Red, Red Rice

There’s a certain slant of smell (sorry Dickinson) that stays with you all of your life. It’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it? One of those smells for me is the general smell of the lunchtime cafeteria food at Pulaski Elementary School, located just down the block from our house on Sylvan Drive. And then, the particular smells of specific dishes in the lunchroom: the sour-ish smell of collard greens, the promising odor of peanut butter balls for dessert, the cheesiness of the mac and cheese, and, of course the redness of the red rice.

I don’t know how else to describe it. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a smell I recognized until I started making this dish recently in our soul food kitchen: red bell peppers, onions, garlic, tomato paste, a touch of hot sauce. And boom! I was back in 6th grade in a flash.

The food in the Pulaski lunchroom was unabashedly soul food, prepared by a team of black chefs only known by their first names. (For a similar narrative, see the remarkable Creole Cuisine, devoted to the largely unheralded black chefs of New Orleans.) The food at home for me on Sylvan Drive as unabashedly Jewish. I was always faintly suspicious of the cafeteria food, sneaking in ham or bacon in one dish or another (probably in all of them I suspect). It was a totally foreign world to me from the age of 5 to 11. And yet somehow, I absorbed it all, sensual memories reawakened 50 years later at a moment’s notice.

It’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it? So powerful that I can ignore (almost) the fact that Charleston, South Carolina is famous for this dish, while Savannah (typically) languishes in its rival’s shadow, despite having an equally storied history with this dish. That’s OK. Let Charleston take credit for it. The real ownership resides within each of us.