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(43,383 posts) Tue Aug 16, 2022, 06:04 AM Aug 2022

Country Captain is the Southern Icon You May Have Never Tasted

https://www.seriouseats.com/country-captain-southern-recipe-history

In April 2009, a Food Network production team arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, to film a special featuring local cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee, complete with a cooking demonstration. "Taste a true original Charleston dish—Country Captain," the producers announced in their Craigslist call for audience members. To get the backstory on the dish, the producers phoned up local food writers and industry insiders, including my colleague Jeff Allen at the Charleston City Paper. The producers didn't have much information to share, for if country captain was "a true original Charleston dish," that was news to the paper's staff. "I had heard of it as a dish," Allen recalls. "But I had never associated it with Charleston cuisine or the classic repertoire of the colonial era." That was my reaction, too. The name was vaguely familiar, but, despite having lived in Charleston for over a decade and in South Carolina almost my entire life, I couldn't recall ever actually eating it.

Which isn't to say that no one in South Carolina was cooking country captain, a fragrant and somewhat spicy dish consisting of chicken parts simmered in a tomato-based curry sauce. That sauce generally includes onions, garlic, and green peppers and it's finished with almonds and currants. It's almost always served over plain white rice. Matt and Ted Lee remember first encountering it in the 1980s in Mt. Pleasant, a suburb just north of Charleston, when it was served to them by a childhood friend's mother. "It's instantly lovable," Matt Lee says. "Even to a nine year old. It's chicken and gravy, but flavorful gravy." They liked it so much that they included it in their first cookbook, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. The Food Network "cooking demonstration" turned out to be a set-up: the Lee Brothers were the victims of a Bobby Flay "throwdown," where the celebrity chef shows up unannounced and tries to best cooks at making whatever their own specialty is in a head-to-head contest. The Lee Brothers won.

A Lowcountry Classic?

But, of the dozens of recipes in the Lee Brothers' cookbook, why did the Food Network seize upon country captain? (The Lee Brothers confirm that the producers chose the dish.) Journalist Sam Sifton could be to blame. In January 2009, just a few months before the throwdown was staged, Sifton wrote in the New York Times Magazine that country captain is "a dish you'll find in both [Charleston and Savannah] and throughout the Lowcountry that surrounds them, in restaurants and home dining rooms alike. Made correctly, it captures exactly that moment of excitement you feel when first arriving in the region from far away: a sense that everything really is different in the South, that it is the one last, true regional culture in the United States."

Sifton's misty-eyed preamble makes it sound like country captain is as much a Lowcountry classic as shrimp and grits and hoppin' John. But we can forgive some running rough-shod over the finer delineations of the sub-regions of Southern cuisine, for almost everyone does the same. (Remember where pimento cheese really comes from.) The rest of Sifton's piece does a good job outlining the murkiness that surrounds country captain's provenance, with interviews from Southern food luminaries like John T. Edge. Almost everyone who has written about the recipe in any depth has correctly identified that its origins are Indian and that it eventually made its way to the South. How it got there, though, is the tricky part.

An Indian Dish Comes to America............