By Damon Lee Fowler | June/July 2009 | Features

Secrets of a Daufuskie Kitchen

In True Gullah tradition, Sallie Ann Robinson cooks slow, local, and from the heart

As Sallie Ann Robinsonriffles through a sad, wilting pile of collards, her displeasure is obvious. “These are pitiful!” she says.

Robinson is standing over a produce bin in a supermarket on the east side of Savannah, Georgia, not far from the South Carolina island of Daufuskie, where she was born and raised. A lively woman with a ready laugh, she is not smiling just now. This accomplished cook and cookbook author knows this isn’t the best place for produce, but she really wants greens and there’s no time for a trip across town. “They got to do better than this!”

We’re out shopping for an afternoon of old-time Southern cooking Daufuskie-style, a rustic yet elegant cuisine rich with local seafood and flavored by a characteristic trinity of onion, bell pepper, and garlic. For Robinson, cooking begins at the market, with whatever’s fresh and in season.

Snaring the produce manager, she smiles through steely determination. “Do you want to check in back for some better greens before I start taking these apart to make myself a decent bunch?”

On Daufuskie, where Robinson’s family goes back at least six generations, people didn’t shop for food: Vegetables came from the garden; chicken, turkey, and pork from barnyard and pigpen; seafood from the surrounding waters. In short, Robinson knows a thing or two about freshness, and she greets the box from the back cooler with a smiling nod. As she walks away, however, it’s clear her approval was mere politeness: “Summer collards,” she mutters, knowing at a glance that they haven’t seen enough cold weather to be tender and sweet. “These’ll take a while.”

Our next stop is a seafood market. “I need me some fish.”
“What kind?”

“I don’t know,” she says, laughing as if that’s the silliest thing she’s ever heard. “I ain’t see ’em yet!”

She selects a half dozen whiting, and as the fishmonger gathers them on a tray, she directs, “Head on—split down the back.”

The fishmonger, however, wants to split them down the belly and remove the head, so this leads to a lively back-and-forth. Robinson, who has dressed fish since childhood, ultimately wins out, but the fishmonger wags his finger and says it’s the last time. She just laughs. As we leave, she murmurs, “They like to keep the heads. Most people don’t know, but it’s the best meat!”

The Gullah Way
Robinson’s first cookbook, Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way, a surprise best seller in 2003, placed her among the nation’s foremost figures in regional American cooking and opened the door to an unexpected writing career. A second book, Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night, premiered in 2007, and a third, on holiday cooking, is in the works.

“Wheh dem ting da come fum? ’Cause da ain’ da me! Who put ’eh deh?” she says, reverting to her Daufuskie dialect as we head back to her bungalow. It loses something in translation, but it means she doesn’t know where it all came from—that she didn’t know she had it in her.