I’d know a cookout was coming by the shopping cart at the grocery store. As a kid in the early aughts, rarely permitted to listen in on adult conversations (especially when they found out I was too literate for the classic spell-out-the-obscenity-so-the-baby-doesn’t-pick-up-our-bad-habits trick), these occasions snuck up on me. Nobody asked me what Saturday worked best for my busy schedule! Any major plans would’ve had to fit between clarinet practice and hours of playing WWE Smackdown! vs. Raw on my DS. But the shopping cart never lied. Seashell pasta, steamed shrimp from the seafood counter, and lump crab meat? Party. And a party guaranteed at least one of two things: crabs and seafood salad.
The seafood salad, which I learned is best served cold with good company in summer heat, was a recipe my mother learned from watching my Granny in the kitchen.
My Granny, the first of my family’s generations born in Baltimore, was my best friend. Born under a waning crescent moon at the tail end of the 1940s to a widow in mourning far from her Carolina home, she was an epic poem of a woman. And it’s an honor to know she, and not the exhausted doctor on call, was the first person to greet me when I crossed to this side of the birth canal.
I took my first steps in my Granny’s black and white checkered tile kitchen. I learned how to plant the sprouted eyes of aging potatoes back in soil in my Granny’s kitchen. Learned about aloe vera healing cuts, using a can of beer to steam crabs, and the consequences of an older cousin sneaking cooking wine to drink in my Granny’s kitchen. Between the jokes and low simmering pots, I’d watch. And my Granny, eager for help in feeding all of us — and sometimes Mr. Bruce, the mechanic who owned the shop next door — would teach. I’d layer mini marshmallows on top of sweet potatoes, add pinches of salt to honey butter cornbread batter, spread ketchup over a meatloaf before it went back in the oven, help fry whole eggs for egg sandwiches on white bread, and squeeze lemons for plastic pitchers full of lemonade. A tiny, eager sous chef.
It’s fitting that I learned we were Gullah Geechee in the kitchen.
“You could eat your weight in rice, little Geechee girl!” my Granny says with a laugh after I beg her to swap mashed potatoes for rice and onion gravy to go with our Sunday pork chops. And you’d ask for it every week too if you ever had my Granny’s rice and gravy!
Now, I knew my family came to Baltimore from the Carolinas. My cousins would visit from outside of Charleston, and I’d heard the stories about my uncle Moses migrating to the city on foot from down south. But I’d never heard nobody use the words “Geechee” or “Gullah” before then. And I held onto that little detail, tucking it inside my memory.
In contrast to my Granny’s lessons, my mama did not like sous chefs with her in the kitchen of our two-bedroom apartment. Full disclosure: my mother did a brief stint in culinary school. While not making me in any way an heir to untold restaurateur fortune, this fact does give texture to the scenes of her firm voice telling me to get whatever snack or juice I was foraging for from the fridge and to promptly get out of her kitchen.
High school came, and it got harder to dismiss me. Soon, I’d be responsible for feeding and clothing myself on a regular basis, and she’d rather have headaches now than have an inept daughter later.
The refreshing part about being a writer with no culinary experience is that the least interesting part of this Great Migration food history is how much shrimp and crab and mayonnaise to add. The fascinating part of all this is the family who risked everything to travel on foot and by train hundreds of miles up the coast from the Great Dismal Swamp to a bay they’d never seen.
So, we started with simple family recipes. The catch? I had to watch. My mother didn’t write down recipes. Her mother didn’t write down recipes. And, if I had to guess, my great-grandmother, born in the Great Dismal Swamp two generations out of slavery, didn’t write down recipes (though her father, a North Carolina farmer, could read, according to the 1930 census). Watch and copy. That’s how everybody learned.
That’s why under no circumstances will I be writing the family recipe here. First, I’m not inviting scorn from my ancestors for spilling the beans. Second, I have no technical knowledge of recipe development. I’m not the one who went to culinary school. My focus is on the story of people preserving Lowcountry traditions.
