Charleston Gold: A Direct Descendant of Carolina Gold

Written by David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Spring 2011

 

Charleston Gold, a short-stalked aromatic descendent of America‟s most historic rice, Carolina Gold, was approved for release by the Texas Department of Agriculture on February 11, 2011. Anna McClung of the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Rice Research Unit in Beaumont, Texas, field tested the variety over the last two years and has recommended to the state seed certification board that the variety be recognized.

Bred by Merle Shepard of the Clemson University, Coastal Research and Education Center in Charleston, SC and Gurdev S. Khush, the former Head, Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biochemistry Division of the International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines, Charleston Gold retains the distinctive gold hull and wholesome mouth feel of its famous ancestor, adding to it the short stalk stature and longer grain of IR64. A further enhancement came from crossing with IR65610-24-3-6-3-2-3, a short stalked fragrant breeding line, giving Carolina Gold an aroma for the first time. Shepard and Khush developed Charleston Gold using the time-honored pedigree breeding method — the method employed by horticulturists in the era before gene-insertion — to make improvements on the classic grain.

Landrace Carolina Gold became the staple rice of the American South shortly after the American Revolution. Famously beautiful in the field and on the plate, Carolina Gold emerged at a time when culinary taste favored rice in composite dishes — pilaus, perloos, bogs, and stews — in which the ability to complement the flavors of other ingredients was paramount.

Non-aromatic rices were deemed superior to aromatic varieties in the United States. During the 20th century an aesthetic shift occurred — the perfumed rices of South Asia and India — Jasmine and Basmati enjoyed rising favor in America and world wide, particularly when rice operated as a separate side dish. Dr. Shepard wondered why couldn't Carolina Gold have an aromatic version as well as the classic non-aromatic? The conviction to create a new variety had Shepard consulting with his friend and colleague Gurdev Khush, a world-renowned rice breeder, about other beneficial features that might be introduced into a new version of Carolina Gold. The old staple rice grew rather tall and historically was vulnerable to wind damage during storms. One of the innovations of the green-revolution in rice breeding was the development of short stalk rices that were not subject to blow down. Certain of these short stalked rices possessed additional virtues — great productivity, disease resistance, and rapidity of growth — a particular benefit when crops must vie with weeds in extraction of nutrients from the soil.

Plant breeding has been an important on-going dimension of agriculture in America since the rise of the Agricultural Reform movement in the 1820s. The desire to improve the best cultivars in the field gave rise to many extraordinary creations. In the 1840s, for instance, Joshua John Ward, a rice planter, created a long-grain version of Carolina Gold, 5/12ths of an inch long, rather than the standard 3/8ths of an inch. This variety created a world sensation, during the sixteen years it was on the world market. It was lost with the Civil War. Charleston Gold is a new variety of the fabled grain, carrying on the tradition of Ward's "long grain" Gold Seed Rice.

One of the most marked advantages of Charleston Gold is its productivity. Grown conventionally, it yields 6819 pounds per acre, compared to 3745 for Charleston Gold. (One reason that rice culture suspended in South Carolina in the 1910s was that other varieties were more productive and could be grown with less cost. Taste, not productivity, inspired the variety‟s revival at the end of the 20th century). What is even more striking is its productivity under organic growing regimens — 6060 pounds per acre, from 300-500 pounds more than major aromatic varieties currently grown. This promises extraordinary utility for planting in developing countries in which traditional agriculture is widely practiced. 

Shepard and Khush began their effort in 1998. After extensive testing for grain quality and disease resistance traits, the most promising strain of Charleston Gold was dispatched to Beaumont, Texas, in 2008 where Anna McClung refined the variety to seed standard and evaluated it across a number of southern growing environments. The 2011 growing season will see its debut in commercial cultivation.

Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold

Written By David Shields

Originally Published In The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

Biologist and rice historian Richard Porcher, Professor emeritus of Biology at the Citadel, discovered in summer of 2009 the plats describing the Pineville Rice plantation of Col.Hezekiah Mayham.

