Bon Appetit – September 2019

80

He tells me this approximately 27 times over

three days, as we barrel down the swampy coasts

of South Carolina and Georgia in a boiled-

crawfish-red Hyundai Santa Fe with the A/C

cranked to five. He tells me a few more times in

our follow-up calls, and again over text message.

“This ain’t about me.” That’s the refrain. “This

is cool and all, but it ain’t about me.”

At first I’m tempted to read it as a classic

humblebrag. Lots of chefs say things like this;

lots of actors and musicians and other famous

types do too. But as is the nature of humble-

braggarts, most don’t actually mean it.

BJ Dennis means it.

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT Benjamin “BJ” Dennis

IV because of a pop-up he started back in 2012

at Butcher & Bee, a Charleston café. Seeking

to dispel the idea that African American food

consists solely of fried chicken and mac ’n’ cheese, the

chef built his menus around what his Gullah Geechee

ancestors ate: fresh-caught seafood, local produce, heri-

tage grains. The media took notice. But instead of open-

ing a restaurant or hiring a PR firm or competing on a

cooking show, Dennis, who is now 40, worked as a caterer

and private chef so he could keep hosting pop-ups and

collaborations all over the city, then all over the country.

His pop-ups were not just about serving delicious food

but also about educating diners, and he emerged as a de

facto ambassador for the Gullah community: a farmer, a

scholar, and a self-taught historian, just as adept at grow-

ing heirloom produce and tracing transnational foodways

as he was at cooking ginger-laced pots of gumbo studded

with creek shrimp. He got written up in the New York Times

for rediscovering a rare African hill rice—thought to be

lost forever—in a remote field in Trinidad. He taught

Anthony Bourdain about Gullah food in the Charleston

episode of Parts Unknown. About how the enslaved

brought with them from Africa so many of the crops now

considered Southern staples: peanuts, watermelon, okra,

sorghum, countless varieties of rice. How their farming

skills formed the backbone of not just the South’s economy

but of the Low Country cuisine associated with coastal

South Carolina and Georgia. How gumbo, Hoppin’ John,

even shrimp and grits can be traced back to African dishes,

re-created by enslaved people in plantation kitchens.

The descendants of these people, known as the Gullah

Geechee, remain here on the Sea Islands and coastal plains

of the American South, their longtime geographic isola-

tion a retainer for their distinctly West African identity,

BJ DENNIS;

FISHING BOATS

IN MOUNT

PLEASANT, SC

The Gullah

Geechee Corridor

BJ Dennis

does not want

this story to

be about him.

SC

GA

FL

NC

Charleston