Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

It was in Newport, Rhode Island, where generations of Charlestonians had vacationed, that I stumbled upon Old Receipts from Old St. John’s, a handmade book of photos and recipes from antebellum plantations in Berkeley County, South Carolina. The year was 1984, and I was, at the time, the food editor of a French magazine in New York. Though I had spent most of my life in the Lowcountry, just a few miles from St. John’s, I didn’t recognize much of the food so lovingly documented in the old book, which, I suspected, had escaped the widespread flooding of plantations that had followed the construction of a big hydroelectric dam in the late 1930s. Had so many Lowcountry recipes disappeared in just a few decades? The book was unsigned, which made me think that it had been written prior to the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), when the names of Lowcountry ladies did not appear in print except at birth, marriage, and death.