PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAOLA + MURRAY; FOOD STYLING BY REBECCA JURKEVICH; PROP STYLING BY SOPHIE STRANGIO
The world started eating rice thousands of years ago. By comparison, farming of the crop is relatively new to the United States. Production largely flourished after the transatlantic slave trade forced enslaved African people to the shores of South Carolina, where their agrarian wisdom helped jumpstart the grain’s cultivation.
One variety in particular, Carolina Gold, flourished on U.S. soil. The buttery, nutty grain became the first commercially produced rice in the U.S., not to mention the most sought-after, as fourth-generation farmer Marion “Rollen” Chalmers told a group of visitors this spring at the Charleston Wine + Food Festival’s agritourism event “Rice Fields + Winnows: The West African Connection”. “Rice thrived on this land,” he told us, gesturing to the heritage fields upon which we were standing. Carolina Gold had been grown and harvested on that same land in the 18th and 19th centuries, but production dwindled in the 20th century as other rice strains became more widely cultivated—and the Lowcountry grain all but disappeared. “But people here remembered how good it tasted,” said Chalmers. Over the past couple of decades, growers like him have begun reviving the crop. Now, they’re introducing the heritage grain to new generations of rice enthusiasts.
Carolina Gold arguably owes its existence to the enslaved African people who first nurtured the crop. To highlight this link, cookbook author and chef Pierre Thiam prepared for the crowd a creamy, vanilla-scented rice
