners might argue that of all the quintessentially Southern foods, it is grits that truly separates the "Proper South" from "Everyone Else".  This quintessential food, as pointed out by Alton Brown himself in his "True Grits" episode of Good Eats [2004], argued that grits - stone ground corn, sometimes treated or nixtamalized with lye (this makes hominy grits), sometimes not (this makes plain ol' grits) - is more or less the same thing as that favorite Italian maize dish, polenta.  In fact, he says they are the same thing (aside: check out the fascinating story of an early blooper in this episode that Alton caught after much correspondence with fans on the Good Eats Fan Page).  Heck, today Southerners and Otherners eat both, blissfully unaware of the difference.

Official Name: State of South Carolina
State Nicknames: The Palmetto State
Admission to the US: May 23, 1788 (#8)
Capital: Columbia (largest)
Other Important Cities: Charleston (2nd largest), North Charleston (3rd largest), Greenville (6th largest)
Region: South, Southeast, Lowcountry; South Atlantic (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Chestnut; Crabcake
Bordered by: North Carolina (north), Georgia (southwest), Atlantic Ocean (southeast)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: boiled peanuts (snack food), collard greens (vegetable), grits (food - okay, this is unofficial), milk (beverage), peach (fruit), rockfish / striped bass (fish), summer / wood duck (duck), white-tailed deer (animal), wild turkey (wild game bird)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Southern foods, particularly Lowcountry foods in the southern / eastern half of the state (especially purloo, Gullah cuisine); seafood (shrimp, crabs, typically boiled or in soups); Lady Baltimore cake; different types of barbecue, including its unique mustard barbecue (between Columbia and Charleston)
As I've said before, my own home state's cuisine is quite Southern in some ways (fried chicken, Moon Pies, beaten biscuits, a lack of enthusiasm for sweet cornbread or not very sweet tea) and quite Northern in others (immigrant cuisines like the Italian, German, Polish and Jewish ones you find in the Northeast, a lack of enthusiasm for boiling shellfish - actually Northerners do this too.  Maybe it's just a Chesapeake thing).  The notable lack of grits at my breakfast table growing up was one of the more Northern aspects of my life growing up in Baltimore.  And though they are becoming much more popular (again?) here than ever before, grits at least for me was something I just didn't eat much.  Granted, I never saw oatmeal at the breakfast table either.  It was pretty much just pancakes, French toast and SmurfBerry Crunch.

Grits, of course, is not just for breakfast.  It can be eaten in a bevy of interesting ways from appetizers to main meals to dessert.  But regardless, most chefs today, from Brown to Nathalie Dupree to Matt and Ted Lee of Myrtle Beach, would all recommend the coarse stone ground stuff over the finely textured "instant grits" (not exactly the "pink slime" of grits but still).  Granted, the harried home cook doesn't always have time to keep a pot of grits on the stove for an hour, but it still tastes and feels better.  The Lee Brothers explain in their Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook [2006]:

Grits ground between cool stones, as opposed to those processed with warmer steel rollers in a high-speed commercial mill, are superior, more intense and fuller-bodied in both flavor and texture, because they retain all of the heat-sensitive corn oils contained in the corn kernel.  Commercial mills deliberately remove the oil-rich heart of the corn kernel so the grits won't turn rancid on the grocery store shelf.  Like many whole-grain meals and flours, stone-ground grits are truly perishable.  They're at their peak the moment they're ground and will slowly fade at room temperature over the course of the next three to six weeks, so we strongly advise you to buy them from the mill if possible...and store them in a sealed bag or container in the refrigerator or freezer. [Lee & Lee 2006:142]

Since most of us don't have a big ol' mill nearby from which to purchase our grits, the Lees give us some mail-order options.  Or lacking that, Trader Joe's and Fresh Market have stone-ground grits.  Surprisingly, few of my local supermarkets do - not even Charlotte-based Harris Teeter (way to drop the ball, guys).  It's all the finely textured maize.

