South Carolina Food & traditional cuisine

South Carolina has one of the most distinctive regional cuisines in America, and its foundation is African. Lowcountry cooking was built by enslaved West Africans who brought rice cultivation, technique and ingredients — okra, benne seed, field peas — and it is the direct ancestor of much of Southern food.

Carolina Gold, the long-grain rice the colonial economy was built on, went extinct commercially and has been revived; it is now grown again in small quantities and is genuinely different from ordinary rice.

The state's barbecue is regionally mapped, and the midlands' mustard-based sauce — a German settler inheritance — exists essentially nowhere else in the world.

Shrimp and grits

Stone-ground grits under local shrimp in a gravy of bacon and stock. Originally a shrimper's breakfast, now the state's signature plate.

She-crab soup

A rich cream soup of blue crab with roe and a little sherry, particular to Charleston.

Mustard-sauce barbecue

Pulled pork under a tangy yellow mustard sauce, found through the middle of the state. Vinegar-and-pepper sauce dominates the coast, and the boundary is taken seriously.

Frogmore stew

Also called a Lowcountry boil: shrimp, sausage, corn and potatoes boiled together and tipped onto a paper-covered table. A communal dish rather than a restaurant one.

Boiled peanuts

Green peanuts boiled in brine until soft, sold hot at roadside stands. The state snack, and non-negotiable.

Benne wafers

Thin sesame biscuits, sweet or savoury, made in Charleston since the eighteenth century from seed brought from West Africa.

Charleston City Market runs through four covered blocks and is where Gullah Geechee artisans sell sweetgrass baskets — buy from the makers at their own tables.

Shrimp docks and seafood shacks along the coast sell straight off the boats, and are the cheapest and best seafood in the state.

Roadside stands across the midlands sell boiled peanuts, peaches and produce in season — South Carolina grows more peaches than Georgia, a fact residents will volunteer.

Oyster roasts from autumn to early spring are community events, held outdoors around a steaming table, and are the most characteristic way to eat here.

South Carolina's wine industry is small and built mostly on the native muscadine grape, which tolerates the heat and humidity that defeat European varieties in the Lowcountry.

The Upstate in the northwest is cooler and higher and is where the more ambitious vineyards are, working with hybrids and some Cabernet Franc.

Craft brewing has grown substantially in Charleston and the Upstate, and is generally the better bet. Peach and muscadine wines are a genuine local tradition, sweeter than most visitors expect.