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11/02/2007 Archived Entry: "Charleston, South Carolina"

Charleston, South Carolina, is a very beautiful city. The Seabourn Pride docked at the edge of the historic center and as soon as you pass the stinky marshes at the port – the stink was so bad it woke us up -- then the new, nice but not remarkable condominium apartments across the street, you are in a different world, an old and gracious southern world with beautiful old homes on quiet, palmetto-lined streets filled with flowering gardens, art galleries, restaurants, antique ships, and many things for tourists to do.

Tourism is, in fact, according to the young and witty driver of our quaint, covered, donkey-drawn touring carriage, the second biggest business of Charleston. Shipping – of what products and commodities he didn’t know – is second.

Palmettos, by the way, are small palm trees, also called Cabbage Palmetto and Sabal Palmetto, not the towering Royals you see in Palm Beach, Fort Meyer, or Naples, Florida, not the gracefully swooping coconut palms you see in Hawaii, or the date palms I love in the gardens and parks of Naples and Salerno, Italy. I would have just called Charleston’s palms small palm trees myself, but Bob Harned, who grew up in Hawaii and knows more about palms than most people, remembered that South Carolina is called The Palmetto State. The tree is on the state flag.

Very fortunately, I have an old friend who lives in Charleston. I don’t mean she is old, just that we have known each other and been fond of each other, and had mutual friends and intersecting lives for about 30 years. Nathalie Dupree used to be Miss Food Atlanta. Now she has become Miss Food Charleston. I would love to call her Miss Southern Food, period, however, because, defying her ageless, indefatigable presence, she has taught Southern cooking for about 40 years, has written more southern cookbooks than anyone could imagine there could be southern cookbooks to write, has had several TV series devoted to southern cooking and the southern way of entertaining … . Need I give her whole resume?

Transplanted from Atlanta to Charleston only six or so years ago, she now heads up the annual Charleston Food Festival, this year scheduled for last weekend in February-first week in March, a great week to visit the city. And she is still writing books. Her next is called “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking.” Nathalie Dupree’s Shrimp and Grits, her last effort, was at every book stall in Charleston’s old market buildings, a series of brick pavilions on – where else? – Market St., where food used to be vended and now souvenirs and specialties of Charleston are sold. I bought some bene wafers, the thin, crisp sesame cookies that the city is famous for, admired the beautiful baskets woven from the grass that grows in those stinky marshes (another nickname for South Carolina is the “Iodine State”), and tried to think of someone for whom I could buy an African-American “Mammie” doll.

I have to say the baskets were extremely tempting, but the large one that I first picked up, with a wave woven into the rim, was $350. Even a tiny token of a basket can be $35. If you stand around and watch the African-American women weaving them right there at the market, you’ll see why they have to be pricey. The work is time-consuming and tedious, and their craftsmanship is impeccable. The big ones must take several days to create. These are heirloom quality crafts.

Bob Harned and I visited Nathalie and her husband Jack Bass in their beautiful, typical Charleston home, painted a bright yellow and with Nathalie’s herb garden in the front yard. The architecture here is designed for the hot and steamy weather. Along the long side of most houses there is what we would call a porch, but Charlestonians call a piazza, pronouncing it pee-ah-za, not the Italian way, which is pee-ah-tza. The front door is likely to be at the short, street-end of the house and piazza, so it is sort of odd to open the door and find you are on an open porch, not in the house. Along the length of the piazza is the garden.

Nathalie took us to see the houses of two friends as well, and what most impressed me is the airiness of the rooms in these Charleston homes. Every room is surrounded by large windows. I could imagine them all opened in the summer with the sea breezes filling the curtains, although before air-conditioning people virtually lived on their piazzas in summer. They would enclose these porches in mosquito netting and eat, sleep, and entertain on them.

Natalie’s house is cozy and very Nathalie, meaning it is well-lived in and filled with interesting, beautiful stuff wherever you look. She has a great collection of ceramics, paper weights, corkscrews that she has cleverly hung on long boards that flank the doorway to a bar-pantry off the living room. I particularly loved two white-painted consoles on one living room wall. They were rams’ heads, the horns spread to hold shelves, one with an oil painting propped up on it, the other with a large ceramic jar, either Italian or French. I forgot to ask her. Nathalie and Jack also have many, many beautiful paintings, including a pair done by an African-American artist whose inspiration is the engravings that were on Confederate money. Who knew? Confederate money always depicted slaves at work, because slaves were the most precious commodity.

