When I called the chef and pitmaster Rodney Scott first thing in the morning for an interview, he asked if he could put me on hold: He was taking coffee to the crew at one of his restaurants, Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ, in Charleston, S.C.
Giving back, saying thank you with gestures like this, has been a North Star for Scott since he was a teenager working at his parents’ many businesses, including a barbecue restaurant, about two hours away in Hemingway, S.C.
For instance, on the Saturday before Easter, the Black businesses in the neighborhood would get together and host a big party for the community. There was a D.J. at first and eventually a stage (which Scott built himself) for live music. There was free food, too, most notably a supremely comforting one-pot rice dish, perloo, a Lowcountry staple with roots in West Africa.
Recipe: Chicken Perloo
Scott recalls these “give-back picnics,” as he called them, as a chance for out-of-towners returning for Easter to reunite with friends and family. Some of the older guys would say, “Let’s throw a pot together right quick” — which meant putting a giant cast-iron cauldron over an open fire outside and getting the perloo started. While they waited for someone to come back from the store with rice, those who remained sautéed some leftover meat, often smoked chicken, but anything would work; could be pork, could be deer. It didn’t matter, he said. What did matter was the spirit of the gathering: “It gave you an opportunity to see people you hadn’t seen in awhile.”
The dish can taste different depending on who makes it, and that is part of its charm. Scott says one person used to make it with lots of black pepper, another with a touch of honey. Some people used onions, others didn’t. There were only two common ingredients in the perloos he tasted back then: rice (today he uses the singular Charleston Gold, not to be confused with the “Gold” rice from the Carolina brand), and Kitchen Bouquet, the browning and seasoning sauce that adds deep color and a salty, enhanced umami to long-simmered stews.
Scott’s scaled-down recipe for chicken perloo, from his debut cookbook, “Rodney Scott’s World of BBQ,” doesn’t call for Kitchen Bouquet: He thinks you can get good flavor in a small pot without it. Here, he cooks down the holy trinity of celery, bell pepper and onion, stained red with canned stewed tomatoes and rib rub, and pulls the meat off a smoked bird, the way his mother, Ella, did. If you don’t live by an award-winning pitmaster, then you can use a grocery-store rotisserie chicken, but you’ll need to add smokiness somehow. I’ve found that a pinch of smoked paprika helps — as it does in my colleague Yewande Komolafe’s jollof rice — along with the dry heat of the oven, which finishes cooking the rice.
A dish that lets you say thank you over and over again.
Once, when explaining what perloo was to a colleague who had never had it, Scott said, “You’re basically making gumbo without all the liquid.” And like gumbo, perloo is whatever you grew up with. It’s one-pot cooking without the glossy food-magazine cover calling it a “wonder.” It’s a way to give back, something to gather around. One Easter, Scott and his neighbors handed out more than 1,000 plates of perloo. They delivered to people who couldn’t come to the picnic for whatever reason, to barbershops, to the sick. But things are different now. Not everyone is here anymore; children have grown and moved away, and Scott’s mother died last December. “It’s kind of heartbreaking,” he said, “because so many people counted on that meal that day.”
Homecoming, for Scott, used to mean seeing old classmates in Hemingway and the big football game. He’s grateful for those years when he had the energy to build stages for live music and to feed the community that raised him, in the form of chicken perloo. “Keep creating good memories with family and food,” he likes to write in people’s copies of his cookbook. But today it means something else: coming home to his wife and children in Charleston, where his living room faces a lake. After a long day of work, watching the sunset over that lake and relaxing with his family is what it’s all about. “I went out, I did my job, and I’m back home,” he said — if you can say that, then you’ve made it. The rest can wait.