Piracy, Confederacy, and Cornmeal

March 7-9

Thursday we wandered in the French Quarter of Charleston. It’s the old town, and many of the buildings are survivors from the 18th century. It was the original colonial walled city.

This is the place where the Civil War started, where secession began. But I’m not interested in its traitor history. More interesting is that pirates of the Golden Age used to work here. 

The city wall was built to keep them out. It didn’t always work, though. Blackbeard once held the entire city for ransom.

According to Wikipedia, Charleston’s old town wasn’t called the French Quarter until sometime in the 1970s. Preservation efforts were well under way by then. The name is supposed to acknowledge the many French merchants who operated in the area. 

I dunno. The pink stucco and iron railings convey a suggestion of the Vieux Carre and the Garden District in New Orleans, where the bars run all night long.

Giving Charleston a French quarter was likely a marketing idea: “We have one too.” Although the bars here do close at night.

We stopped at a historic site called the Powder Magazine and chatted with a couple of volunteers in the gift shop. The building held the city’s gunpowder supply. To keep city blocks from blowing up, residents were permitted to store only small amounts of powder at home. 

The rest of the city’s powder supply—some privately owned and probably a lot publicly owned —was kept in the magazine.

They needed lots of powder to keep the pirates out.

Nobody wanted to live near all those explosives, though. So the powder supply was moved to a new location when this part of town needed to be developed. 

Not far away from the old powder magazine, we found a restaurant called Slightly North of Broad that served some Low Country dishes. So we decided to have an early dinner. 

S.N.O.B.is similar to Grace & Grit in that it also offers unconventional twists on Southern food. I had a crawfish hoecake. It held identifiable pieces of okra, but the crawfish must have been ground up. The cake was served under an arugula salad with bits of grilled ham.

The sauvignon blanc came from Les Deux Moulins in the Loire Valley. It was fresh and light, a good lunch-time wine. 

Joanna had a Dixie-fried pork cutlet that looked like a schnitzel. It came with rice middlings. Neither of us had heard the term before. 

It may refer to broken rice grains, a by-product of rice milling. It had the consistency of a thick risotto.

The cutlet came with a red sauce of cranberries or maybe lingonberries. We’re not sure which.

At the next table were two women, whose names, we learned, are Tommie and Dana. Tommie comes from Tennessee. Dana lives in the area. They are mother and daughter who were out for a joint celebration of their birthdays.

They cut us a piece of the birthday cake. They and we have been to many of the same places—Rome, Charleston, Florence, the Alamo.

When they heard we were staying in Mount Pleasant, across the harbor from Charleston, they told us about Water’s Edge, another of their favorite places to eat, where they would be going for lunch the next day. “Maybe we’ll see you there.”

Later we strolled down the block to the harbor, where we got to watch dolphins play and birds dive.

We walked out onto a pier perhaps a hundred yards long. By the time we reached the end of it, the wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat in my hand to save it from blowing away.

When we got back to the beach, the wind wasn’t half as strong. We did get a sprinkle when we walked past the water fountain.

I took a brief rest at a cafe in front of another glass of vino before we retired to the hotel.

Lunch was the size of dinner so we went to the Whole Foods around the corner to grab a few things for a picnic. We had sardines, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Wasa crispbread, fruit. Oh, I felt so sophisticated.

Friday we took it easy all morning at the hotel and decided to go to Water’s Edge for an early dinner. Maybe we actually would run into Tommie and Dana there and get to say hello.

Water’s Edge is one of several restaurants overlooking a waterway called Shem Creek. The restaurants are next to a wetlands nature park named for the creek.

We indeed met Tommie and Dana. They were finishing lunch with a friend and saw us. They called us to their table and introduced us.

There were two things on the menu that had been recommended by the ladies at the Powder Magazine.

One is she-crab soup. Joanna and I ordered bowls of it to start. 

It is a rich, creamy soup, thick like New England clam chowder, but the flavor is very different from anything I’ve tasted before. 

Joanna detected dill in the broth. There may have been something else too, but I’m not sure what.

Joanna suggested that, since the soup is made only with female crabs, perhaps the eggs are cooked in the broth and that accounts for some of the unusual flavor.

Joanna followed the soup with a seafood pasta made with shrimp, scallops, and swordfish.

It was good, but I was occupied with shrimp and grits.

This is another delicacy mentioned at the Powder Magazine. Just about everybody in Charleston serves shrimp and grits. Each cook, though, has an individualized version of the dish.

This one came with a scoop of bright yellow grits smothered in a white gravy that contained shrimp, red onions, mushrooms, and andouille. The sausage was hot, but the rest was mild. 

A funny thing happened with the wine. Early dinner, white wine. Well, sometimes. 

I had a glass of Drylands sauvignon blanc. The winemaker’s name didn’t mean anything to me, but the grape variety did. I had enjoyed it the day before.

What a surprise. It tasted distinctly of grapefruit, like a mildly spiked grapefruit punch. Joanna took a sip and laughed at the illusion. 

