Low Country Cuisine

This rich, warming stew, punctuated by succulent shrimp, juicy hunks of beef, and crisp-tender okra, is one of our favorites from Toni Tipton-Martin’s new cookbook Jubilee.

You’ll need your favorite seafood seasoning and your biggest pot for this seafood boil brimming with shrimp, sweet corn, smoky sausage, and tender potatoes.

Set a large colander in the sink before you add the shrimp so you can drain the seafood boil as soon as it comes off the heat.

When I host cooking school weekends at my place, I often do a Lowcountry Boil on Friday nights for my usual “meet and greet” session, where the folks attending can get to know one another—and me—a little bit. This is a specialty of the Lowcountry areas like Charleston and Savannah, where the people live near the water and have access to plenty of fresh shrimp. But of course you don’t need to live near the water to enjoy it. The traditional way to serve this is to basically dump it—spread it, if you will—across a large picnic table that has been covered with newspaper. You may want to fancy up the serving situation, but it’s fine to keep it casual, too. You can just tell your guests that’s how they do it down South.

The amount of crab and shrimp you need will depend on appetites and on how well your guests know each other. When you serve crabs in mixed company, even dear friends will shock you with their daintiness, but if it’s a family dinner, as ours is tonight, you might expect people to put away eight or ten crabs apiece. If crabs aren’t available, a seafood boil is equally delicious with just shrimp, especially if they are wild ones, still fresh enough to have their heads on.

This Lowcountry-style dinner—shrimp with saucy black-eyed peas and smoky bacon—is worthy of a glass of sweet tea.

Open a cold beer and dig in to this heap of potatoes, corn, and shrimp for a taste of Louisiana summer.

Lowcountry cooking is full of ideas that seem foreign to outsiders. This sweet and spicy chutney is the perfect foil for salty country ham. Ground together, the two form a paste for memorable appetizers.

One of my favorite meals was made by finding some leftover meat or fish and some cooked rice, and tossing them in a skillet with whatever caught our fancy. When you're good and hungry, a mixed-up quick meal tastes every bit as good as any long pot [long-cooked dish]. And you don't have to wait.

Oyster-roast masters like Louis Osteen, who have been doing this for years, use huge pits or grills that are large enough to cook sausages, oysters, and clams all at the same time. We recommend using whatever type of oyster is locally available to you. Examine them carefully—discard any that smell bad. If any are cracked or open, and don't close when tapped, discard those as well. When roasting oysters, it's important to keep them moist enough to create steam (hence the soaked burlap or water in the roasting pan). If roasted dry, they can explode. To make this menu simpler, you could skip making the clams; there will still be plenty of food for everyone.

Quickly sautéed shrimp over rice is a very old, traditional breakfast in the Carolina Low Country. But it would also make a nice quick-and-easy luncheon or supper dish, rounded out with a salad and maybe cornbread.

A seafood spread such as this one—especially when paired with crisp benne-seed (sesame-seed) wafers—has long been a popular cocktail nibble in South Carolina's Low Country.