Charleston, S.C. • On the Carolina coast, rice reigns.

"Charleston, in a sense, was built by rice, and the rice was only made possible by the knowledge of the West Africans who were enslaved and brought here," said Jeff Allen, a researcher, author and agriculturalist focusing on historical foodways and sustainable production.

Rice's economic impact faded after the Civil War, but its importance in the kitchen never waned.

"Rice was served to everyone in the house, including the pets, 365 days a year," said Glenn Roberts, a founder of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. He grew up in California with a mother from South Carolina. "She was raised in that black-skillet environment — first pot on the stove was rice."

"My mother liked to do rice and gravy" as a side dish, he said. She would heat a skillet 'screeching hot," pour in bacon fat, add cold steamed rice and cook until crispy, then serve it with gravy. For breakfast, she'd make crispy rice and scramble in some eggs. For a main dish, she'd add chicken or another protein to rice and make a pilaf-like dish known variously as perlou, pirlou, pilau, perloo, purloo and perlew.

Cookbook author Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor also grew up eating rice every day. "The most important thing about rice is that you cook it proper," she said. She carefully rinses the rice in three changes of water, ensuring that every trace of stickiness is washed away. Cooked rice should not stick together, she said. "Every grain to itself," she told a group of food journalists meeting in Charleston in October.

Allen, Southern cooking authority Damon Lee Fowler and chef Charlotte Jenkins joined Smart-Grosvenor in a session on the region's foodways; Roberts spoke about rice at another session and expanded upon his remarks in a telephone interview.

Today, Roberts and his foundation are working to re-establish historic varieties of Carolina rice. He also is a founder of Anson Mills, which sells Carolina Gold Rice, primarily to chefs.

"I like to describe it as a spicy floral with almost an almond characteristic," he said. "A lot of people like talking about mineral and hazelnut."

Carolina Plantation Rice is raising and selling Charleston Gold, which Roberts describes as the daughter of Carolina Gold. Charleston Gold is a "long-grain, slightly aromatic rice, high nutty, bordering on popcorn," he said. Now Roberts is working on reviving a variety called Carolina Long. "It was the most expensive rice in the world right up to the Civil War," he said. "Charleston Gold is the first step into moving toward what that rice was."

Smart-Grosvenor's recipes call for long-grain white rice; Jenkins uses converted white rice, which has been soaked and pressure-steamed and cooks up into separate grains. Smart-Grosvenor calls herself a Geechee; Jenkins says she is Gullah. Both words describe people from the coast and isolated barrier islands stretching from southern North Carolina to northern Florida.

Fowler said that defining who is a Geechee or Gullah was easier than defining their cooking. "The cooking is consistently changing," he said. "There's a constant evolution when you're talking about food and the interaction people have with food."