A cook who never used a cookbook now has her own
When Emily Meggett drives you around this island in the heart of South Carolina’s low country, you don’t pay for a thing.
The man at the seafood shack hands over a paper bag filled with squirming blue crabs and waves off a credit card. It’s the same at a farm stand, where she stops for a bag of boiled peanuts and a bunch of spring onions for the hoppin’ John she plans to make the next day.
“They always tell me, ‘Don’t you bring your pocketbook in here,’” she said.
Even the Charleston car dealership 40 miles away doesn’t charge her for oil changes. The shrimp and gravy lunches she packs for the garage crew probably have something to do with it but so does her stature. At 89, Meggett is considered by many to be the most important Gullah Geechee cook alive.
She was born on this Sea Island, as were her parents and their parents, in a line that connects back to the enslaved Africans who were forced to work in what is now known as the Gullah Geechee corridor, a string of coastal communities from North Carolina to Florida. Through centuries of slavery, they managed to hold on to some traditions and forge new ones. They created their own Creole language called Gullah and a culture known as Gullah Geechee.
Two weeks ago, Meggett, who has never used a cookbook during her 78 years in the kitchen, published her own: “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island.”
Her family and Abrams, the publisher, celebrated with a party on the island. About 500 people showed up, and she signed every book they bought. A church choir sang. Guests ate the 60 pounds of fresh shrimp she received in exchange for two signed cookbooks.
The book’s 123 recipes center on the trinity of the Gullah Geechee table: rice, seafood and fresh local vegetables. Meggett includes definitive versions of chicken perloo and okra soup, one-pot meals with African antecedents.
‘I cook big’
If she has a message for home cooks, it’s to learn to be intuitive and pay attention to small but essential techniques, like not messing too much with your biscuit dough, or gauging the correct ratio of grain to liquid in a pot of red rice by the feel of the spoon when you stir.
Some recipes are complex, like making wine from muscadine grapes, or stuffing shad with parsley rice and serving it with roe — a two-day effort. “This dish is a tough guy,” she said.
Others are as simple as mixing melted butter and corn syrup for pancakes, or freezing Tropical Punch Kool-Aid in a plastic-foam cup to make the classic freezer pop called a chilly bear or a thrill.
In Meggett’s kitchen, abundance is not a prerequisite for sharing. It’s a rare day that she doesn’t deliver food to someone who needs a little love. If her side door is open, it’s a signal: She has some food ready. She still cooks for a community center and her church, where she was the secretary for 28 years. (“When computers came out, I said, ‘I’m done.’”)
All of which helps explains why many of the recipes in the book make 10 servings, except the one for fried chicken. It makes 30.
“I cook big,” she said. “You tell me what you want, and I’ll fix it no matter what it is.”
The book has another, more complicated side. Recipes for dishes like pot roast, stuffed bell peppers and broccoli with cheese sauce were perfected in the years Meggett cooked for white
families. As the book recounts, she worked off and on for families who kept homes on Edisto Island and spent 45 years with the Dodges, a wealthy family from Maine who restored a house built in 1810 on the Seabrook cotton plantation.
Meggett started in 1954, first washing dishes then cooking for the other workers, making $11.13 a week. In the 1970s, she took over as head cook and became the de facto house manager.
“We went back-and-forth on how to represent the Dodge House,” said Kayla Stewart, who co-wrote the book and helped Meggett test recipes. (Stewart has written for The New York Times.)
“Some of us might see it as servitude,” she said, “but Miss Emily saw it as a way to feed her kids doing something she really enjoyed.”
Spreading her cooking to the world
The idea for the book dawned in 1994, when the Smiths, a white family who summered on Edisto Beach, asked a friend if he knew someone who could prepare meals for them. On her first day, Meggett arrived at 3 p.m., after cooking for another family. Becky Smith answered the door and said she was about to go buy ingredients for dinner.
Meggett was aghast. “You mean to tell me you knew I was coming and you’re going to wait until 3 o’clock to go to the store?” she told her. “I said, ‘You give me $100 and the car keys.’” By 6 p.m., fried chicken, cabbage and red rice were on the table, and Meggett was headed home to her own family.
The two women developed a deep friendship that endures to this day. “Right away, it was a closeness,” Meggett said.
Smith, 20 years her junior, kept encouraging Meggett to write a book. “The world needs to know who you are,” she would say.
