Josephine Drayton

I grew up on James Island, just outside Charleston, in a family that has been on the South Carolina coast for generations. Low Country food — shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, Frogmore stew, benne wafers — is one of the most historically rich and least internationally understood food traditions in America. It is the cuisine that grew out of the rice culture built by enslaved West Africans who brought their food knowledge with them. I know where to get the she-crab soup that tastes like the Atlantic Ocean, which fish camp on the water serves the Frogmore stew, and the bakery on King Street that has been making benne wafers from the same sesame-seed recipe since 1939.