Now that I’ve offended all of South Carolina in Part One, it seems worthwhile to mention some other stuff. There’s always some magazine or travel email declaring that Charleston is the very best U.S. vacation destination, even better than Fargo, North Dakota. I’m certain there are many good things to say about South Carolina, and I do like the food. There are lots of fish.
Population and lGeography
In 2023, there were an estimated 5.374 million South Carolinians, making South Carolina 23rd of the U.S. States by population. In the 1830 census, there were 581,185 South Carolinians, with 265,784 free and 315,401 slaves, more slaves than free. Of the free residents, 7,921 were reported as free colored. Female slaves outnumbered male slaves by about 4,500, and white males outnumbered white females by about 3,000.
There has never been a decennial census when South Carolina did not report some growth, but there were never any huge gains. From 1860 to 1870, during the Civil War, growth was a minuscule .03%. It’s estimated that as many as 20,000 South Carolinians died in the War, so that certainly slowed down the numbers. Between 1920 and 1930, growth was only 3.3%. That would have been the height of the Great Migration and the early beginning of the Great Depression in the agricultural South, so South Carolina is probably lucky to come out with a net gain.
From 1910 to 1930, South Carolina’s Black population dropped from about 55% of the total population to about 30%. During the Great Migration, Philadelphia was a particularly popular destination for South Carolina Blacks, and Philadelphia rhythm and blues would re-migrate to South Carolina juke boxes in the 1960s as Beach Music.
In the most recent census, more than half of South Carolinians live in six metropolitan census areas, the largest being Greenville-Anderson-Greer with 928,195. Nearby Spartanburg accounts for another 355,241. Greenville and Spartanburg are in Upstate. Columbia, the state capitol, located in the Piedmont, has 829,470, and Charleston in the Lowcountry has 799,636. While the combined statistical metropolitan areas are pretty large, there are no individual cities with populations larger than 150,000. Columbia has 133,803, Charleston has 132,609.
In the 2020 census, 60.3% of South Carolinians were Anglo, 25% Black alone, and 5.8% were two or more races. Hispanics were 6.9% of the population.
The state’s three regions, the Lowcountry coastal plain, the Piedmont beginning at the fall line, and Upstate (which includes South Carolina’s slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains), are together mildly uncomfortable when they sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, each boasting pride of place, and each fiercely protecting its perceived prerogatives. I have heard that the state geographically balances things like highway and education funding so that no area feels slighted. It’s the smallest Southern state, 40th in size among the U.S. states with 32,020 square miles. It’s a miracle that so much discord can be be contained by such a small package.
Politics
South Carolina is Republican. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump carried 58.2% of its 2,548,140 votes. In 2020 Trump carried 55.11% of 2,513,329 voters.
Lindsay Graham and Tim Scott, both Republican, are South Carolina’s U.S. senators. There are seven congressional delegates, and only Jim Clyburn, in South Carolina’s most gerrymandered Congressional District, is a Democrat. Presumably the gerrymandering minimalizes the statewide effect of traditionally Democratic voters. Every elected state official is Republican, and in the General Assembly the senate is 30 Republicans to 15 Democrats. The house is 88 Republicans to 36 Democrats.
It’s a mighty red state. The one Congressional District that voted Democratic for President in 2024 was also Jim Clyburn’s Congressional District.
2024 Presidential Election Results by South Carolina Congressional District, Wikipedia.
Pat Conroy
There was never a more geocentric author than Pat Conroy (1945-2016), and in the 70s and 80s he was all the rage. The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, Lords of Discipline, South of Broad . . . He even wrote a good, readable South Carolina cookbook. I used two of his recipes, the oyster bake and the Frogmore stew, for my daughter’s birthday this year. There are, I suspect, similar recipes throughout the Gulf Coast, but Conroy makes them seem peculiarly South Carolinian.
Readers of a certain age (and I’m certainly one), were introduced to South Carolina through Conroy, and all-in-all it’s a pretty good introduction. Conroy’s families are often as not full up with disfunction, but even his villains have their moments, and correspondingly his heroes have their villainy. It may be a complicated world, but end of the day his books are readable and his place, coastal South Carolina, is likable.
