Lowcountry Cuisine Fall/Winter 2019-20

lowcountry cuisine LC 68 www.LCCmag.com | www.LCcuisineMag.com | www.LowcountryCuisineMag.com the dough down as I did when I was small enough to kneel on the counter and help her as a young child. That morning, the dough was my therapy. I divided the dough into two loaf pans and put them in my upper-oven, then scrambled to get ready. When I raced back to the kitchen, heels clonking and scarf fluttering in my own breeze – I was running out of time – I checked the oven window and then sat on the floor in my dress, both laughing and crying at the same time. The dough had grown exponentially out of the pans and baked into a mass the shape of my oven’s roof. In my laziness that day we wrote the recipe, I failed to note that it made four – not two – loaves. She would have cried from laughing so hard, too. After detaching the bread from the roof of my oven, I sliced a piece anyway, threw a piece of cheese on top and ate it in the car as my husband and I sped downtown to pay our final respects. It was just what I needed. Taste and smell are scientifically linked to memories in the brain, and on that drive I was transported just where I needed to be: back in her kitchen with her one more time. There are two types of cooks: those who, like Mimi, cook by feel, and others who, like my other grandmother (aka Grandmama), follow a recipe to a tee. It was also following a death in the family that Grandmama found solace in cooking. She was famous for cooking endless Southern-style meals, and after my grandfather passed away, she put together a family cookbook and dedicated it to his memory. What is special to me about this cookbook is that nearly every recipe has a small comment or story to go with it: how she first tasted the dish at a work gathering and “just had to have the recipe,” how she used to alternate red rice and tuna casserole to feed a family of six when things were tight, and how her mother passed down the macaroni pie recipe but preferred melting the cheese separately. I make the same oyster pie that my grandparents first tried on Yonges Island in the 1940s before their wedding. That oyster pie has been a prerequisite on our family’s Christmas dinner table ever since. My copy of the book is 15 years old now and is splattered and tattered – signs of a great cookbook. I reference it Anne and Grandmama cut into a raspberry lemon cake, a favorite from The Shuler Family’s Treasured Recipes cookbook.