Product Description

Sallie Ann Robinson was born and reared on Daufuskie Island, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands well known for their West African-influenced Gullah culture. With this cookbook, Robinson highlights some of her favorite memories and delicious recipes from life on Daufuskie, where the islanders traditionally ate what they grew in the soil, caught in the river, and hunted in the woods. Includes 75 recipes and 25 folk remedies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #801071 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Gullah are the hardscrabble South Carolina Low Country descendants of plantation slaves, and their meals reveal African, Jamaican and Caribbean influences. Robinson was raised on Daufuskie Island, an isolated Gullah bastion near Hilton Head. She combines a memoir of growing up with her nine siblings and down-to-earth recipes to cover each meal of the day. Most of her remembrances involve chores and the fertile life of the island, though she also includes a fine chapter on Folk Beliefs and Home Remedies, where we learn that ear cleaning should be done with a hen's feather (never a rooster's) and that a handful of spider web makes for an excellent bandage. As for the recipes, each could be filed under one or more of the three S's: simple, soul food or seafood. For breakfast, there is Country Fried Fish with Grits. Lunchtime sandwiches include Fried Soft-Shell Crab, which could be paired with 'Fuskie Seafood Gumbo with a stock made from fatback bacon and pig tail. Dinner entrees come stuffed, like Flounder Full of Crabmeat, which can be grilled or steamed. All the dishes can be washed down with one of her seven homemade wines, which generally involve adding five pounds of sugar to five pounds of fruit (like persimmons or peaches) and a gallon of water. (Oct.)
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Review
"A fascinating cookbook. . . . Southern food lovers will also find plenty of down-to-earth recipes." -- New York Times Book Review

"Robinson's stories come from another era . . . Her memoir provides a warm, touching account of a time gone by." -- Library Journal

"The recipes take full advantage of treasures of the sea, abundant fresh vegetables and game of the rich, moist land." -- Black Issues Book Review

Review
"Echoes the same reverent note as her much-praised first [book]."
— Charleston

"Time honored recipes are generally quick and straightforward, while still full of the flavor of local ingredients."
— Staten Island Advance

Spend some time with [Robinson] yourself . . . and you’ll feel marvelously satisfied in both your belly and your heart.
—Ann Arbor News

Cooking the Gullah Way is a last glimpse of a fading culture.
—Gastronomica

. . . [E]ach [recipe] could be filed under one or more of the three S's: simple, soul food or seafood.
—Publishers Weekly

[T]he recipes allow us all to savor Robinson's taste of Gullah culture and to recreate her world in our own.
—Jessica B. Harris, from the Foreword

Customer Reviews

Sallie Ann Robinson's Food for the Mind, Body, and Soul

Celebrity Chef Sallie Ann Robinson, a native of the famous Sea Island known as Daufuskie Island located just down the Savannah River between the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, has made guest appearances on numerous cooking shows and been profiled in such publications as the 2005 Old Farmer's Almanac, Southern Living, and National Geographic. In COOKING THE GULLAH WAY, MORNING, NOON, AND NIGHT, her book of highly appealing regional recipes and personal memoir, Robinson goes beyond writing about her native Gullah culture to honoring, sharing, and preserving its customs and dialect with the kind of affectionate familiarity, and certainty of knowledge, that only a fifth-generation daughter of the island could possess.

There are many levels on which to appreciate Cooking the Gullah Way. Lovers of exceptionally good food might justifiably desire to simply roam through its pages, pick out favorite recipes, and feast on their findings. Yet the recipes themselves often provide more than satisfying pleasures for the palate simply by virtue of names that reflect Robinson's coastal heritage sensibilities. Imagine, for example, a filling breakfast of the author's "Gullah Bacon Corn Muffin" with a side dish of "Sassy Strawberry Preserves"; a lunch featuring "Sallie's Seafood Spaghetti" with "Yondah Black-Eyed Pea Soup"; or a dinner of "Grilled Fresh Vegetables," "Local Sea Island Country Boil," and "Country Candied Yams with Raisins" all washed gently down by your choice of "Soothing Sassafras Tea," "Ol' Country Lemonade with Orange," or a homemade wine such as "`Fuskie Backyard Pear Wine." Such mouth-watering teasers defeat all attempts at resistance.

However: a major special feature in Cooking the Gullah Way is Robinson's chapter on "Gullah Folk Beliefs and Home Remedies." As the author writes, "Those times living on Daufuskie without a television or radio to inform us about the weather made us wiser as we learned nature's ways."

Chapter sections on "Living with Nature" and "Sea Island Folk Beliefs" offer notes of real interest for students of southern culture and history. Moreover, in these days of economically challenged households, the section on "'Fuskie Old-Fashioned Home Remedies" offers possible alternatives and/or supplements to medicines for the treatments of a variety of ills. Everything from asthma and earaches to high blood pressure and toothaches is covered with a note of caution to first, "learn about any remedy and be aware of the good and bad sides of it."

If the winning recipes and folk remedies make Cooking the Gullah Way a homemaker's dream companion book, the down-to-earth wisdom and observations shared through the interwoven stories make it a delectable choice for the general reader as well. We smile with appreciation as Robinson's "Pop" explains that in the morning when he calls out, "Off and on it!" to his still sleeping family, the phrase means for every able body to "Get off ya backside and on ya feet." And we nod with humored enlightenment when he points out that, "A heap may see, but only a few knows"--meaning that seeing is not necessarily synonymous with understanding. With that in mind, what we need most to understand about Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night, is that this book delivers as much delicious nurturing for the soul as it does nourishment for the body.


by Author-Poet Aberjhani
author of The American Poet Who Went Home Again
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library of American History)

Cooking the Gullah Way
Loved this book. It holds alot of history and good cooking. This is of course strickly Gullah cooking and not just good ole southern cooking. Great addition to collection.