Buttery casserole celebrates Vidalias

In Saving Southern Recipes, Southern Kitchen’s Kate Williams explores the deep heritage of Southern cooking through the lens of passeddown, old family recipes.

Sometimes it can be easy to forget that the South is a place for rice. Between all of the hemming and hawing over the proper way to cook grits and the perfect method for shaping biscuits, we can lose sight of the region’s other starch of choice. Of course, those of us who don’t live in coastal Carolina or southwestern Louisiana didn’t grow up around rice culture, so perhaps it’s easy to forget.

But this grain is just as important to our culture and food as grits, whether we eat it in jambalaya or chicken bog.

The antebellum low country prospered under a rice economy based on the backs of enslaved Africans. Indeed, Africans from rice-growing regions, such as Senegambia, were specifically captured and enslaved in order to maintain the plantations. Carolina Gold rice, which heirloom grain cultivator Anson Mills calls “the grandfather of long-grain rice in the Americas,” was the signature rice of the region, boasting sweet and nutty flavor and a pleasantly toothsome texture.

After the Civil War, much of the Carolina rice production stalled; without unpaid labor and access to capital, it faltered. Much of the South’s rice production moved to Louisiana where, according to Virginia Willis’ new book, “Secrets of the Southern Table,” it grew to a $342 million business.

This is all to say that recipes for dishes such as humble rice casserole are just as important to explore in the Southern recipe canon as those for chess pie and chicken and dumplings.

Southern Kitchen reader Betty Greene sent me her family’s recipe for a simple onion-studded and paprika-sprinkled rice casserole, which has clearly stood the test of tinkering. The casserole bakes up with a golden brown crust and crisp, almost kugel-like topping made from the slightly dry rice grains. It was excellent as written; the only real change I made to Greene’s recipe is an insistence on using the South’s signature onion, Vidalia, for its subtle, aromatic sweetness. And if you’ve got a bag of Carolina Gold rice, make sure to use that, too.