The Tastemakers (8 page)

The Civil War, however, put an end to all that diversity, said Roberts. “Sherman blew up the seed houses, skilled farmers died on the war's battlefields, and emancipation killed off the labor model,” which relied on slavery. A series of storms and floods ruined many fields in the early twentieth century, and with each farm that closed, local rice mills, which knew how to process each grain in ways that preserved its best flavor and texture, also shut their doors. Cotton plantations replaced rice fields because the cash crop could bring
in more money, but cotton plants depleted the soil until it was barren. Monoculture replaced seed diversity in the fields that remained, and the hundred-plus rice varieties, grown in various different ways, were replaced by a handful of common commercial seeds that were heartier and could store better but lacked any of the aromatic flavor and cultural significance of those original Carolina rice varieties. By the 1980s the last small-plot rice farmers were dwindling, and the rural families, largely African American, who toiled in the fields and kept the traditional recipes alive were moving to the cities without passing on their knowledge to the next generation. Countless recipes were lost to history and only exist today in scattered memories and the research files of a few dogged academics. “The term
Carolina Rice
meant something before the war,” Roberts said wistfully as we pulled into the Clemson Coastal Research and Education Center, just outside the city limits. “We lost a sense of place, our identity, and a market.”

The introduction of China Black was just one step in Roberts's mission to rebuild the diverse world of Carolina rice, and he was here to see how it was taking shape. Clemson University, with help from the US Department of Agriculture, operated the farm. Roberts drove past a few small buildings and greenhouses and out onto a field bordered by a tall forest of eucalyptus on one side and a large pond with blooming magnolias on its shore. The trees were pregnant with dozens of squawking white egrets that two large alligators watched hungrily from below. Roberts saw me looking nervously at the alligators and told me not to worry; the alligators would run away from us, he said, unless, of course, they didn't. Then it would be us doing the running. “This land is just like Africa,” Roberts said with excitement as he stepped out of his rented Camry and greeted Hal Harvey, the farm manager, who had a great white mustache and wore a faded camouflage hat. The two men stood by a plot of earth that was about the size of two parking spaces and was surrounded by small mounds of mud and flattened reeds. In the next few weeks they would plant five strains of rice in this small plot, including China Black, which would take up roughly 1/240th of an
acre, a tiny test planting about the size of a bathtub, because the idea was simply to see whether it could take root here. Larger trial plots of China Black would also be planted two hours south, near the Georgia border, and in Arkansas and Texas to see how the crop would fare in different conditions and climates.

Though there are several varieties of black Chinese rice dating back thousands of years, the rice labeled as IAC600—Roberts's rice—is a relatively recent creation. In 1994 a Brazilian crop breeder named Candido Bastos imported several strands of black rice from China and began selecting from their breeds for varieties that grew well in São Paulo state. Though dozens of other black rices existed on the market, almost all cultivated in China, the strain that Bastos isolated had surprisingly aromatic flavor properties when grown in Brazil: a nutty, fragrant bouquet and taste, making it desirable and unique for cooks. Bastos eventually contacted Dr. Anna McClung, research leader at the Dale Bumpers Rice Research Institute in Arkansas and one of America's foremost rice breeding authorities, to see whether this black rice might be something that the American market would respond to. McClung grew out a test patch and checked for problems. She contacted several commercial rice farmers, but none were ultimately interested in growing it because of the color, which created a quality-control nightmare in a production facility. “Because it's black, it looks like a weed seed if you mix it in with regular rice,” said Dr. McClung over the phone. “It'll contaminate your white rice in processing, and vice versa. People said forget it. Unless you are only farming black rice, it's a pain to work with.” McClung turned to Anson Mills and Roberts, who she had worked with previously on other rice varieties the company sells. “You need someone like Glenn who can say, ‘I know there's a market for this, and I'm going to bite the bullet and do what it takes to bring it out.' ”

In the second year of the seed's development McClung split the breeding crop, which contains plants that act like parents for producing seeds, into two, growing one in Arkansas and the other in Puerto Rico in order to expose it to different climates at different times of the year. The seeds flew down to the Caribbean, first-class
freight, and returned in the spring, as first-class bushels, to be planted again in Arkansas. In the fourth year the testing continued, and McClung and Roberts, who has funded most of these experiments out of his pocket, sent IAC600 to a food science laboratory in Louisiana to test its nutritional, milling, starch, and other characteristics, all of which were very good and, in some cases, such as antioxidant levels, excellent. “When you're going that far, that's when you realize whether you want to let others grow it,” says Roberts. “Then you have to find growers who are willing to take it.”

