Entry · catalog no. 4246
red rice
/ /ˌrɛd ˈraɪs/ /RED RYSS
noun · Gullah Geechee Lowcountry — South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A one-pot tomato rice: pork fat, smoked sausage, onion, bell pepper and celery cooked down with tomato paste, then long-grain rice steamed until every grain stands separate and runs red.
“She put on a pot of red rice Friday with the shrimp.”
Origin & Attribution
Gullah Geechee cooking of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands and the Charleston Lowcountry — the foodway of the Black cooks and cultivators who built the Carolina rice economy. Karen Hess argued in 1992 that the Carolina rice kitchen was primarily the creation of early African American cooks, and Michael W. Twitty traces the dish through the African diasporic rice line. Emily Meggett, the matriarch of Edisto Island, wrote that red rice borrows from the traditions of her African ancestors and owes a great debt to the enslaved Africans who brought their knowledge of rice and vegetable farming. Its West African relatives are the tomato-rice complex — thieboudienne in Senegal, and the broader jollof family — though Meggett calls red rice a cousin of those dishes rather than a descendant. The persistent mislabel is heritage branding: red rice sold as Charleston or Savannah plantation-house cooking, with the Black and Gullah Geechee authorship taken out.
1992
Karen Hess publishes The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection
2003
Sallie Ann Robinson prints red rice in Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way
2022
Emily Meggett's Gullah Geechee Home Cooking puts the dish under its own name
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Gullah Geechee Lowcountry — South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands · 1900s
Spoken by
Gullah Geechee families of the Sea Islands and the Charleston Lowcountry
$REDRICThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring34 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1992
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection, University of South Carolina Press
1992
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Sallie Ann Robinson, Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way, University of North Carolina Press
2003
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+ Cite a sourceEmily Meggett, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, Abrams
2022
See also