HISTORY: She-crab soup

S.C. Encyclopedia  |  She-crab soup is uniquely Charlestonian-a silky, seafood chowder with a European heritage.

The dish helped put Charleston on the regional culinary road map, as surely as Philadelphia’s cheese steaks or Chicago’s deep-dish pizzas. Shrimp and grits are perhaps the only items appearing more often on the menus of Charleston restaurants than this elegant appetizer.

“There’s nothing quite like it on this side of the Atlantic,” says John Martin Taylor, cookbook author and the notorious arbiter of Lowcountry cuisine known as “Hoppin’ John.”

Although some Charleston area restaurateurs bemoan it as nothing more than a novelty item slurped by the gallon by gullible tourists, Taylor maintains it’s an example of a delightfully distinct regional cuisine being bred into mediocrity by taking shortcuts such as thickening it with flour (“wallpaper paste” he says with disgust).

Food historians believe she-crab soup is based on the Scottish seafood bisque partan bree which was brought by settlers to the New World in the early 1700s where it was localized in Charleston with the addition of boiled and pureed long grain rice and the roe of blue crabs.

During a 1909 visit to Charleston, President William Howard Taft supped on she-crab soup at the home of Mayor R. Goodwyn Rhett. It is made with the meat of a dozen female crabs, fish stock, milk, spices, and heavy cream. Finishing touches include a sprinkling of the orange crab eggs across the surface of the thick soup, followed by a dollop of a fine, dry sherry like Amontillado. The soup is a blending of the New and Old worlds, served up hot on a Charleston verandah.

– Excerpted from an entry by Dan Huntley.  To read more about this or 2,000 other entries about South Carolina, check out The South Carolina Encyclopedia by USC Press. (Information used by permission.)  Photo by Jo Anna Barber from Hillsborough, NC, USA [CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.