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VI Feasting at Hampton The Culinary Aspects of a Low Country Christmas This page intentionally left blank Writing in My Colonel and His Lady, a moving tribute to his parents, Rutledge offered some insight into the kind of fare that was standard for the holidays at Hampton. “I hate,” he ventured, “to describe a plantation Christmas dinner if I cannot offer my readers the dinner itself.” References to culinary pleasures as an integral and important aspect of Christmastime at Hampton Plantation spice many of Rutledge’s pieces on the season. Indeed they offer one ready benchmark to his ability as a writer, for at times his descriptions of dishes and meals are so powerful that they put the reader’s salivary glands in overdrive. Any hunter who has risen before dawn on a cold December day can, for example, readily identify with the penultimate sentence in “All of a Christmas Morning,” when Rutledge and his sons, along with the six “dusky henchmen” who had served as drivers on a deer hunt, return “in triumph to the plantation house, to a breakfast of hominy, cold wild turkey, corn bread, and coffee.” Not exactly gourmet fare, but simple and eminently satisfying provender straight from nature’s larder as found in Hampton’s cultivated fields and wild woods, as these snippets from his writing suggest. And yet I cannot think of it without recalling the snowy pyramids of rice, the brown sweet potatoes with the sugar oozing out of their jackets, the roasted rice-fed mallards, the wild turkey, the venison, the tenderloin of pork fattened on live oak acorns, the pilau, the cardinal pudding! Festive is a plantation dinner table, with a huge haunch of venison, a wild turkey, snowy pyramids of steaming rice, crisp brown corn breads, and Bahama sweet potatoes, the sugar oozing out of their loose jackets. Our Christmas breakfast of hominy, venison sausages and corn bread . . . Here the breakfaster may regale himself on plantation fare: snowy hominy, cold wild turkey, brown crumbly cornbreads, venison sausages, Carolina Christmas  206 beaten biscuits, steaming coffee, home-made orange marmalade. Unless my observation be at fault, the making of coffee on a plantation is a solemn rite, not to be trusted to any one save the mistress of the house. She loves to make it herself before the ruddy fire in the dining room, its intriguing aroma mingling with the fresh fragrances from the greenery hunt about the walls. She loves to carry coffee-making to the point of a fine art, and to serve it out of a massive silver coffee-pot— the same used when a gentleman named General George Washington visited this home during his Southern tour in those last years of the eighteenth century. Rutledge offered a quintet of recipes published in the December 1913 issue of Country Life in America (pp. 106–7). To my knowledge these are the only recipes he ever published, and all of them appear below. In introducing the recipes, he wrote: “It is impossible to speak or write of Southern hospitality or plantation festivities without falling into a discussion of Southern cooking. Many of the recipes have never found their way into cookbooks.” He then provided “a few of the recipes that still form a part of the Christmas celebration at Hampton Place.” Drinks and Cordials  Rutledge occasionally mentions spirits in his writing, and it is clear he enjoyed a comforting libation at day’s end and the conclusion of a hard hunt. Similarly he would lift a festive glass to toast visitors or celebrate special occasions such as holiday meals. All the drinks described below are his personal recipes. Blackberry Cordial Shakespeare once wished that “reason was as plentiful as blackberries.” Certainly the latter were plentiful along the ditch rows and field edges at Hampton, and in the “make do with what you’ve got” practicality that financial straits mandated through Rutledge’s life, blackberries were picked for cobblers, jams, jellies, and canning . They were also used for a flavorful, refreshing libation. Here is what Rutledge offered in that regard, saying, “this has been a beverage long esteemed in the South both because of its rich flavor and because of its medicinal qualities. This cordial will be drunk, not made, at Christmas-time, but the recipe for it is given here.” Select the ripest berries, mash them with a wooden or agate spoon, and squeeze them through a jelly bag. For every quart of juice, allow one pound of sugar, a...

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