Out of all the grits dishes I could have chosen, especially the iconic cheese grits, one truly Lowcountry take on them is the famous shrimp and grits that you can easily find on either side of the Savannah River.  I was eyeing the Lee brothers recipe among many others, but finally went with a recipe former Town & Country editor James Villas found for his cookbook The Glory of Southern Cooking [2007].  This native son of North Carolina has three takes on shrimp and grits in his cookbook, and seemingly his favorite one ("perfection" was his exact word) came from the Captain Jules (or is it Captain Juel's?) Hurricane Restaurant in Little River, South Carolina.

Typically, the cooks told me they didn't have an exact recipe (ha!), but after gabbing with them for an hour about the dish, I left with enough information to concoct what  now deem to be the quintessential formula.  My lifelong search for authentic shrimp and grits, therefore, is over - at least for the time being. [Villas 2007: 290]

The recipe I use is Villas' interpretation of Captain Jules' / Juel's shrimp and grits, pages 290 -291 of The Glory of Southern Cooking.

The Recipe: Shrimp and Grits

To make this version of shrimp and grits you will need the following:

For the "grits" part of the shrimp and grits...

* grits (preferably stone ground - search for these if you have to.  These will be the slow cookin' kind.  Trader Joe's had stone ground grits for only about $3)
* half and half (a quart ran about $1.50 at Harris Teeter)
* butter (had it)
* water and salt (had these too)

And for the "shrimp" part...

* shrimp (I got 1 1/2 lbs at Harris Teeter, apparently wild caught fresh shrimp from somewhere in the United States, for about $10 per lb)
* red and green bell peppers (one each, the green for about $1 for one, the red for about the same at Harris Teeter)
* onions (only about $1 or so at Harris Teeter)
* garlic (had it)
* andouille sausage (the good thing about this: I found it in the butcher's section for about $6 per lb.  I bought one for just $1.25)
* chicken broth (had that Better than Bouillon stuff, which seems to be working fine so far0
* heavy cream (about $2. This stuff ain't cheap)
* oil (just a dash.  Villas recommends peanut oil.  I have veggie oil pictured but ended up using that rice bran oil I had from the Oregon posts, since its smoke point is about the same as peanut oil)
* thyme, oregano and paprika (had 'em all)

First wash off the shrimp.

You need to peel the shrimp...

...and then de-vein them.  This is tedious but necessary.

Next, chop the onions, garlic and bell peppers.

Chop the andouille sausage...

...and fry it for a few minutes in a skillet (cast iron here0 with a dash of oil.

Now would be a good time to start on those grits.  While your sausage is rendering place a large pot of water (exact measurements in Villas' recipe) on the stove to boil.  When it starts boiling you will add the grits.

Back to the skillet: add your vegetables and shrimp and cook for several more minutes.

Once the shrimp are cooking, add the grits to your pot of water.

And back to the shrimp: add the chicken broth to the shrimp concoction and stir it.

Back to the grits: after a few minutes it should be bubbling a bit.  When it does that...

...add the butter, half and half and salt...

...and cover.  You will need to stir on occasion but set this on the burner, on low, for about 50 minutes.  Yes, the Trader Joe's package says half an hour.  Ignore it.  Cook this until smooth and creamy.

 Now back to the shrimp: add heavy cream to your shrimp gravy and let it reduce.

 I should have reduced it more than this, but oh well.

To assemble this, you simply place some of the grits on your plate...

...and place your shrimp and shrimp gravy on top.

This was my first time making slow cooked grits, and I've never made shrimp and grits before.  It is such a lovely dish!  The creamy grits and the shrimp gravy just mix wonderfully together (though add a dash of salt to taste, of course).  The shrimp adds a nice firm bite.  Plus, the shrimp are slightly spicy and the grits is wonderfully buttery due to the half and half and, well, butter.  It's a dish worth eating often.

Sources:

Food Network.  "True Grits".  Episode of the show Good Eats (Alton Brown, host). Food Network, 2004.

Dabney, Joseph.  The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland.  Cumberland House: Naperville, Illinois, 2010.

DiRuscio, Mike.  "Transcription of Good Eats: True Grits".  Good Eats Fan Page (GoodEatsFanPage.com), 2004.  Includes correspondence between DiRuscio and Alton Brown about the episode.

Lee, Matt, and Ted Lee. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners.   W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006.