By the fifth year enough rice was available to do a few taste tests, so Roberts took some of the precious grains into his kitchen and cooked up a pot. “I said, ‘Wow, that's tribute rice, and it's beautiful!' It had a great inkiness, and the rice wine I made was amazing.” The crop was stabilized, and slow-scale production began on a sixty-six-day yield cycle, from spring planting to fall harvest. In 2009, with a steady supply just a season away, Roberts began talking up China Black to the chefs in his vast network, initially approaching some of the most trusted and powerful tastemakers in his circle and, indeed, America—California's Thomas Keller, New York's David Chang, Chicago's Charlie Trotter, New Orleans' John Besh, Sean Brock, and others—with the promise that his next delivery was going to contain a fantastically aromatic black rice that would be a perfect fit for where their cooking was going. There was a ton of interest from the chefs, who couldn't wait to get their hands on China Black.

“Then,” Roberts recalled, with a shake of his head and a chuckle, “the seeds crashed.” The seed stock was already limited, and for some reason the facility storing the seeds accidentally sent Roberts the breeding seeds (the parents), basically the foundational DNA of the crop, that were irreplaceable. Without knowing what had happened, Roberts planted them, only later realizing he'd basically put China Black's entire family tree into the ground, with no chance of recovery and no ability to replicate easily. “It was like slaughtering my prized breeding bull and selling it to me as steak,” Roberts said, still smarting at the monumental screwup. Everything had to start back at square one, and only now, in the spring of 2013,
had Roberts gotten back to the point at which China Black could be grown as a trial on a decent enough scale to provide samples to a few chefs. Not only that, but in the past year the trials at Clemson with China Black had not gone well. “It's probably the worst of the six varieties out here,” said Harvey, as an alligator slowly crawled into position nearby, under the oblivious herons. “The field conditions weren't the best last year, and the plot wasn't level.” Most of the crop hadn't survived. The fate of China Black was resting in this little plot plus the others around the country, all of which amounted to no more than a handful of acres.

“If we get a hurricane,” Roberts said, “Hal and I will be sitting here saying, ‘Well, that was fun, let's do it again!' ”

We left the farm and drove back toward Charleston, stopping for lunch at the Glass Onion, a sustainable soul food restaurant that served some of Anson Mills's products. Over a buttermilk-battered fried chicken po' boy, beers, and a platter of shrimp and grits, Roberts told me how he'd become the nationally recognized tastemaker of American grains.

Glenn Roberts was born in Delaware, though his mother was originally from South Carolina, and her family included preachers and mule farmers. He mostly grew up in La Jolla, California, near San Diego. His father was both a professional singer and aerospace worker, and his mother owned restaurants in La Jolla and, later, Marin county, near San Francisco. Though Roberts grew up in the kitchens of these restaurants, with their French-speaking kitchen staff and Continental menus, he never really picked up the hang of cooking (he says he can make one dish really well, but not a meal). His mother, however, taught him what she knew about the Carolina Rice Kitchen, making traditional dishes at almost every family meal. Over the years Roberts, who is a restless and adventurous soul, has dabbled in a number of things. He flew jets in the Air Force, sailed around the world on yachts, rode horses, drove long-haul trucks, crewed on shrimp boats out of Charleston, and even tried his hand at growing corn, working at a cotton mill, and making moonshine (which he still has a soft spot for every so often). Eventually Roberts settled into restaurant consulting, working with chefs and owners
on everything from concepts and menus to architecture and construction, a discipline that demanded that his pulse rest firmly on the latest food trends. He opened, closed, and revived restaurants in California, DC, and the South, getting to know the country's emerging top chefs, such as Thomas Keller, before they were household names. By the 1990s he had settled down in Charleston.