Mayham, the first planter to grow Gold Seed rice in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, was one of the two planters whose name is linked by early rice historians with the introduction of Carolina Gold to the Lowcountry in the wake of the American Revolution. With the support of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, Porcher and University of Georgia graduate student Hayden Smith, plans to conduct a preliminary archaeological survey of the site to retrieve seeds and plant matter. Rice geneticist Anna McClung of the USDA has been able to extract DNA from single rice grains in the past and has indicated a willingness to perform similar analysis on whatever is extracted from Mayham’s plantation.

Securing the primordial Gold seed from Mayham’s upland rice fields would be greatly revealing for several reasons. Mayham’s rice strains would eventually serve as the founding seed from which Joshua John Ward, the greatest and most experimental of the antebellum rice planters, developed his world famous long grain version of Carolina Gold. During the brief 20-year period from 1840 to 1861 when that variety was cultivated, it commanded this highest price of any rice on the world market in Paris and London. It is an ambition of the CRG Foundation to genetically recreate the long Gold variety in the next decade.

Pushing Back the Roots of America’s Conservationist Writing: Agricultural Reform Literature of the Antebellum Era

Written by David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

Before the Civil War, specifically from 1820-1860, the number of agricultural journals published in the United States proliferated into the hundreds. Begun in 1819, the American Farmer printed in Baltimore, Maryland figured as the pioneer of these farm papers and forged what would become a transnational exchange of knowledge, ideas, observations, essays, public addresses, and editorials on all facets of agri- culture, including the preparation and consumption of food. Though many of these journals circulated only for a few years, others would cultivate a substantial subscription base over a period of decades. What propelled the fomentation of these agricultural publications, and what message did they seek to convey to their readers — farmers?

Already at the birth of the American Republic did the nation’s leaders (many of whom farmed) write and speak about the depleted soils rendering eastern farms (particularly in the mid-atlantic and southern regions) less and less productive. The long-held traditions of planting in monocultures of tobacco and cotton, fallowing instead of manuring and rotating crops, plowing vertically on hillsides, and planting the same crop on the same land year after year left much of the nation’s farmland eroded or exhausted. The call to farmers to restore these “worn out lands” with what the agricultural improvers promoted variably as “the new husbandry,” “scientific agriculture,” and “book farming” served as the mantra of the new age of agricultural reform led by the editors and contributing writers whose experience, expertise, innovation, and vision would promulgate the economic, ecological, political, and moral imperatives of sustaining farms and farming far into the future.

Given the primacy these conservationists assigned to practices of restoring and sustaining the soil as the basis for sustainable agriculture, we might consider the corpus of these agricultural journals as America’s first conservation writing in an era predating national programs and policies set forth decades later to conserve and protect wilderness lands. The most articulate of these agricultural writers were no less committed to (and eloquent at) conserving and restoring natural resources than were the likes of Henry Thoreau and John Muir, figures whom we more readily recognize as founders of American environmentalism. Even the poetry commonly featured in the farm papers conveyed moral lessons and practical instruction, and often exonerated the farmer as national hero. Some poets put recipes into verse, such as “Recipe for Making Sweet-Potato Pudding” and “Pudding and Beans” featured in the New England Farmer in 1833 and 1838 respectively.

Among the most strident and articulate of the editors of the farm press, Jesse Buel — also a judge and a farmer — wrote in 1838 that “we should consider our soil as we do our free institutions, a patrimonial trust to be handed down, unimpaired, to posterity; to be used, but not abused.” The health of the nation’s soil and citizenry formed an interdependent relationship. To carry out the the mission to preserve farm- ing as the nation’s economic and cultural foundation, the agricultural “improvers” as they were often called enlisted farmers (and especially those with some facility with the pen) to experiment, observe, record, and report on field trials with the latest thinking and practices involving but not limited to crop rotations, manuring, new seed varieties, soil analysis, and plowing techniques and implements. These journals exhorted farmers to acquire knowledge of the various branches of the natural sciences and to subscribe and contribute to the agricultural journal published in their respective regions as a means to increasing the productivity of their farms and, by doing so, advancing the state and status of the nation’s agriculture in general. Among the most important of the agricultural papers include The Cultivator published in Albany New York, the New England Farmer of Boston, the Genesee Farmer of Rochester, the Southern Agriculturist of Columbia, South Carolina, the Farmer’s Register of Petersburg, Virginia, the Southern Planter of Richmond, Virginia, and the Southern Cultivator of Augusta, Georgia.