Eventually, Meggett agreed. Smith began writing down her stories and more than 150 recipes that she kept in her head. While Meggett cooked, Smith pulled out measuring spoons and cups to record the amounts.
The project proceeded in fits and starts. One of the Smiths’ sons, Elliott, spent the pandemic lockdown getting the manuscript into shape so they could publish it themselves. He persuaded his mother to take herself out of the book.
Gullah Geechee cooking
The book might never have been published in its final form if Elliott Smith hadn’t asked BJ Dennis, a well-known Gullah chef in Charleston, to weigh in. Dennis had known Meggett for only five years but quickly became part of the family. “Once you meet Emily,”* he said, “game over.”
A few weeks before the Smith family members were going to pay a company to print the book so they could sell it themselves, Jonah Straus, a literary agent, asked Dennis if he was interested in writing a book. Dennis already had one in progress but made a suggestion: The first high-profile book on Gullah Geechee cooking should come from Meggett.
“It’s never the grandma who gets the first book deal,” he said.
At first, Meggett didn’t like the idea, because it would take so much longer than self-publishing. “I thought I would be dead and gone because of COVID by 2022,” she said. “But I prayed about it and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
The Smith family handed over the manuscript and asked for no money in return, though Meggett eventually insisted they get some anyway. “I just feel so grateful that this is the way we did it,” Becky Smith said. “It is the most freeing thing. It makes it sweeter for me.”
Beyond the recipes, her life story is a pleasure to read. She was raised by her grandmother, who had 14 children of her own. In 1951, she married Jessie Meggett. Her dress cost $19, and they celebrated with poundcake and cherry wine. (Her advice: “Make your wedding small and your marriage big.”) In 1980, they had a proper honeymoon in Europe.
Jessie Meggett, who maintained roads and later worked at a grocery warehouse, died in 2006. His father had been born and raised in a two-room cabin built on an Edisto Island plantation to house enslaved people. In 2013, the Smithsonian Institution disassembled it board by board and moved it into the National Museum of African
American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C.
The 11 children the couple raised grew up to work in finance, teaching, nursing, the military or government. They have produced so many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren — 55 in all — that Emily Meggett can’t remember all their names. She lost one daughter to a heart attack and another, more recently, to COVID.
“Every day ain’t going to be sugar, honey and iced tea,” she writes in her book. But that doesn’t mean you can’t tuck some biscuits into a visitor’s bag or run a cake over to an ailing neighbor.
“Every morning I say, ‘God, lead me to one needy soul today,’” she said, “and then I go and put my pot on the stove.”
BENNE COOKIES
Recipe from Emily Meggett Adapted by Kim Severson Emily Meggett, who published her first cookbook,“Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes From the Matriarch of Edisto Island,”at 89, learned how to make these crisp wafer cookies from her grandmother who learned from generations before. Benne seeds, sesame seeds that enslaved Africans brought with them to the southeastern shores of the U.S., have long been a staple in Gullah Geechee cooking. They are an important component in rice dishes and savory crackers and are the stars of these buttery wafers. Regular sesame seeds will work fine, especially if you toast them in butter, but Meggett suggests you try to buy benne seeds, an heirloom seed that is available online. They have a nutty, almost burned honey flavor and bring out the umami in the cookies. Yield: About 40 cookies
Total time: 1 hour ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon/129 grams unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for greasing
1 cup/140 grams benne seeds or
sesame seeds
1 cup/125 grams all-purpose
flour
½ teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon fine salt
½ cup/100 grams granulated
sugar
¼ cup/55 grams packed light
brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease 2 large cookie sheets with butter.
2. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a cast-iron skillet over medium heat and add the benne seeds, stirring them until coated. Toast the seeds, stirring frequently, until fragrant and darkened a shade, 2 to 3 minutes. Take care not to burn the seeds and turn down the heat if needed. Scrape onto a plate and let cool completely.
3. Whisk the flour, baking soda and salt together in a medium bowl.
4. In a large bowl, cream together the remaining 8 tablespoons/115 grams butter and both sugars until well combined and fluffy. Add the egg and beat well. Add the cooled toasted benne seeds and the vanilla, then stir in the flour mixture.
5. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls of the cookie dough at least 2 ½ inches apart on 1 prepared cookie sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until golden brown around the edges. Remove the wafers from the cookie sheet immediately and place on waxed or parchment paper to cool. Repeat with the remaining dough on the second cookie sheet, reusing the first sheet when it’s cool, if needed.