For college, I moved back South to a liberal arts school on the border of the Carolinas. In my first year, I studied the Lowcountry South and the histories of Gullah communities in my 9 a.m. Africana Religion and Healing class. With Tracey Hucks, a scholar of Africana religion and culture, I learned that Portuguese and English slavers stole West Africans and carried their captive cargo to the Carolina, Georgia, and Florida shores (the Lowcountry) to harvest rice and indigo for profit.
After class ended and hurricane season passed, Dr. Hucks organized a tour of the Lowcountry. A van full of undergraduate students, three professors, and a dean road tripped and ferried across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. I made it back to the swamp and learned more about the collective history of Gullah Geechee people. Like many stories of enslaved Africans, Gullah people are stolen people who cultivated cash crops on the coast and sea islands, preserving food, language, and culture in the face of the never-ending threat of death. And still, Gullah Geechee culture is under threat of climate disaster, government neglect, and dissociation as descendants continue to migrate away from the Lowcountry.
That trip helped me understand my family and mourn my Granny. Like Toni Morrison’s Milkman in “Song of Solomon,” that trip was my ancestral Odyssey. My journey back to the swamplands, Southern towns, and sea islands my great-grands knew.
The recipe isn’t the story I’m telling here. The refreshing part about being a writer with no culinary experience is that the least interesting part of this Great Migration food history is how much shrimp and crab and mayonnaise to add. The fascinating part of all this is the family who risked everything to travel hundreds of miles on foot and by train up the coast from the Great Dismal Swamp to a bay they’d never seen. When my great-uncles, great-aunts, and great-grandparents bet everything on Baltimore, they trusted themselves, soil, and sea.
They knew how to farm, work ports, and fish. They’d done it down South. They cooked and cleaned and laundered. They tended bars and ran numbers and nursed babies. They planned to survive together using all those skills, with no promise of housing or wages when they arrived.
Seafood salad survived too. You can find the cold-served recipe in Gullah cookbooks like Miss Emily’s or in online videos from folks who do generously share how they fold the ingredients together. And that’s the thing — there are at least 20 different ways to make seafood salad. Use the holy trinity if you like. Use onion alone if that’s all you got. And boil whatever pasta you like (long as it’s not linguine or spaghetti because I draw the line right there). You can alter, skimp, or splurge based on what the market and your wallet allow. And nearly every protein you can add is canned or caught on the Atlantic coast. If you know fishermen or fishmongers or have an EBT card, you can make seafood salad. In a 21st century world where opulent seafood displays of chilled jumbo prawns on sparkling silver towers next to lobster tails and caviar mountains signify luxury and a secured class position, seafood salad shows the down-home, working-class side of seafood. We find home by the water and we feed each other.
Seafood salad is recession-friendly, climate-adaptive cooking. It’s my go-to when the week’s forecast is too hot for any meals requiring the stove or the oven. I’m not sautéing or roasting anything in 95-degree heat. (And we’ve been having a lot of 95-degree heat lately.) My recipe is different from my mother’s, and I’m sure hers is different from my Granny’s. My mother swears she’s always used wet mustard in hers, and I disagree! I can’t remember her using wet mustard growing up and firmly believe ground mustard is the only reasonable choice. Our approaches differ. Beyond mustard, my mother also has no qualms with people using imitation crab meat, and I maintain that adding canned tuna or canned salmon is the better way to go about making it. I add lemon juice and olive oil where she never did. The recipe changes over time, just as the generations do.
What doesn’t change is the best part of seafood salad: it’s not a dish to eat alone. This summer I’ve made it at least four times, and each time I share it with my dearest friends because I want them to survive the summer too.
There’s a lot I cannot change. I can’t lower property taxes or inject more funding into public transit or regulate megacorporations or end imperial wars on my own. I can’t bring my grandparents back from the dead. I can’t buy back my grandmother’s house. I can’t undo the grief of family separation. I can’t turn back the clock.
What I can control is how much onion I chop and how much Old Bay is too much. I can call my friends and ask them if they’ve eaten and how they are. I can plan cookouts and feed the people I love for another day in a season where I’m wondering how many days we’ll have together.
All I can do is try to preserve the past while living in my own challenging present.