Despite the high moral grandeur and visionary zeal characteristic of the agricultural journals of the time given to sustaining the vitality of the soil and the farm, they were equally devoted to enlightening readers to the proliferation of new and novel varieties of grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Correspondents regularly shared their judgments of particular varieties for taste, resistance to pests and disease, productivity, and marketability — including rice. Among the major farm journals of the era, the Southern Agriculturist most prominently featured essays, reports, queries, and responses disputing or promoting all conceivable aspects of rice cultivation, including the merits and vagaries of particular seed varieties, harvesting methods, sowing and irrigation regimes, manuring, rotations, marketing, international trade, and recipes.

Featured in an 1828 issue of the Southern Cultivator is Thomas Pinckney’s experiment to free his fields of what many rice planters at the time relentless struggled to eradicate: “volunteer rice.” Pinckney reports variable success by having planted sections of a rice field in wheat, barley, oats, flax, slip potatoes, cowpeas, and the garden pea. Of these crops, barley, oats, and flax most effectively eradicated volunteer rice.

The Southern Agriculturist the same year featured the recommendations of Charles E. Rowand to rice planters to alternate planting their rice fields in cotton, corn, barley, or oats. Possibly the most pioneering of rice planters and one of the few who rotated crops as a matter of course, James Hamilton Couper reports in an 1833 issue of the Southern Agriculturist increasing his plantation’s productivity by following a rotation regime of sowing cowpeas followed by sugarcane, cotton, and rice over six successive years. He also intercropped cotton, peas, and corn on other fields. Other crops reported by southern farmers and planters as improvers of the soil include sweet potatoes, “pinders,” or peanuts, “skinless oats,” buckwheat, and rye.

Not only did certain of the more forward-thinking rice planters rotate crops and intercrop to increase the soil’s fertility, they also did so as a means to staving off the “volunteer rice” or “red rice” that regularly plagued rice fields by assessing, changing, and managing soil chemistry— a central focus of the “scientific farming” promoted in the agricultural improvement literature.

In 1828, Charles Munnerlyn writes, “Rice land that possesses any ill quality, or much polluted with volunteer Rice, I think could be greatly improved, by planting it a year in dry culture.”

In the same year and journal (Southern Agriculturist), Roswell King claims that “A rotation of crops is necessary to make large crops of Rice [. . .] as well as to eradicate the water grass and volun- teer Rice.”

Another correspondent in 1833 provides a detailed account of his success with keeping his fields clear of volunteer rice by sowing oats and slips (potatoes) alternately twice a year for two years, as Edward T. Heriot’s written account of his experiment with this rotation eleven years later would confirm. Other methods of eradication included the use of various manures and irrigation regimes. The question arises, how did these planters know how to eradicate volunteer rice without destroying the commodity rice varieties intended for cultivation? Surprisingly, their accounts provide us little or no explanation.

In the bigger picture, how did the agricultural journals as a whole change American agriculture? While it may be impossible to ascertain their impact apart from the broader realm of the agricultural reform movement of the time that included not only the journals but the activities of agricultural societies and “fairs,” farm manuals, and other non-print efforts, we can trace their influence upon the formation of agricultural colleges, the creation of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1862,  and the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture that have increased efficiency and productivity but, in retrospect, have compromised the ecological sustainability of modern agriculture. Yet given their reliance upon organic manures before the age of chemical fertilizers — and our own age in which their use has spawned a return to “organic” farming, we might learn from what the early nineteenth-century agriculturists had to say about farming and food. And too, we might incorporate their writing into America’s canon of environmental literature and the knowledge and wisdom found there into our culture of growing and eating food.

