“Taste the State: South Carolina’s Signature Foods, Recipes, & Their Stories”

The Horry County Museum and the AVX Foundation present a lecture by Kevin Mitchell on his book, "Taste the State: South Carolina’s Signature Foods, Recipes, & Their Stories" on Saturday, Jan. 8 at 1 p.m.

In "Taste the State," Chef Kevin Mitchell and historian David S. Shields present engaging profiles of 82 of the state’s most distinctive ingredients, such as Carolina Gold rice, Sea Island White Flint corn and the cone-shaped Charleston Wakefield cabbage, and signature dishes such as shrimp and grits, chicken bog, okra soup, Frogmore stew and crab rice. These portraits, illustrated with original photographs and historical drawings, provide origin stories and tales of kitchen creativity and agricultural innovation, historical “receipts” and modern recipes, including Chef Mitchell’s distillation of traditions in Hoppin’ John fritters, okra and crab stew and more.

Because Carolina cookery combines ingredients and cooking techniques of three greatly divergent cultural traditions, there is more than a little novelty and variety in the food. "Taste the State" celebrates the contributions of Native Americans (hominy grits, squashes and beans), the Gullah Geechee (field peas, okra, guinea squash, rice and sorghum) and European settlers (garden vegetables, grains, pigs and cattle) in the mixture of ingredients and techniques that would become Carolina cooking. "Taste the State" also explores the specialties of every region—the famous rice and seafood dishes of the Lowcountry; the Pee Dee’s catfish and pinebark stews; the smothered cabbage, pumpkin chips and mustard-based barbecue of the Dutch Fork and Orangeburg; the red chicken stew of the Midlands; and the chestnuts, chinquapins and corn bread recipes of mountain Upstate.

Mitchell is the first African American chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of Charleston. He has culinary arts degrees in occupational studies and management from the Culinary Institute of America and a master’s degree in southern studies from the University of Mississippi, where he studied Southern foodways, the preservation of Southern ingredients and the history of African Americans in the culinary arts. Mitchell is a 2020/2021 South Carolina Chef Ambassador.

The program will be held in the McCown Auditorium located at 805 Main Street in Conway. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, call (843) 915-5320 or email hcgmuseum@horrycounty.org. To view a full list of programs, visit our website.