Sallie Ann Robinson Gullah Cookbook Author

My name is Sallie Ann Robinson, I write, I cook, I demonstrate, I teach as much as possible. About once or twice a month I will invite friends and family to my house, because I really love to cook, kids are growing up; they're not home a lot. So on weekends, I'm like, y'all come to the house, I'm going to cook. So I'll have them over, so they would say, "Sallie, you need to do a cook book." This was early nineties, and I'm like, "No I don't want to do a cookbook." So they like, "Yeah, but people out there really want to know about this type of food." And I'm like, "Don't they know how to cook?" And they like, "No." And I said, "Where they be from?" I ain't know nobody who don't know how to cook like this. Because I grew up on an island, everybody knew how to cook. And everybody knew how to cook great food. And I started thinking of all the great meals and the food that we shared at dinner tables, having a wonderful time off. And the way we had to process some of them, hunt them, grow them, go to the river and find them, you know catch the shrimp and catch the crab and catch the fish, and what it would be like to tell the story with a lot of these dishes and how important it was that they knew it was just a jump on the plate, you just didn't find it somewhere but what important it was to go out there and get the freshest of everything we had. Life growing up on the Daufuskie for me was a very fascinating free-spirit lifestyle. We lived a unique life here because Daufuskie is also an island that you can only get to by boat. We couldn't just drive to any place and get something, we had to depend on someone with a boat to get to the mainland. I actually, my mom used to write a note on a list and send by the guy that was going over that day to shop. And the grocery store person on the mainland would send the grocery back. And once a month they'd go and pay their bills, and that was for the necessity things, like salt and pepper. Things that we didn't grow or couldn't do at the time. We appreciated the food that we ate and yes, we did a lot of things like other folks did. They put all these cute little name on it, well excuse me. You know, french toast, I'm saying egg and milk toast was fine for us. (Laughter). French? We not French, I don't know anything about; you know, and we did that because, you know, even the milk, we milked our cows. We had chickens to lay our eggs and we were very, um, creative, you know, we were very creative, things just didn't, you know, we didn't do things by books. We did things by just knowledge of saying, "Hey, I can do this. Why don't we each do this?" And my parents learned so much from their parents that has been passed down for generations. And I think it's very special to continue things for generation to generation. You know, to go and find, to get a seed and to watch the plant, and plant it in the soil, and through the process of tending it, watching it grow and then it grows into a vegetable appear, and then, within time, you get to pick these fresh vegetables and then you take it in the house and you turn it into something so tasty, without all the crazy spices, you know because, we didn't have it we couldn't grow it if we wanted to because really, they didn't know anything about those spices. The basic were: bell pepper, onions, salt and pepper, and garlic was great because we grew garlic. You know, those were the basics, um, and our food flavor came through. That's what I find Gulla food to be so special about because the flavor of the food come through, not the spice and the process of preparing the food is from beginning to end. I hear history of many places but not enough about the people that continue to live there, and their way of life. I get overwhelmed about Daufuskie and, day and night, there isn't a day that doesn't go by, something doesn't come to me that I want to write a document. I learned to appreciate so much more looking in than I did looking, being in it, because it wasn't as important living in it. And I just won't stop writing and telling everything I could possibly remember as a child and what my mom and family members have shared because we sat around the table in groups and it was always stories. Today we don't do that, with our kids. We don't share the stories. For them to understand how important it is, and they always said, "You gotta know where you come from and you gotta know where you're going." And that's one of my reasons for wanting to document the stories with my recipes and knowledge of the good old days on Daufuskie.