(Special Note)

Last Spring, the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation awarded a grant to Stephen Spratt, a Ph.D student of American Literature at the University of South Carolina, to research the major agricultural journals in circulation from 1819 to 1860 and extract articles on crop rotations and on varieties of grains, leg- umes, and peas. These findings will soon be accessible as PDF documents in the Foundation’s archives.

Stephen’s dissertation explores the mediating force which the agricultural press and the larger “print” world of agricultural writing exerted upon the imaginary and literal field of agriculture from the age of Thomas Jefferson and Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur to the eve of the Civil War. 

Birds in Rice Fields

Written by Merle Sheppard

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

Impoundments for rice production along the Carolina and Georgia coastline, drastically changed the local landscape and brought about a diverse ecosystem that attracted myriad aquatic organisms, including frogs, worms, snakes, and crustaceans, and provided food and habitat for a large number of birds.

Bobolink

The rice field undergoes succession and shifts in plant species composition over time (Kelly 2005). Interestingly, although several dozen species of birds inhabit the rice ecosystem, only two actually damage the crop. Dr. David Shields reported on the “rice bird,” which is actually a bobolink, the most serious of rice pests during the major rice production period in the Charleston area (Shields 2008). Early planters timed the planting of their crops so as to minimize the impact of these migratory rice feeders.

The other bird, the Canada goose (figure 2), is a more recent pest of rice. We cultivate Carolina Gold and soon to be released ‘Charleston Gold’ at Clemson University’s Coastal Research and Education Center on Savannah Highway in Charleston, SC. The geese come in flocks of a dozen or more and attack the crop shortly after the rice seed germinate, devouring the young seedlings. The geese have adapted to the local environments, because of holding ponds and lakes in subdivisions (and because of feeding by residents) and stay in the area all year round, not following their usual behavior of migrating south during winter. In 2008, Canada geese destroyed about a 20 square meter area in a field of Carolina Gold rice on the Clemson University Experimental farm.

Canada Goose

Most other bird species that are attracted to rice fields, both old and new, are not pests but are part of the essential fabric of this ecosystem. They also provide endless opportunities for birdwatchers and naturalists to observe them. A good example of an old rice field is typified by the abandoned rice fields at the Caw Caw Interpretive Center on Savannah Highway near Ravenel, SC. Caw Caw is a 654 acre property, formerly a rice plantation that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. The earthen dikes and water control devices are still in place and the impoundments and adjacent areas provide habitat to at least 251 bird species. Some birds are seasonal, others are not so common but the list is an example of the amazing diversity and richness of species that occur in abandoned rice fields.

The unique element of the rice field (old or new) is water. This not only provides an ideal habitat for colonizing plants but also attracts a large number of aquatic animal species including insects. The abandoned rice plantations also produce communities of plants along the edges of impoundments that provide an ideal habitat for many bird species such as the common yellow-throat, king rail, least bittern, and many others. This article will provide a small photographic glimpse at a few of the more commonly encountered bird species in rice fields in current production and in abandoned rice fields. There are dozens of other species, not included here, that have adapted to the edge habitat that adjoins rice impoundments. As we admire the rich species diversity of the avifauna, we are still enjoying the fruits of the labor of early rice planters and people who supported the enterprise of rice production.

Birds found in rice paddies
Great Blue Heron
Little Blue Heron
Tri-colored Heron
Green Heron
Black-Crowned Night Heron
Yellow-Crowned Night Heron
Great Egret
Snowy Egret Cattle Egret
Wood Stork
White Ibis
Greater Yellowlegs Solitary Sandpiper
Wood Duck Mottled DuckHooded Merganser Bufflehead
Blue-winged Teal Pied-billed Grebe
Ring-necked Duck Northern Pintail
Anhinga
Double-crested Cormorant

Birds that feed on rice

Bobolink
Canada Goose
House Finc

The Vanquished Banquet: American Chestnut Pudding

Written by David Shields 

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

 

Native to the mountain south, the American Chestnut for centuries served as a major food source for forest wildlife until the introduction of the fungal blight that decimated the species after 1904.

