Y: Don, tell me, when’s the last time you had a proper Southern meal?
D: Too long, Yaël. Southern cooking calls for kitchen techniques that not everyone can master.
Y: That’s true. The way that Southern cooks have harvested and used locally-grown crops in their dishes forms a long scientific history surrounding Southern food and culture. One ingredient of those Southern kitchens known as hill rice or upland red-bearded rice was thought to have all but disappeared from the U.S.
D: Hill rice has roots in the regions of West Africa, and once served as a staple for the Lowcountry and Gullah African-American communities of the 19th century.
Y: Many varieties of grains were brought with and passed among families of West Africans who had been enslaved and brought to America. Hill rice was popular among them because it didn’t grow in flooded furrows like other rice. Instead, farmers reared hill rice in garden patches, which kept them free of the threat of malaria.
D: Many descendants of these West African regions sustained themselves on hill rice, but it was thought to have been lost until B.J. Dennis and David Shields, a South Carolinian chef and professor, found that the Merikins of Trinidad had preserved it. Dennis and Shields saw hill rice being grown in a small plot tended by a farmer descendant of enslaved persons from Georgia.
Y: Some geneticists suggest that hill rice may be a genetic hybrid and that it may prove impossible to locate an original cultivar. But, geneticists, horticulturalists, historians, and cooks alike relish the opportunity to study crop transfer and cultivation sustained by African-American food practice. It is only one part of the complex science and history of Southern cuisine.
