Illustration by George McCalman

Jenkins comes from — and lives in — South Carolina. But more specifically, and crucially, she carries on the culinary traditions of the Gullah Geechee communities of South Carolina — communities whose connection to West Africa continues to thrum through a style of cooking that has endured in this region since the earliest years of slavery. The rice in that pot, here in her home kitchen a short drive outside of Charleston, will emerge in a few minutes as a tantalizing purloo studded with nuggets of bacon and pinwheels of okra.

Jenkins doesn’t measure anything. She doesn’t hover over the stove. Like a seasoned musician, she lets her ears and eyes lead the way. She drops chunks of pork into a pan, returns to the kitchen table to chat with her daughter, Kesha, and simply waits “until it’s crisp.” When the pork is done, she wipes the residual schmutz from the pan with a paper towel. “This is a trick,” she says. “Because that can definitely change the taste of your food. Oh, I have a lot of tricks now.” The okra shows up late to the party on purpose. “I don’t cook the okra in the rice the whole time because if you did that,” Jenkins says, “the okra would disintegrate.”

Her okra purloo, when ready, turns out to be a marvel of contrasting textures and currents of seasoning, and it confirms what everyone in the Charleston area tells you, which is that Charlotte Jenkins is an absolute queen of Gullah cooking. Yet right now, you might be reading about her for the first time.

For years in nearby Mount Pleasant, she and her late husband, Frank, ran a restaurant called Gullah Cuisine, which closed a decade ago. Her cooking attracted national acclaim, but somehow Jenkins never ascended into the pantheon that includes godmothers of Black gastronomy such as Edna Lewis and Leah Chase. Why that didn’t happen — well, that’s a complicated story that goes down to the roots of Charleston’s troubling history when it comes to race, rice, money, and power. But it’s never too late to honor a dignitary in our midst.