In the 19th-century the roasted nuts were a favorite Christmas treat. Chestnut stuffing filled Thanksgiving Turkeys and Christmas Geese. Chestnut soup adorned the winter table of many southern homes. But the most refined dish prepared from the American Chestnut by southern cooks was chestnut pudding. The recipe derived from the Old World, found in both English and French cuisines, employing the European Sweet Chestnut. Because it often included rose water as an ingredient, one of the elements of 18th-century confectionary, Chestnut puddings tasted antique . . . traditional, and so found favor in those families that revered heritage. The version I have provided does without the rose-water, but captures the old taste of home.

Recipe

Boil two dozen chestnuts, remove the shells, and rub the pulp through a sieve. Mix pulp with one- half pint of cream, two ounces of butter, three of loaf sugar, salt, and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir these ingredients over a moderate fire until they thicken. As it thickens, increase the intensity of your stirring to prevent sticking and burning. When the preparation strips away from the sides of the pan easily, remove the pan from the heat, and add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs and the whites of three eggs whipped firm. Butter a mould and fill it with the mixture, fastening the cover securely. Steam for an hour and a half. When cooked, invert it on a dish, pour some warm fig or apricot ham over it and serve.

The Vanquished Banquet: Fritters

Written by David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

The mid-19th century was the heyday of the fritter. A traditional dish of southern Europe and West Africa, the fritter was any ingredient incorporated into a batter of wheat, rice, or buckwheat flour, or corn meal, shaped into a roundish mass, and fried in lard or vegetable oil. A fritter could be savory or sweet, depending upon the chief ingredient incorporated into the batter. In Louisiana they were called beignets, in the Midwest, dodgers, in the south fritters. They were often dipped into a sauce, or melted butter, or gravy, or drizzled with syrup or molasses. Savory fritters were side dishes, sweet fritters, desserts. Both the cymling (pattipan squash) fritter and the okra fritter were standard dishes of the early southern table.

Cymling Fritters

Squashes came to the southern table from the native nations of the Southeast. Of the various indigenous varieties of C. pepo grown in the eastern half of the continent, northerners gravitated to the crookneck ‘winter’ squashes, southerners to the scalloped summer squashes which they called cymlings. The exterior shell of the cymling hardens as it matures.

A Virginian of the Reconstruction Era advised, “In selecting cymlings take none that the thumb-nail cannot easily penetrate, and the white ones are preferable. Cut them into pieces, and boil in just enough water to cover them for about three-quarters of an hour, or until soft enough to mash.”

Cymlings were invariably boiled or fried as the first step in any dish. One of the great debates of the latter 19th-century about cooking squashes concerned whether to add bacon to the pot. Some thought it too greasy, others a necessary flavor additive. Since it does not appear in any surviving cymling fritter recipe, we sidestep the controversy.

After boiling and running through a colander, mix with an egg, season with salt, pepper, and butter, make into cakes and fry a light brown.

Marion Cabell Tyree, Housekeeping in Old Virginia (Louis- ville: John P. Morton, 1879), p. 241. 

Okra Fritters

#1

Cut the okra in very thin slices, almost as thin as a wafer, make a batter of flour, egg, and water, or a little milk; put the okra in with a little salt, and fry them in hot lard.

Mrs. Sarah A. Elliott, Mrs. Elliott’s Housewife (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1870), p. 106

#2

Strain a quart already boiled, mash it smooth, and season with salt and pepper; beat in one or two eggs and add flour enough to thicken into a paste; fried as fritters, and served upon a napkin hot, as fried.

Sarah Annie Frost, Godey’s Lady’s Book Receipts and Household Hints (Philadelphia: Evans, Stod- dard Co., 1870), p. 184. 