A number of Pat Conroy’s books have made pretty good movies, though not the cookbook. No one’s ever made a movie of the cookbook, and that’s a shame. It might be short on plot, but it would be long on character development, mostly mine.
Food
There are things people eat in the South (including Texas as part of the South) that weren’t traditionally eaten elsewhere: barbecue, grits, okra, greens, cornbread, pecan pie, biscuits . . . From Southern region to Southern region the particular versions of those things vary. In my parents’ house, for instance, we usually ate turnip greens, not collards or mustard greens. Central Texas barbecue is mostly beef, while other Southern barbecue (including East Texas) is mostly pork. Recipes in Shreveport probably have more in common with Dallas than New Orleans.
Southern Blacks apparently put sugar in their cornbread, Southern Whites did not. Northerners, who learned about cornbread from African-American Great Migration cooks, use sugar.
Questions of race and food and the sources of Southern cooking are fascinating, but as a general matter everyone loves iced tea, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet, fried chicken, and cornbread, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet. Traditionally Blacks and Whites, poor and rich, ate more or less the same stuff, though I would never put sugar in the cornbread. I have tasted it though, and as a child I put sugar in everything else, including rice and grits and iced tea.
Notwithstanding the South’s generalized food traditions, there are some places in the South that are Meccas for food creativity. New Orleans of course, Central Texas for barbecue, and the South Carolina Low Country. For Central Texans it’s all those German and Czech butcher shops, while for New Orleans it’s all that all dat. For the Low Country I suspect it’s a combination of wealth, copious inshore seafood, the preservation of African culture by the Gullah Geechee, and rice.
Other than Louisiana, the ultimate Southern seafood extravaganzas, the Frogmore stew and the oyster bake, hail from South Carolina. South Carolina lays claim to being the source for shrimp and grits and vinegar-based barbecue sauce for its whole-hog barbecues. South Carolinians don’t just eat black-eyed peas, they throw in rice snd whatnot and turn them into hoppin’ john.
I already owned a copy of The Pat Conroy Cookbook, but before we went I dug it out and read parts. I also bought Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, and used it some. The Gullah Geechee recipe for okra gumbo is not so different from my mother’s. It’s tomato and okra based, but of course the author adds shrimp. South Carolinians put shrimp in everything I reckon, including no doubt the cornbread and the iced tea.
In Charleston, at the Fort Sumter gift shop, we bought a copy of Charleston Receipts, the 1950 cookbook of the Charleston Junior League. Whatever negative things one might say about Charleston, The Junior League, or South Carolina, Charleston Receipts is a masterpiece. There are 22 recipes for shrimp alone, including Shrimp for Breakfast and six different shrimp pies.
"Fry bacon until crisp. Save to use later. Add bacon grease to water in which you cook rice . . . add shrimp . . . "
Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau, Charleston Receipts, 1950, 38th printing, p. 75. As if these people don’t already have a jar of bacon grease handy.
Fish
We’ve had a good redfish fall in Texas at Port O’Connor, with lots of fish, so we were primed for redfish, and would go to Charleston to fish some more for them. There are other South Carolina fish to fish for, Native brook trout in the Upstate, redeye and largemouth bass, even a striped bass spawning migration, but right now I’m mostly thinking about redfish and saltwater.
When we were last at the skiff in Port O’Connor, I brought home the boat box of redfish flies I’d stowed nine years ago. They were pretty sadly rusted, as though I’d soaked them in tears for all the fish I haven’t caught. I had to throw most of the flies away, and since then I’ve been tying redfish flies to replenish the box and to take to South Carolina. I’ve been using materials and receipts from Sightcast Fishing, which specializes in Texas Gulf Coast flies. They do well-designed variations of classic Texas saltwater flies, their materials are creative, and their flies are pretty. Of course if you can find them, redfish will usually eat almost anything you throw at them, but still . . . it’s nice to know that what I throw looks good to me, even if the fish ignores it.
