"lowcountry" news and stories

Kris Furniss can pinpoint the exact moment he metamorphosed from Morgan Stanley money man to aspiring food world impresario. It was the week of 9/11. The Long Island bred boy had always loved food -- he confesses to reading Gourmet when he should have had his nose in the Wall Street Journal -- and was already looking for a career change. Furniss had worked in the Towers, and when they fell, he acted. Three days after the attack, he enrolled in culinary school. Today, Furniss owns and operates one of the Low Country's premier food retail boutiques with his wife Margaret in her native Charleston.

Read more about Kris Furniss and his South Carolina culinary creation after the jump.

Unlike many regions, the food of the lowcountry isn't based on products or brand names: there are few firms that produce pre-packaged or prepped ingredients in the region (Adluh, the flour mill, is one of the few). Nathalie Dupree, author of dozens of books on the regions cuisine, says it's with good reason and dates back more than a century.

While the rest of the country smoggily industrialized, "the South had an economic crisis after the Civil War and had to subsist essentially on what it grew and what it caught. People couldn't afford to buy things, they had to eat from their own gardens until after World War II essentially." There was no money or clientele to start food factories on a mass scale. But though times then may have been tough, it's left a cherished legacy now. "That preserved the cuisine all throughout the south, and it's the primary reason for southern cooking staying so different." Here's a sampling of the foods that make this area of the country so unique.

"It's not low, country food, it's all one word – lowcountry. It doesn't have anything to do with class structure - it's purely geographic," barks Nathalie Dupree as soon as she starts discussing her home turf's cuisine. Dupree should know: she's the author of a dozen or so books on the food of the region, the latest of which is "Nathalie Dupree's Shrimp and Grits". Gridding its reach on a map, she sketches from the Pee Dee River southwards, finishing with Savannah.

Another expert, Joe Dabney, quibbles slightly. "Savannah counts, but it came along a little later." Dabney is a longtime newspaperman with his own local cookbook, "The Food, Folklore and Art of Lowcountry Cooking," due in spring. "The heart of lowcountry cooking is in Charleston."

Certainly, it's thanks to Charleston and its history that lowcountry food has such eclectic, exotic roots. Firstly, that now-tony and toned-down city was the original colonial New York, a cosmopolitan metropolis seething with newcomers and defined by its tolerance. Charleston was one of the first colonial outposts to allow Jews to worship without persecution and the congregation is still one of the oldest in the USA. That openness encouraged unusual settlers.

"Everything came through Charleston – it was an elite community for so long. It had an extraordinary variety of people: there was an Italian bakery in town in the early 1600s that fed everyone. And they also planted olive trees there," Dupree explains. British techniques like roasting and stewing became staples, too – a nostalgic nod to the motherland with which Charleston, named after a British king as Charles town, felt such strong links.

Ted Lee and Matt Lee Photo: The Lee Bros.

So you think you're out playing hooky from work on the promise of a lovely Southern lunch stewed up by your favorite cookbook authors and then all of a sudden, in strides Bobby Flay.

Yup -- "Throwdown."

Matt Lee and Ted Lee and the rest of the assembled had been lured to a barge on the Hudson River -- Matt's preferred canoeing channel -- on the premise that the brothers would be filming a segment for a Food Network special called "Lowcountry Lowdown." They'd filmed the first half in Charleston, S.C., and reportedly, the duel would have gone down on their home turf, had Chef Flay not fallen prey to the vagaries of air travel.

Read more about throwing down with the Country Captain after the jump.