Opala, Joseph A.  "Introduction to The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection".  The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection, online version of the pamphlet, United States Information Service: Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1986.  Online access available through the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University.

Prather, Ramsey.  "Lowcountry Cuisine: South Carolina's coast is home to one of the country's richest culinary traditions."  Coastal Living Magazine.com (CoastalLiving.com).  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Time Inc. Lifestyle Group. All Rights Reserved.

Shields, John.  Chesapeake Bay Cooking.  Broadway Books: New York, 1998.

Villas, James.  The Glory of Southern Cooking.  John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2007.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "South Carolina" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "South Carolina".

Snacking State-by-State: South Carolina I - Honey come purloo me again!

South Carolina is the next stop on our culinary tour of the United States.  This state is known for everything from mustard barbecue sauce (not all over the state, but it is unique to the Palmetto State) to boiled peanuts to its Lowcountry boils and other dishes.  Many of those Lowcountry dishes come specifically from the Gullah people.

Official Name: State of South Carolina
State Nicknames: The Palmetto State
Admission to the US: May 23, 1788 (#8)
Capital: Columbia (largest)
Other Important Cities: Charleston (2nd largest), North Charleston (3rd largest), Greenville (6th largest)
Region: South, Southeast, Lowcountry; South Atlantic (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Chestnut; Crabcake
Bordered by: North Carolina (north), Georgia (southwest), Atlantic Ocean (southeast)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: boiled peanuts (snack food), collard greens (vegetable), grits (food - okay, this is unofficial), milk (beverage), peach (fruit), rockfish / striped bass (fish), summer / wood duck (duck), white-tailed deer (animal), wild turkey (wild game bird)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Southern foods, particularly Lowcountry foods in the southern / eastern half of the state (especially purloo, Gullah cuisine); seafood (shrimp, crabs, typically boiled or in soups); Lady Baltimore cake; different types of barbecue, including its unique mustard barbecue (between Columbia and Charleston)

South Carolina and coastal Georgia are Lowcountry.  This cuisine, as Ramsey Prather at Coastal Living Magazine (date unknown) points out, is heavy on rice, grits and seafood:

The Lowcountry teems with aquatic life, and for centuries local cooks have turned to the water for culinary inspiration. Crabs, shrimp, fish, and oysters form the basis of any traditional menu, and seafood dishes are offered at every meal. [Prather, date unknown]

Shrimp and grits, she-crab soup (not Virginia's variety from the Chesapeake Bay), frogmore stew and so on are all typical dishes of the Lowcountry.  Many of these dishes are important to the Gullah, that very localized Lowcountry African American culture that anthropologist Joseph Opala, an expert on Gullah culture, points out have very strong ties to Sierra Leone (date unknown).  In fact, the important tie between the Gullah and Sierra Leone is one specific food that is vital to Lowcountry cuisine: rice.

During the 1700s the American colonists in South Carolina and Georgia discovered that rice would grow well in the moist, semitropical country bordering their coastline. But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop. The white plantation owners purchased slaves from various parts of Africa, but they greatly preferred slaves from what they called the "Rice Coast" or "Windward Coast"—the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa, stretching from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for slaves from this area, and Africans from the Rice Coast were almost certainly the largest group of slaves imported into South Carolina and Georgia during the 18th century. [Opala, 1986]

It is these enslaved West Africans that are the direct ancestors of the modern-day Gullah people, and the recipes I am interpreting for South Carolina are all familiar to them.

The first dish is indeed one of those rice dishes, one that exemplifies the importance of rice to the Lowcounrty.  The ancestors of the Gullah brought their ideas about how to cook rice with them, and one of the most important ones was what modern cooks call purloo.  Apparently nobody agrees on exactly how to pronounce it, even in South Carolina - pur-LOWE, pur-LAO, PUR-lowe, pur-LEW?  That's just a smattering of the many different ways to pronounce it: Joseph E. Dabney (2010:150) enumerates about sixteen that Lowcountry cooks have used in the past.  From what Dabney notes in his cookbook The Food, Folklore and Art of Lowcountry Cooking (2010), even though it came to America from West Africa, purloo is not native to Africa:

...the word and the dish are said to have originated in ancient Persia (modern-day Iran).  In subsequent centuries, the dish's popularity spread in all directions and accumulated many different name tags, such as pilaf in Turkey, pullao in India, and pelau in Provence, France [Dabney 2010:150]

That is, over time it worked its way from Persia through the Middle East into West Africa, and across the Middle Passage into the Americas.