I found out later that the wine is from New Zealand. Maybe there’s something about the dirt that accounts for that flavor.

The only problem was that the light, fruity wine was overpowered by the hearty soup and the gravy on my grits. It was still OK, but I couldn’t taste that grapefruit any more. 

We were eating lunch when dolphins appeared in the creek. You see a fin occasionally break water and then disappear for a while. 

Brown pelicans started to gather, too. I guess it was lunch time for them as well as for us.

In a way, pelicans remind me of turkeys: so ungainly that they’re beautifuI. They swoop down and sit slump-shouldered on the surface. Their bills are so long that the tips dip into the water. Downy feathers on their crowns look like bad haircuts.

Sometimes, they don’t land at all, but swoop across the water a few feet above getting wet. Ducks do the same thing.

They don’t mind the motorboats or paddlers coming in and out. They’re used to it.

I noticed a man painting a window frame on a restaurant across the water. He was taking his time. I could hardly see his hand move. 

No. His hand didn’t move at all. It took me a while to figure it out. It was some kind of decoration at the window, probably a pirate climbing the wall.

After lunch, we went out for a closer look. As you do in most swampy parks and nature preserves, you see things from a boardwalk. This protects the oyster beds, birds’ nests, and grasslands as much as it protects us from the mud.

There were more pelicans and lots of ducks. Also some black birds that look like skinny crows. I don’t think they are really crows. Could they be grackles?

The boardwalk took us to the end of the creek, where it meets Charleston Harbor. You see downtown Charleston in the distance, Crab Island nature preserve, the top of the cable-stayed bridge that leads to Charleston. 

A map showed where Fort Sumter is, but I couldn’t make it out on the horizon.

Besides tour boats and personal craft, there are shrimp boats on the creek. Signs show how the nets work. They drag behind the boat, one on short lines and the other on long so they won’t tangle. 

Several shrimpers got their start in the 1930s. They had been in a local shipping industry, carrying goods between Charleston and the far side of the harbor. 

A bridge across Charleston Harbor in 1929 put an end to the need for that service. So when shipping business dried up, shippers became shrimp fishermen.

Saturday we went back to the French Quarter. 

My sister Jamy had recommended a restaurant called the Peninsula Grill. Google Maps put it at the corner of Market and Meeting Streets. We had been right there on Thursday.

It’s across Market from the Confederate Museum.

We got there about one or so, and found it unlocked but empty. We walked into the dining room looking for someone who works there. We found a lady working on a laptop computer who told us the bar didn’t open till four and the kitchen at five.

We didn’t want to wait that long. It looks like a good place for a serious dinner. When we’re in Charleston next we’ll try it.

We saw flags on storefronts down Meeting Street and people milling on the sidewalk outside. When we got close enough we could make out the names of Arnold’s Deli (which appears to be closed), Hyman’s Seafood Co., Hyman’s Half Shell, and Hyman’s General Store.

We had a 15-minute wait for a table. The crowd outside was plentiful, but the place is huge. All those Hyman’s are one big happy family. Currently fifth generation, according to the menu.

Hyman’s has Confederate food. It doesn’t try to be hip; it makes a nod to Kosher instead.

The menu has shrimp and grits, which may be required to do business in Charleston, but shellfish is forbidden under Kosher law. So the menu also has a variant, salmon and grits, which I believe is Kosher. 

Hyman’s website says the restaurant offers Glatt Kosher meals prepared by Chabad House of Charleston.

Last time I was in a Glatt Kosher restaurant, it was in Little India in New York and served strictly vegetarian South Indian food.

The walls of Hyman’s are covered with celebrity photos. We were told that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and ate at Hyman’s. We saw head shots of Oprah Winfrey, Billy Joel, Michael Bolton, Martha Stewart, and people I don’t know. 

A small label on the edge of our table said that Alan Dershowitz ate there. The name didn’t ring a bell. He was a hotshot lawyer, professor, and author.

I had a combination dinner with a half dozen boiled crawfish and some fried oysters. That came with red rice, hush puppies, and collards.

Joanna had a broiled tilapia filet with a baked sweet potato and corn on the cob.

This was comfort food. 

I tried a glass of Riesling, the first I’ve had in decades. The food was so good I don’t remember a thing about the wine. So that means it wasn’t bad.

We went for a walk, backtracking to a store where a lady on the sidewalk had given us some sweet pecans. They were good, so we wanted to buy some,.

But not at $13 a bag. 

We did get a cone of vanilla bean ice cream. We shared that as we walked along Market Street. 

We stopped at the old burying ground at the Congregational church on Meeting Street. We finished the ice cream on the sidewalk. Call it superstition: We felt it was inappropriate to eat ice cream while we walked among the dead.

A few of the stones were recent, from the first half of the last century. But most were so old that we couldn’t make out the inscriptions. Some of the stones were made of slate that had lost their messages entirely.

So it was another great day in pirate country.

Be well, gang, and to all a good night.

Harry