The Vanquished Banquet: Stewed Salsify Virginia Style

Written By David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

In America, the slender, pale salsify root became, curiously, a monument to the people’s insatiable desire for oysters, earning the vegetable the nickname, oyster-plant. Even boiled, mashed, rolled in cracker crumbs, and deep fried like fried oysters, Salsify does not possess the mouth feel, salinity, or unctuousness of a bivalve. So it suffers the fate of being a perpetual disappointment, a failed wish for those who take it up thinking it to be, somehow, the vegetable kingdoms phantom double for a blue point. (Repeatedly in cook books of the 19th century one finds suggestions on how to make salsify taste “more like an oyster,” such as “having a little cod- fish stirred among it” while stewing.)

Let us exorcise the phantom now. Only a 19th-century Midwesterner, haunted by elusive memory and residing far from the railroad depots where barrels of eastern oysters were dispatched, could possibly delude themselves into detecting the briny succulence of an oyster on his tongue when savoring salsify.

The root has its own virtues, whether boiled, stewed, fried, or shaved into a salad. It has a clean, slightly saline toothsomeness, free of the mintyness and occasional fibrousness of a parsnip, the rough sugar of a carrot, or the mealy blandness of a potato. It is wholesome, delicately nutty, and visually appealing when peeled, white, and firm. Salsify’s propensity to dissolve into mush when over-boiled has prompted 21st century cooks to steam rather than boil the root. In traditional European cookery salsify’s whiteness became a point of culinary elaboration. Care was taken to prevent the peeled roots from discoloring by soaking them immediately in vinegar water. Dishes often married the cooked roots with milk or cream.

Recipe

Scrape and throw into water at once to prevent from turning dark. Boil till tender in a closely covered vessel. Drain off the water and cut the salsify in pieces half an inch long. Throw in a saucepan with 1 teacup vinegar

1 teacup water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon butter salt and pepper to taste

Just before serving add the yolk of an egg beaten up and mixed with a little water. The seasoning above is give for one quart salsify.

Mrs. S. T. Marion Cabell Tyree, Housekeeping in Old Virginia (Louisville: J. P. Morton & o., 1879) p. 250. 

The Vanquished Banquet: Creole Fried Cucumbers

Written by David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

Cucumbers, like all vegetables, were invariably cooked until the end of the 18th century, in the belief that heating completed the process of digestion that was only imperfectly performed by the human stomach. The fear of Dyspepsia only dissipated when Scottish physicians redrew human understanding of the digestive process during the Enlightenment.

The 1790s saw the birth of raw vegetable salads as a major component of the table. Cucumbers during the entire 19th century were both cooked and consumed raw. Every American cookbook of any merit included one if not several recipes for fried or sautéed cucumbers for summer menus. The fanciest of these dishes emerged in the south, particularly in Louisiana. With the health fad for raw vegetables that began in the 1890s and culminated in the 1920s, the fried cucumber faded from American cookery, until the recent revival of stir-fried cucumbers prompted by the vegetarian movement. The oriental flavors now favored bear little relation to the rich taste profile of Creole Fried Cucumbers.

Recipe

Slice 8 middle sized cucumbers, flour them slightly and fry a light brown in a little lard; pour off the lard and add to the cucumbers 4 tablespoonfuls of hot water, 2 of wine, 2 of walnut catsup, pepper, salt, and sliced onion, (if you like it) a lump of butter dipped in flour; stew about 15 minutes. A teaspoonful of mustard is better than the onion.

Christian Women’s Exchange, The Creole Cookery Book (New Orleans: T. H. Thomason, 1885), p. 76 

The Vanquished Banquet: Mutton Ham

Written By David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

In 1837 the editor of the Tennessee Farmer declared that mutton ham was superior to pork. While his opinion seems not to have been sustained by southern culinary history, the pleasures of a cured ram or sheep’s leg were widely known in 19th-century America. Mutton Ham was a traditional English meat, described and lauded in the most popular late 18th and early 19th-century English cookbooks.