One common feature of purloo, apart from the rice, is that it usually features meat or seafood as a main component of the dish.  Chicken, shrimp, oyster, crab, ham and even duck and sausage purloos abound in Lowcountry cookbooks.  But you do often see vegetable ones too.  The one I use below is from pages 156 and 157 of Dabney's book, which he adapts from Lillian Marshall's cookbook Cooking Across the South, and features okra.  Okay, okra and bacon.  Even though he calls it "Savannah Okra Pilau" - as in Savannah, Georgia - this is for all intents and purposes a purloo.  And is it that difficult to believe that something they'd be making in Savannah wouldn't have crossed the river into Charleston?  Seriously?

The Recipe: Savannah Okra Purloo (Pilau?)

To make this okra purloo, on pages 156-157 of Dabney's book, you will need:

* rice (a smallish bag is all I needed - about a dollar at Wegman's)
* okra (a package of the fresh stuff ran about $2.75 at Wegman's.  Typically I would've just bought frozen pre-sliced okra and saved myself the trouble, but the recipe calls for thinly sliced okra, and the frozen stuff is never thinly sliced)
* bacon (a few slices; the local variety set me back about $3.50 at Giant)
* onion (one is all you need - about 60¢)
* green bell pepper ($2 on sale, or about $1 for the one)
* chicken broth or bouillon (or this Better Than Bouillon stuff which seems to work)
* tomatoes (if not the goopy fresh kind you find in the supermarket, go with canned.  A can cost no more than a dollar)

You will also need a dash of salt, which I forgot to put in the photo.

First you ought to defuzz the okra.  Any of you who has dealt with fresh okra has learned this is not fun: the little hairs can sometimes bristle and stick in your skin and be a real pain.  What some websites suggest is to wash the okra, and then take a nylon net or brush or even a paper towel and scrub the hairs off as best you can.

There really is no other way to photograph this, is there?

Next, slice your okra pods thinly.

Cube your bacon and add it to a heavy skillet or Dutch oven with your okra.

Add the other vegetables...

...and your tomatoes, chicken broth and (of course) your rice.

Cover and let cook without uncovering for 15 minutes.

STOP! Do NOT lift that lid!  Since I have no lid for my cast-iron skillet, I used the lid for my crab pot like I did for the Maryland fried chicken recipe.

Uncover and fluff with a fork.  I found that in my cast iron skillet nothing burned to the bottom of the pan, as it usually does in my large pot to which everything burns.  That pot is now basically good only for boiling water and making soup.  Oh well.

This is a relatively easy rice dish to make.  The rice came out tender and the sliminess of the okra was hardly noticeable at all.  Plus, the bacon and rendered bacon grease give a nice flavor.  This was an all-around satisfying dish.  I will make this again - but next time I';m just doing the pre-frozen okra.

Sources:

Food Network.  "True Grits".  Episode of the show Good Eats (Alton Brown, host). Food Network, 2004.

Dabney, Joseph.  The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland.  Cumberland House: Naperville, Illinois, 2010.
DiRuscio, Mike.  "Transcription of Good Eats: True Grits".  Good Eats Fan Page (GoodEatsFanPage.com), 2004.  Includes correspondence between DiRuscio and Alton Brown about the episode.

Lee, Matt, and Ted Lee. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners.   W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006.

Opala, Joseph A.  "Introduction to The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection".  The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection, online version of the pamphlet, United States Information Service: Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1986.  Online access available through the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University.
Prather, Ramsey.  "Lowcountry Cuisine: South Carolina's coast is home to one of the country's richest culinary traditions."  Coastal Living Magazine.com (CoastalLiving.com).  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Time Inc. Lifestyle Group. All Rights Reserved.
Shields, John.  Chesapeake Bay Cooking.  Broadway Books: New York, 1998.

Villas, James.  The Glory of Southern Cooking.  John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ, 2007.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "South Carolina" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "South Carolina.