Anson Mills came about thanks to a stroke of bad luck. In 1998 the Smithsonian Institution was conducting a series of historical dinners focusing on the railroad cuisine of the post–Civil War era, and they asked Roberts to help put one on in Charleston. He began working with a historian to learn about the cuisine from that time period, leading him to the Carolina Rice Kitchen, which had been named by historian Karen Hess. Roberts wanted to serve the rice that was central to many of those recipes, a strain called Carolina Gold, and he ended up at the Turnbridge Plantation just north of Savannah, which is one of the few places where that rice was still growing. Arriving late in the day, he looked out over the flooded fields of Carolina Gold rice, their stalks lit by the glow of the setting sun pouring across the water like spilled paint. “Man, it was gorgeous,” he said, the image still in his eyes. Glenn Roberts fell in love with growing rice right then and there. The first thing he did after leaving was send his mother a bag of that same rice for her approval. “She flipped out. She hadn't seen anything like it since the Depression.”

Unfortunately, the Smithsonian dinner turned into a disaster. The church group that was cosponsoring the event had no idea how to properly store the rice, and when Roberts opened the bags in the kitchen, an hour before service began, the precious grains were full of corn weevils, a common agricultural insect. He freaked out, then calmed down, told the kitchen to switch the order of the meal around, grabbed a few busboys, and got down to the dirty work of salvaging the rice. “Imagine sitting in a pair of Gucci loafers and an expensive suit, picking dead bugs out of rice for three hours,” he said. “It fucking sucked.” At the end of the night what stuck in people's minds was the food, and the reaction they'd had to the rice more than made up for the agony of its execution. “I decided a lot
of chefs would like that rice,” Roberts said. “It was the real thing.” Anson Mills began the next day.

Roberts started growing corn right away because he had done it before and it was easy to cultivate quickly, and he used the proceeds to finance his first crop of Carolina Gold, which was more labor intensive. Using historical records and seeking out seed experts and backwoods farmers, he began pulling together a breadbasket of heritage southern grains, most of which were no longer commercially available. Anson Mills brought back native blue corn, heirloom yellow hominy corn, yellow flint popcorn, traditional couscous, Sea Island red peas, Carolina Graham wheat, Sonora white wheat, Einkorn wheat, Italian grains like several varieties of polenta, farro, buckwheat Taranga, and a whole slew of Carolina Gold products. Everything was grown using traditional, organic, sustainable methods, including hand harvesting, to retain flavor, preserve soil integrity, and keep a historical continuity with the grains. Multiple crops shared the same soil in rotation because they complemented each other's flavors and doing so improved soil health. Rather than use large commercial rollers to mill corn, hull rice, and grind wheat, Anson Mills operated with antiquated equipment, like granite mill stones, so the product retained a traditionally coarse texture, which affected taste tremendously because it left many aspects of the grain, such as the germ, intact. Anson Mills products, which require very specific storage and cooking instructions (they are not shelf stable), are packaged simply and sold directly to the chefs Roberts knew from his past life in the restaurant business. He asked them to spread the word, and their enthusiasm for his products soon grew within the upper echelons of America's culinary tastemakers.

The first product that Anson Mills put on the map was grits. Grits are technically a very simple product, with origins in Native American culture, and are made of coarsely ground cornmeal. Over time the varieties of corn used to make them had grown so efficient that grits were practically devoid of all taste. The large industrial mills that ground down kernels to cornmeal did so with pulverizing force, resulting in a grit that was much too small and uniform, with the plant's germ, where much of the flavor is stored, largely
destroyed. However, grown at organic farms in three states, the heirloom corn for Anson Mills's grits, in varieties such as Carolina Gourdseed White, John Haulk Yellow, Burris White, and Boone County White, is naturally soft, hand harvested, and stone ground, resulting in an uneven appearance and large grits that are hearty in texture and ready to soak up flavor. David Chang, the chef and owner of the Momofuku group of restaurants, first encountered Anson Mills's grits in 1999 when he was cooking at Craft, a restaurant run by chef Tom Colicchio. “No one was using the grit cut at that time,” Chang recalled, noting how chefs like Colicchio and Mario Batali first used it to make Italian-style polenta. “It shows you where American dining has gone. No one was going to put grits on a fine-dining menu. Then [fine dining] became a little more rustic and slowly evolved from there and grew.” Chang's own shrimp and grits dish, made with Anson Mills grains and laced with ramen stock and soy sauce, was a nod to his own Korean American–southern roots and was one of his first standout hits at Momofuku Noodle Bar, his flagship New York restaurant. As word of Anson Mills's grits spread from kitchens like Chang's, the demand among chefs soared, and grits became a must-have item on menus around the country, prompting others to grow and sell their own stone-ground grits in imitation of Roberts.