By Nausicaa Chu
Megan Pinckney Rutherford, founder of the popular lifestyle blog Shades of Pinck, grew up eating Gullah red rice on Sundays. The flavorful rice dish originated with the Gullah Geechee people, African Americans descended from enslaved West and Central Africans. But she had not heard of jollof rice, a West African dish, until researching for her new book.
Pinckney Rutherford tried jollof rice for the first time on a trip to Ghana. Though she was thousands of miles from home, the dish was practically identical to the Gullah red rice she had eaten growing up. “I was just amazed at how that recipe had traveled across the Atlantic,” she says. “We’re nearly 500 years past the first ship coming to the Americas, and that recipe is still a part of my everyday life.”
On September 19, Pinckney Rutherford will demonstrate how to cook Gullah red rice at the Southbound Food Festival. She is one of nine participants in the festival’s ROOTED: Women in Food event, presented by Baptist Health Women’s Medical Center. The event’s theme is Legacy in Motion, a celebration of Southern women chefs and the traditions that influence them.
Cheryl Slocum, a James Beard-winning food journalist, editor and recipe developer, came up with the Legacy in Motion concept after moderating a panel with several high-profile Black woman chefs. The panel discussed the legacy of Edna Lewis, an acclaimed African-American chef who shaped how Americans viewed southern cooking. Slocum wanted the festival to highlight the importance of such legacies. “The point of legacy to me is that we’re carrying these memories and these traditions forward,” says Slocum. “We’re sharing who’s done what and recognizing who’s done what to influence us.”
After she received an invite from the festival earlier this year, Pinckney Rutherford’s publishers suggested she participate in the Women in Food event. By then, she had already embarked on a yearslong journey to understand her Gullah Geechee heritage for her upcoming book, Grits and Grace. A sixth-generation native of Charleston, South Carolina, Pinckney Rutherford grew up in a close-knit community that valued Gullah Geechee culture. “It’s really cool because I grew up on property that my grandfather’s great-great grandfather purchased during Reconstruction,” she says.
But when Pinckney Rutherford moved to Columbia, South Carolina—where her husband grew up—she realized that her son would not have the same Charleston upbringing. “If there were things that I wanted him to take away from that culture, it was my responsibility to provide those to him,” she says. “It just started making me realize the role of women when it comes to cultural stewardship and what it means to pass things on.”
Through her book, she hopes to teach her son about their shared heritage. But Pinckney Rutherford also has another view of legacy: it does not just mean passing down centuries of history, it means creating a sense of home.
A sense of home “isn’t just a physical structure,” she says. “It’s what it smells like, what it tastes like, what it feels like.”
Pickney Rutherford’s grandmother created that sense of home for her. “She’s the one that just always made family a feeling, not just a word,” says Pinckney Rutherford. “She was the arbiter of our family recipes, and she made meals and dishes the way that her grandmother and her mother taught her.”
Slocum’s grandmother played a similar role. As a child, Slocum would visit her grandmother’s apartment in New York City. Her grandmother would put ice and rock salt in a container to make banana ice cream, cook a delicious oxtail soup or bake peach cobbler.
Slocum’s grandmother found time to cook despite being a working professor. Stacks of gourmet magazines would lie around her apartment. “She was a professional person at a job at a university that was an important job, but food still was important,” says Slocum.
Food was also an important part of Slocum’s day-to-day life. Her mother would prepare meals or, if Slocum wanted to eat something else, allow her to make her own food. “My mother didn’t have a problem with me having something different than everyone else. But I just had to make it myself,” says Slocum.
Slocum’s mother provided culinary lessons while cooking. One time, Slocum’s younger sister took a bite of raw hamburger meat when the family was in the kitchen. “I was like, ‘oh no,’” says Slocum. But her mom had “just had a very matter-of-fact, scientific kind of mentality. And she was like, ‘well, that’s just the beginning of steak tartare.’”
At the Women in Food event, Slocum will moderate a panel with four chefs: Virginia Willis, a James Beard-winning chef, cookbook author, and TV personality; Sandra Gutierrez, an award-winning food journalist, cookbook author and culinary expert; Erika Council, owner of the nationally acclaimed Bomb Biscuit restaurant in Atlanta and cookbook author and Pinckney Rutherford. The panel will feature “all four of the chefs that we invited talking about their legacies, what it’s meant to them, how it influenced them,” says Slocum.
A legacy can look different for everyone. It can look like a red rice dish that traveled thousands of miles, memories of a grandmother making banana ice cream or even a sister eating raw hamburger meat. But the chefs agree on one thing: these legacies are important to share. “Things get carried forward, they evolve sometimes,” says Slocum, “but then you also want to preserve and certainly remember and certainly record.”