After catching up with Nathalie and Jack, who is a professor of humanities, learning about the important and surprising history of Jews in South Carolina – a colonial charter that allowed Jews religious freedom, the first Jewish elected official in the country -- of which Jack is one, we went to visit two very grand Charleston homes. One is owned by a New Yorker, Lou Hammond, who has an important public relations company in Manhattan. Lou, and her husband Chris, have collected French furniture and Turkish rugs for many years, and their impeccably restored Charleston home is a fabulous showcase. Peggy Moore, who used to be an editor at Glamour magazine in New York, has settled in Charleston with her husband, Truman. Their home also has important furniture, and a contemporary kitchen in what used to be a separate building. In early Charleston days, the kitchens were brick and separated from the wooden house. Nathalie says it was as much for keeping the house cool as to protect against kitchen fires. Peggy’s kitchen has been attached to the main house by a hall and it has been completely renovated. I could tell from the flame-stained, unpolished copper hanging from her pot rack that Peggy likes to cook and that this was not merely a show kitchen. I was very flattered that she had a copy of my “New York City Food” on her cookbook shelf.

As many of you probably know, I love antiques and old furniture. It was an incredibly treat to see some in such beautiful houses, all being used the way it was meant to be. These are living museums.

For lunch, we went to S.N.O.B., what Lou Hammond calls the ‘21’ of Charleston, in that it is a place where everyone important goes for lunch. I would never have thought to equate it with ’21.’ I would compare it more to the Union Square Café. It’s a beautifully proportioned big room, a former warehouse, with red-stained, well-worn wooden floors, oriental rugs here and there, wide-stripped beige and white vinyl tablecloths for graphic impact, and an open kitchen at the back, beyond a wide brick arch. Nathalie took us there because, like me, she most appreciates food that represents the place it where it is grown and made. Even though the restaurant is called S.N.O.B., it seemed anything but snobby. The name stands for Slightly North Of Broad, Broad St. being the dividing line between the very rich homes and the merely comfortably affluent homes. The menu is mostly local specialties, with a few French, Asian and other dishes thrown in. The southern food is somewhat reinterpreted – or revisited, as I am enjoying saying these days – to appeal to sophisticated contemporary tastes. We had, for instance, the local style of crab cakes with a bit of frisee salad. And we ate one of the best things I have eaten in a long time, truly: Crispy fried chicken livers are served on coarse-ground grits with onion gravy. I would go back to Charleston just for that!

Actually, I would love to go back to Charleston. I didn’t get enough of it. That, to me, is the downside of cruises. You get to a place that deserves your attention for more than a day, and you have to move on to the next port. In this case, however, our next port closed us out. It seems the Seabourn Pride’s berth in Savannah, Georgia, was being occupied by a ship that was for some reason detained by the U.S. government. There was no room for our ship, so we stayed in Charleston for a second day.

I took a long walk by myself that day, while Bob took a tour of Fort Sumter. He says it was interesting, but it was like visiting an archaeological site that has nothing but the foundations of an ancient city to see. (I have been to more than my share of those, as Bob is a trained Greek and Roman archaeologist and we are in Italy all the time.) He said you really have to use your knowledge of history and your imagination to “get” Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began. My taste tends to the more concrete. I looked at houses and gardens for a few hours. Even the lesser streets of Charleston are a joy to walk and see.

Then I poked around in a few antique stores. There was one gorgeously arranged store that had magnificent French furniture and accessories, but between the good stuff was some garage-sale quality items priced like precious antiques. I found, for instance, two cake plates from a service for 12 that I have. Over several years, I bought mine piece by piece at tag sales for no more than $1 each, sometimes as little as a dime. Here, two tiny plates were $125. I can’t imagine my stuff has increased in value that much. If you are interested in Canton ware – the blue porcelain from China that was so popular in the 18th and 19th centuries – Charleston has plenty of it. Finally, I found something I loved, collect, and could afford, a 19th century unlined copper chocolate pot with a wooden handle. So, between my kosher salami from Baltimore, the bene wafers and antique copper pot from Charleston, I considered the shopping part of my voyage on the Seabourn Pride very successful.

I am home now, a day early, because tropical storm Noel got to the Bahamas before we could on the ship. So next time I write, it’s from Brooklyn.