Ceeb: Before It Was Called Carolina Gold

I've been talking about this rice for the last 26 years, ever since my cookbook The New Low-Country Cooking came out in 2000.

But before anybody called it Carolina Gold, the Wolof people of Senegal already had a word for rice. Ceeb.

This rice didn't come from the South. The South came from this rice — and from the people who knew how to grow it.

The flavor profile is nutty. It's an heirloom long-grain, with a clean, almost floral smell when it cooks. You'll find it on the best menus in the South, and it's the backbone of Lowcountry cooking: red rice, Hoppin' John, pilau, shrimp and rice, rice pudding.

Knowledge from the Rice Coast

Along the West African coast, from Senegal down through Guinea and Sierra Leone to Liberia, people had been growing rice for thousands of years. They even had their own species, Oryza glaberrima, African rice, domesticated along the Niger River thousands of years ago. Women taught their daughters how to plant it, harvest it, pound it and cook it. Farmers on the tidal rivers learned to read fresh water against salt, to flood a field at the right hour and drain it at the right hour, and to build earthen banks that held a river back until they wanted it in.

That's engineering. There's no other word for it.

Rice in Carolina

Now Carolina. The colony was founded in 1670, and the men running it went looking for a money crop. They landed on rice. They had the land, the swamps and the capital. What they didn't have was anybody who knew rice. So they went shopping for that knowledge on the slave ships.

Between 1749 and 1787 alone, 68,701 captive Africans were legally landed at Charleston. Planters wanted people from the stretch of coast Europeans called the Windward Coast, the Rice Coast. And they said so out loud. On May 1, 1769, a Charleston firm named Brewton, Doyley and Brewton ran an ad in the South-Carolina and American General Gazette selling Africans "from CAPE-MOUNT, on the WINDWARD COAST, which is in the center of a RICE COUNTRY."

Read that ad one more time. They weren't selling strong backs. They were selling know-how.

And the know-how paid. By the 1770s rice was South Carolina's fortune, and by 1774 eight of the nine largest estates in all thirteen colonies sat in South Carolina.

Carolina Gold itself came later. Planters popularized it in the 1780s, an Asian-type rice named for the gold color of its husk. There's a story about a ship captain carrying the first seed in from Madagascar in 1685. Historians still argue over it. But a seed is just a seed. Here's what it took to turn a cypress swamp into a rice field:

• clear the swamp by hand
• build the earthen banks
• dig the ditches and canals
• set the wooden floodgates, called trunks
• flood and drain the field on the tide
• press each seed into the mud with your heel, which was women's work
• stand in the water to weed it
• cut it, thresh it and pound it in a wooden mortar
• toss it into the wind in a flat fanner basket to blow the husk away

That fanner basket craft still lives in the sweetgrass baskets Gullah Geechee women sell along the roads outside Charleston today.

Every grain of that fortune went through Black hands.

The cost of the fortune

Now here's what those hands got for it.

The rice swamp was some of the deadliest work in the country. Malaria, dysentery, waterborne fevers and parasites. Each enslaved worker was expected to bring in around 2,250 pounds of rice. On Gowrie, a rice plantation on the Savannah River, the historian William Dusinberre went through the plantation's own records. Between 1833 and 1861, twice as many enslaved people died there as were born. Between 1833 and 1864, 90 percent of the children died before they turned sixteen.

That's roughly ninety percent.

The money went up the river to Charleston. The mansions, the churches, the wrought-iron gates people still take pictures of. The people who made it went into the ground.

Whose story survived

So how does a story like that get buried? Same way it always does. You change who the hero is.

The planters became the men who "introduced" rice to Carolina. The seed got a romantic origin story, a captain and an island and a lucky gift. And the people who carried the knowledge across the ocean got written down in the plantation books as "hands." Full hand. Half hand. Not minds. Hands.

The grain returns

After the Civil War the plantation system fell apart. Hurricanes in 1911 finished off much of what was left, and the last commercial crop of Carolina Gold came in 1927. The rice that built a city nearly disappeared.

Then in the 1980s, a Savannah eye surgeon named Dr. Richard Schulze and his wife, Patricia, got seed from a USDA rice research station in Texas, where some had been kept. They planted 14 pounds and harvested 64. By 1988 they were bringing in about 10,000 pounds a year. Anson Mills and Carolina Plantation Rice started selling it to the public in 1998, and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation was founded in 2004 to keep it alive.

The receipt

So here it is. For everybody. Now you know where Carolina Gold comes from. Not from a captain's pocket. From Ceeb. From the Rice Coast. From women who taught their daughters, and daughters who taught theirs, and kept teaching in a swamp on the other side of the ocean.

It's back on the table now, in the best kitchens in the South. The grain survived. So did the knowledge. It always does.

Know where your rice comes from. Tell a person and share the receipt. Before it was called Carolina Gold, it was African knowledge.

The Receipts R the Recipe.

Sources & Further Reading

• Michael W. Twitty, "A People's History of Carolina Rice," MAD (2015)
• Charleston County — Inland Rice Fields: History
• Adverts 250 Project — Brewton, Doyley & Brewton ad, South-Carolina and American General Gazette, May 1, 1769
• Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston — "Women's Work with Rice and Cotton" (cites William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days)
• Journal of the American Revolution — "Life in the Southern Colonies"
• The Henry Ford — "The Sweetgrass Basket: An African American Tradition"
• Carolina Gold — origin, decline and revival (Wikipedia)