The first recipe published in an American periodical, an 1825 receipt published in the New England Farmer, opted in favor of smoking the leg for ten days with green hickory wood. Another school of preparation eschewed smoking but recommended that the ham be soaked and boiled before eating. In the south mutton ham came to be a feature of up-country, rather than coastal cookery, in large measure because the heat and humidity of the coastal south made sheep miserable and thwarted large-scale sheep-breeding.

Once cured, a ham could be shipped anywhere, and hence came to the Lowcountry and Tidewater table. While numbers of recipes survive for the dish, the most extensive comes from Mrs. Washington of North Carolina. With the fall-off in demand for mutton on American meat markets in the twentieth century, the mutton ham languished and has become a forgotten mainstay of the banquet table.

Recipe

Leg of mutton weighing twelve pounds; one ounce of black pepper; a quarter of a pound of brown sugar; one ounce of saltpeter; one and a quarter pounds of salt.

The day after the sheep is killed, mix the sugar, pepper, and saltpeter, and rub thoroughly into the meat for fifteen minutes, until the outer part is thoroughly impregnated with the seasoning. Put the ham into a large earthenware vessel and cover it with the salt; let it remain thus for three weeks, turning it daily and basting it with the brine, adding to this, after the first week, a teacupful of vinegar. When the ham is removed from the pickle, wash with cold water, then with vinegar, and hang it up in a cool cellar for a week, at least, before it is used. Soak an hour in fair water before boiling.

Or, if you choose to smoke it for several days after it is corned, it can be chipped and eaten raw like dried beef.

Mrs. Washington, Unrivalled Cook-Book (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1886), pp. 116-17. 

The Vanquished Banquet: Broiled Rice Birds

Written By David Shields

Originally Published in The Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2009

South Carolina rice planters looked upon the rice bird with mixed emotions. The cloud-like flocks of black song birds feasted upon the rice fields, fattening for their long migration to central South Amer- ica. They could strip fields bare. But they also ranked among the tastiest birds — up with the canvasback duck — served on the American table. So the southern remedy to the Rice Bird was the shot gun. Hundreds of thousands were gunned from the sky over southern ricelands up until 1911. But the rice bird — or bobolink — did not suffer population decline until the hay fields of America, their ideal nesting sites, were converted to alfalfa, as the horse was supplanted by the tractor in agricultural America.

Today the bobolink is protected in the United States. But in Jamaica, where the are called butter birds, they are still shot and consumed, and farmers in Argentina, where the rice birds winter, find them as much as a nuisance as rice planters did in the 19th century. With the return of rice planting to South Carolina, the rice bird has also reappeared.

By some uncanny instinct they find the fields, and like their ancestors of old, gobble the grain. As an endangered species, South Carolinians are not supposed to shoot and consume them. Yet the bobolink population is on the rise, and there may come a day when we can once again savor the two dishes that graced the traditional southern table: broiled rice birds and rice bird pie.

A southern gourmet provides an enthusiast commentary of both dishes in an 1858 contribution to the greatest of antebellum American sporting periodicals, The Spirit of the Times:

They put up at several nom de plumes — rice bird, bobolink, reed-bird, rice-bunting, and last, although not least conspicuous, in their European guise ortolan is much admired and sought after for the delicacy of the flesh. They are served in several styles, a la cuisine, in the most notable restaurants; however different may be the methods of treating their rich, fat bodies, in the cooking and dressing, they always please the exquisite taste and palate of the gastro- nomist. Yet I know no better mode of cooking and dressing them than to place them in rows strung above a moderate fire, and under them a dripping pan well supplied with pieces of toasted bread, to received the rich and luscious drippings, that will exude from them. Allow them to cook thus gently, occasionally turning, so as not to have them over-roasted, as to one’s taste determine the portion of salt and black pepper should be put into each bird. They also afford an excellent pie, by the addition of a half-pint of rice, boiled, half pint of milk, add the yolks of two eggs, then place the birds, seasoned with all the usual spices, into the pie-pan; let it bake slowly until perfectly done. Oh! Ye Gods! What a pie! What a dish!

The Spirit of the Times 29, 36 (October 15, 1859), 425.