Lowcountry cuisine

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Lowcountry cuisine is the cooking traditionally associated with the coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia--the Lowcountry. While it shares features with Southern cooking, its geography, economics, demographics, and culture pushed its culinary identity in a different direction from regions above the fall line. With its rich diversity of seafood from the coastal estuaries, its concentration of wealth in Charleston and Savannah, and a vibrant French influence from a large Huguenots population, Lowcountry cooking has strong parallels with New Orleans and Cajun cuisines. But Charleston never developed the enduring grand restaurant legacy that New Orleans did. And so it lacked a major resource that had helped define and promote Creole cusine to the rest of the world.

Contents 1 Region 2 Rice 3 Foods that are traditionally part of Lowcountry cuisine 3.1 Appetizers, Soups, and Salads 3.2 Meat and Seafood 3.3 Rice 3.4 Sides 4 See also 5 References

[edit] Region

There is a difference of opinion as to what exactly the Lowcountry encompasses. Points of agreement are that it is the coastal plains of the Southeastern United States below the fall line--the last place where rivers drop on their way to the Atlantic and beyond which rolling hills begin. The heart of the Lowcountry is in South Carolina bounded on the north by the Pee Dee River and on the south by the Savannah River. More generous accounts argue that the region extends further south into Georgia and perhaps into northern Florida. The geography is a critical factor in distinguishing the regions's culinary identity from interior areas of the South. The rich estuary system provides an abundance of shrimp, crabs, and oysters that were not available to non-coastal regions prior to refrigeration. The marshlands of South Carolina also proved conducive to growing rice, and that grain became a major part of the everyday diet.

[edit] Rice

[edit] Foods that are traditionally part of Lowcountry cuisine

[edit] Appetizers, Soups, and Salads

• Benne-Oyster Soup
• Cooter Soup
• She-crab Soup
• Sweet Potato & Crab Soup

[edit] Meat and Seafood

• Catfish Stew
• Lowcountry Boil
• Country Captain
• Frogmore Stew
• Shrimp and Grits
• Shrimp Kedgeree
• Oyster Roast

[edit] Rice

• Charleston Red Rice
• Perlau

[edit] Sides

• Hoppin' John

[edit] See also

• Cuisine of the Southern United States
• Vertamae Grosvenor

[edit] References

• Taylor, John Martin. Hoppin'John's Lowcountry Cooking. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
• The Junior League of Charleston. Charleston Receipts. Wimmer Brothers, 1993.