“S” is for She-crab soup. She-crab soup is uniquely Charlestonian—a silky chowder with European heritage. The dish helped put Charleston on the regional culinary map as surely as Philadelphia’s cheese steaks and Chicago’s deep-dish pizzas did the same for those locations. Food historians believe that she-crab soup is based on the Scottish seafood bisque partan bree, which was brought to the New World in the early 1700s. It was localized in Charleston with the addition of boiled and long-grain rice and the roe of blue crabs. The recipe for the soup calls for the meat of a dozen female crabs, fish stock, milk, spices, and heavy cream. Served hot, she-crab soup’s finishing touches include a sprinkling of the orange crab eggs across the surface of the thick soup, followed by a dollop of a fine, dry sherry.
“S” is for She-crab soup
