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.

One person who did know it was author Pat Conroy, a teacher in his young adulthood. When Robinson was in seventh grade, he came to teach at her school on the isolated, poverty-stricken island and later wrote of the experience in The Water Is Wide.

 “People told him we were too ignorant and stupid to learn, but he wouldn’t accept that. Pat showed us that there was a whole world across the water—and told us we could be anything we set our minds to.”
In her snug kitchen, Robinson slips into the Gullah speech and cooking patterns of her childhood. They are ways deeply etched in her soul. Though she has almost no accent in public, among family and friends her native Gullah patterns surge back, mixing with those of her later education.

Her cooking is similarly blended. Loosely called Southern, this rice-and-seafood-based cuisine is a heady mix of West African, English, and French food ways preserved for generations by the island’s remoteness. Some call it Gullah-style after the descendants of the West African slaves of the region, and she allowed the term to be used in the titles of her cookbooks. But attempts at classifying her cooking only amuse Robinson, who simply calls it “how we did ov’ deh.”

Family Cooking
While I unload the groceries and begin prepping onions, bell peppers, and celery, Robinson rummages for a smoked ham hock, a meaty ham bone, and a pair of pig’s feet to season the greens. They go into a large pot of water set over lively heat. Meanwhile, she disjoints a half dozen turkey wings, liberally seasons and scatters them with sliced onion, and tightly covers them with foil. “You put ’em in with no cover, that skin gonna be tough.”

Though Robinson’s parents raised turkeys on Daufuskie, having only the wings is a recent luxury—and treat—but the flavor is deeply traditional. She pops the pan into the oven and turns to wash and prep the greens, tearing them into small pieces. “Back home we never cut collards. If you asked Mama for a knife, she’d say, ‘Whuh you need knife fuh?’” She stops the sink, covers them with hot water, as her mama did, and leaves them for a tenderizing soak.

Next she scrubs the potatoes—for salad, another childhood favorite. Her mother often added tiny sweet shrimp that her stepfather, Pop, netted from the tidal creeks, but today we’ll have it plain. Wielding a paring knife, Robinson peels and cuts the potatoes into chunks and sets them to cook in water with onion, salt, and more garlic.

“Mama loved her garlic,” she says. “Of course, she grew hers in the yard.”

Since she left Daufuskie, Robinson has mostly lived in cities, and her cooking has adapted accordingly. But for the most part, she follows her mother’s ways, still hearing her voice. “Mama would say, ‘Fix it da way I show ya’—and you paid attention, ’cause she was only gonna show ya once!”

When the potatoes are cooked, Robinson quickly drains them and lets them cool while she uncovers and bastes the wings with their pan juices. Scattering them with strips of bell pepper, she slides them back in the oven to brown. Later, they’re covered again and baked until falling-off-the-bone tender.

Next, she tosses the potatoes with chopped onion, celery, and bell pepper. Realizing we forgot to buy cubed sweet salad pickles, she digs around for a good substitute and dumps sweet mixed pickles out onto a cutting board. “Mama always say compromise.”

Suddenly, she frowns and then laughs. “Lord. Now I done forget dem egg!”

We quickly cook up four, and she peels and cuts them into the salad. She adds mayonnaise by spoonfuls and finally a squirt of yellow mustard—just for color, she says. She mixes in healthy doses of paprika and pepper and, eyeing it, adds more. “If I had to measure, I’d not get nothing done.”

Robinson’s cooking is not as constant or labor intensive as that of her mother, who cooked breakfast before sunrise, on a wood-burning stove, and started the main meal before breakfast was cleared. But like her mother, she shows love for friends and family through her cooking. Her now-grown son Isaiah, she says, “can smell my food from all the way across town.”

By now the broth for the greens is reduced to half, and Robinson adds them to the pot. She sets the lid askew and opens the oven door, releasing heady, intoxicating aromas. The wings emerge a glistening bronze. While the greens finish cooking, Robinson dumps the fish in the sink, sprinkles on paprika, seasoning salt, garlic powder, and pepper and begins to heat oil in a cast-iron pan.

No Daufuskie meal is complete without rice (in this case, crab fried rice), so while the oil heats, Robinson fries a couple of strips of bacon in a skillet and sets it aside. Into the fat I stir chopped onion, bell pepper, and celery, and she dumps in a pint of picked crabmeat. I stir until the crab is a rich gold, and she adds in the crumbled bacon, cooked rice, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, then puts on a lid and turns the heat down.

While that steams, she rolls the fish in flour, shakes off the excess, and slips them into the fat. After the skin side browns, she turns them with a fork, and fries them until they pop to the top of the fat.
“Dat fish floatin’,” she says, scooping them up. “He done.”

Runaway Chicken
At last we settle in at the table, savoring the flavors that sustained Robinson’s family for generations. The crab fried rice is perfect; the wings are rich and luscious; the greens are tender and flavorful.
While we eat, Robinson talks wistfully of her life on Daufuskie. She tried going back when her children were young, but the remoteness did not work well with them. Today, her work keeps her on the mainland.

Even from a distance Daufuskie continues to inspire her. In addition to a third cookbook, she is at work on a collection of children’s stories based on island lore. It makes sense that Robinson, whose life has been shaped by the traditions and sharing of food, would choose to tell stories of home by writing about cooking. But, she says, it wasn’t so much a choice.

“When you went to someone’s house back home, you ate. That’s what people did. So, when I had friends and family to my house, I cooked. Finally,” she says, “they started saying, ‘Sallie—you need to write a cookbook,’ and I said, ‘Cookbook?! I ain’ gone do dat!’ But it was a seed planted. It wouldn’t let go. No matter what I was doing—when I went to bed, when I was driving to work—it was like an echo: ‘You need to write a cookbook.’”

“The first recipe I wrote was Runaway Fried Chicken—at first I just called it country fried chicken. It was the most boring thing I ever read, so I thought, I got to do something to make this interesting. So I started to tell about the first chicken I ever killed and cooked—the one that ran away into the woods.”
This opened the door to other stories of her childhood, of fishing with Pop’s homespun fishing nets, tending Mama’s chickens and garden, and gleaning fruits, nuts, and berries from the surrounding woods.
The concept for a storytelling cookbook was in place, but the thing that sealed it was the day she heard a tour guide tell a boatload of tourists that Daufuskie natives lived in trees and wore bones through their noses.

“I said, ‘Whuh ’Fuskie you talkin’ ’bout?!’ That’s when I thought, I’ve got to tell the real story.”

Telling the real story has done more than educate come-yahs (newcomers); it has brought Robinson closer to her roots.

“When I write, I hear their voices in my head—my parents’ and grandparents’,” she says. “It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing the past.”