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, January 8^th at 1:00 PM.

In Taste the State, Chef Kevin Mitchell and historian David S. Shields present engaging profiles of eighty-two 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.