Just a Light Lunch, Charleston Style

When I think of eating a light lunch, to me that means something like half of a turkey sandwich and an apple. Not surprisingly, our friends the Old Charlestonians had rather different notions about what constituted a light mid-day meal. After the jump, we've prepared another edition of Southern Cookin' for you. This time it's just a very delicate, sparse four course meal, with recipes taken from the invaluable Charleston Recollections and Receipts: Rose P. Ravenel's Cookbook.  (More info on the cookbook can be found in post one here.)

So if you're feeling just a teeny bit hungry around lunchtime, do be sure to check out the  following recipes. They are absolutely perfect for a small snack! 

Brunch with the Butlers (a Bonus Edition of Southern Cookin')

Because we're already somewhat awash in weekly features here, we decided we would post our Southern Cookin' series on a more intermittent basis, so the blog doesn't start to resemble a soup du jour menu ("Oh, it's Thursday? I'll take the tomato soup Poster of the Week, please.") 

And while that'll still be the plan going forward, we did have a special request from a reader for another installment of Southern Cookin' this week.  And since we aim to please (and we're in possession of a storehouse of old-time recipes), we're happy to feature another selection from Charleston Recollections and Receipts: Rose P. Ravenel's Cookbook. (If you're just tuning in now, info on the cookbook and its ties to the real Butler clan of Charleston can be found in our inaugural post.)

This week's bonus recipe is a full breakfast/brunch menu.  It's just out of the oven and waiting you on the other side of the jump.   

Charleston Recipes from Rhett Butler's Real People

I will be completely honest with you: despite my best efforts to the contrary, cooking makes me about as agitated as Aunt Pittypat mid-swoon--easily excitable, hopelessly flustered, prone to fainting at the slightest provocation, and liable to be revived only by a handy swoon bottle (okay, maybe the last two are teeny tiny exaggerations).  

But although cooking isn't a natural talent of mine, I must say I'm very excited to introduce yet another feature here, something that we fondly call Southern Cookin'. From time to time, we'll be posting authentic Southern recipes (or "receipts" as they said in yesteryear) from the era of Gone with the Wind.

Today we're getting things started with a five-course dinner from Charleston, that genteel city and birthplace of Rhett Butler. 

Some quick background info: the recipes, which you'll find after the jump, are excerpted from Charleston Recollections and Receipts: Rose P. Ravenel's Cookbook. Rose P. Ravenel (1850-1943) was the daughter of a Charleston planter, merchant and shipowner, who kept lifelong journals and sketches describing Carolina coastal life, her family's lineage, and her memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

She also collected more than 200 recipes from her Charlestonian friends--and here's my very favorite part--this collection was based on an earlier cookbook developed by her mother, Eliza Butler Ravenel (emphasis mine, of course!). Meaning that these recipes were not only circulating during antebellum Charleston, but were actually known and used by Rhett's own Butler kin (yes, yes, that is only *if* he was a real person, I know).

The author of the cookbook (wisely) updated the instructions for modern times--so you won't see any steps like "boil water in a pan over a wood burning fire" or "cure the meat for five days in the smokehouse on your plantation."  But beyond that, they appear as they did 150 years or so ago.

If you're more clever than me when it comes to culinary matters and try out these recipes (or any others we post in the future), let us know. We'd be curious to find out if they were, in fact, tasty or if they should best be left to the historical dustbin.  Either way, I hope they provide an interesting glimpse into the life of antebellum era.