For this 89-year-old Gullah Geechee chef, cooking is about heart
Heard an interview the other day with Emily Meggett on NPR, where she expressed her belief that God had called on her to feed the poor of her Gullah Geechee community and I got more curious about her as I listened to the interview, so looked her up on the net.
I'm with her in her cozy home kitchen, where she's going to teach me how to make a local classic: shrimp and grits with gravy. As she chops up some salt pork to get us started, she recalls the first thing she remembers making as a girl. "Grits!" she exclaims. "And the salt pork right here."
Ms. Emily is a member of the Gullah Geechee people. Her community can trace their ancestry to West and central Africans brought to these shores and enslaved. In insulated locations throughout the coastal areas of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, they managed to preserve much of their rich culture, language, and music.
Her cookbook is called Gullah Geechee Home Cooking (get recipes for Benne Cookies, Red Rice and Chicken Perloo). Right now, Ms. Emily is focused on making her gravy: salt pork, onion, flour and some seasoning salt. That's it.
"You watch me every step of the way," she instructs, stirring the pot constantly with her favorite spoon. This virtuoso in the kitchen doesn't bother with a whisk. Still, her gravy is as smooth as silk.
"I'm from the old school," she says. "People add things, to see how that's gonna taste. But sometimes I think they jazz it up too much! This is tradition, how I learned how to cook it. Wash the grits. Wash your meat. Fry your meat. Put your onion in there. Put your flour in there, make your gravy and your seasoning. Nothing else. That's your tradition."
Some of Ms. Emily's other recipes are intensely local too, like her delicious benne wafers, sweet little cookies made with local sesame seeds. Benne seeds were brought over from West Africa by enslaved people and became an important staple in their hidden gardens.
Ms. Emily's family kept their own gardens at home, too. They grew their vegetables, beans and fruit; they raised hogs, chickens, and other livestock. They fished and hunted. "We even had our own rice pond when I was growing up," she says.
Ms. Emily's ancestors, like other enslaved people brought to the Carolinas, were expert rice cultivators. And rice remains foundational in Ms. Emily's cooking. She says if anyone's going to try only two recipes in her book, it's two Gullah Geechee staples: "Red rice and the Hoppin' John."
Gullah Geechee red rice is kin to jollof rice, a tomato-based recipe popular across western Africa. Her Hoppin' John is a little different than the version many folks know from Southern cuisine. Instead of being made with blander black-eyed peas, here they're made with nutty-tasting field peas.
Her beloved late husband Jessie grew up nearby too, in a two-room cabin that previous generations had lived in as enslaved people. In 2017, that cabin was relocated to Washington, D.C., where it's now on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Ms. Emily, who friends around the island call "M.P.," recounts plenty of family stories as well as her own, complex history in Gullah Geechee Home Cooking.
"When I came along, I guess I was the last of the slaves," she says. As a teenager, she began babysitting the white children of the wealthy owners of local mansions as well as the children of Black workers at those houses. "When I went over to babysit, I got a dollar and 25 cents, from 8 o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. And that was in the 50s."
Not long after, her mother told her she had to choose: she could either work in the fields or find something else. She became a cook for some of those wealthy white families. One of those was the Dodge family from Maine — and Ms. Emily cooked for them for 45 years.
"When I went over to the Dodge house, a week's pay was $11 and 15 cents all week! And every year, it went up a dollar and three penny," she recalls.
"I started from the bottom of the barrel," she says emphatically. "Up to this time, I think I did good for myself and also my children because if I wasn't be taught what to do and how to do it then I couldn't have taught my children."
Those recipes are imprinted in her memory. "That's how I cook," she says. "I cook by my brain, and my hand and my heart."
Heart is a big word with Ms. Emily. She has always looked after Edisto. When the side door into her kitchen is open, folks know they can stop in for a plate of hot food. (Conversely, wherever she goes on the island, she is gifted with ingredients.) Cooking, for Ms. Emily, is about sharing history — and, as she says in her book, food is one of the most important ways we take care of each other. That was the whole impetus for her cookbook, she says.
"A lot of times, we has a treasure in our head," she observes. "And we will die and go to heaven, and take that treasury with us. And why can't we just share it with somebody else here? I'll get more out of that, to share it."
Gretchen Smith is the director of the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society. She is thrilled that her good friend Emily Meggett is attracting so much attention with her cookbook.
"It's got so much more than recipes in the book," Smith says. "It's stories, it's anecdotes, it's the culture of the Gullah community, it's not just a cookbook by any means. And I think that's really what has ignited the interest in it."
In the meantime, the gravy's ready. Ms. Emily Meggett is emphatic about her gravy. "All right now, you see what I put in there," she says. "I didn't put no celery, no bell pepper, no tomato, no water."
At nearly the last moment, she sautees the shrimp in a separate skillet. They're done in just a couple of minutes, and she quickly folds them into the sauce. "If you make the gravy, and put the shrimp in there to cook, it makes it tough," she observes. After we take a bite, she says triumphantly, "See, you got the crunch of the shrimp." She's right. The shrimp are firm and meaty, with almost a bit of a snap to them still.
Finally, this tantalizing dish is ready — and you will never leave Ms. Emily's house without getting fed. "The whole entire world!" she laughs. "The whole entire world. It don't be a day pass by that somebody don't stop by here that don't get something to eat."
As soon as the shrimp and grits are ready, we gather over the kitchen table for a moment of prayer, holding hands in communion. Ms. Emily says grace — and then we feast, together.
Some recipes included in this link:
Comments
Post a Comment