Where's the shrimp? Seafood salads bob to the top of Charleston's Gullah cooking

It’s not a party without seafood salad.

Scratch that. It’s not a party without two, maybe three, seafood salads, so guests can scope out which serving bowl of chilled pasta shells, crab, relish, eggs and mayonnaise has the most generous helping of South Carolina shrimp.

“A lot of people will just bring the tuna salad, but they looking for shrimp,” says Marion Gadsden, Jr., whose recipe for the iconic dish is featured in his brother Darren Campbell’s new cookbook, "Charleston’s Gullah Recipes." “They’ll stir it a little, and if they don’t see shrimp — and local shrimp too…” At that, Gadsden just shakes his head.

Partly because it’s almost always made by a home cook or caterer, and typically reserved for celebrations, seafood salad is perhaps the most overlooked item in the Gullah food canon. Unlike land-based dishes such as hoppin’ John, it hasn’t penetrated the standard soul food lineup beyond the Lowcountry. “May be a hyperlocal tradition,” Adrian Miller, the James Beard Award-winning author of "Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine," theorized after polling his sources. And in the Charleston area, it’s barely known outside of the African-American community.

"I don’t have anybody that comes in and specifically says they’re looking for shrimp or crab for a salad,” says Gigi Smith of Crosby’s Seafood. “And I really don’t remember my grandmother saying, ‘Let me get some pasta for supper.’ Maybe grits or rice or potatoes. I would even venture to say it just seems like a Southern thing that was not popular here. You could always make a salad with rice.”

Smith paused to ask other employees if they knew anything about seafood salad, but none of them had heard of it. They suggested calling back after Billy Goff arrived for his shift.

“Seafood salad, I ain’t ever fixed that one,” Goff, an African-American man, said. “You’d have to ask my niece.”

Goff meant he didn’t have a recipe on hand. But he was very familiar with the dish and its most important attribute:

“I know shrimp is No. 1,” he said.

Getting real

Seafood salad isn’t the only expected guest at local graduation parties and family reunions. According to Gadsden, you can also count on someone to bring barbecue meatballs, someone to bring chicken wings and someone to bring red rice. But it has a somewhat hazier history than those favorites.

The inclusion of mayonnaise and canned tuna strongly suggests the preparation emerged around the time of World War I, better known among condiment scholars as the nation’s great mayo moment. Thousand Island dressing, another crucial seafood salad ingredient in the eyes of some cooks, was concocted during the same period.

But the salad — noticeably absent from contemporary cookbooks and magazines, which slapped the title “seafood salad” on an array of other cold mayonnaise-based starters with celery, capers and canned lobster — wasn’t designed to be trendy. It was a way to enjoy ingredients that were available and affordable. By the mid-20th century, it was entrenched.

Campbell says his 75-year-old cousin Julius, who grew up on an Edisto farm, remembers seafood salad being served at family functions. “He told me that they made homemade mayo back then,” Campbell says. At Hamlin Beach, where Sameka Jenkins of Carolima’s Catering grew up, “The older fishermen, they went in the creek for the crabs, and picked the meat for the salad.”

Now, though, those formerly accessible ingredients are so expensive that scoops of the good stuff are distributed selectively. “It was one of those dishes where you had to be a certain age to have some,” Jenkins says.

Jenkins still makes her popular “Hamlin Beach Seafood Salad” with blue crab, but imitation crab meat has been a component of seafood salads since the 1980s, when the ground pollock paste became a supermarket staple. Yet cost and convenience aren’t the only attributes in fake crab’s favor: Plenty of cooks (Gadsden included) believe its distinctive bright pink color contrasts handsomely with the beige pasta.

Still, Jenkins thinks real crab is a selling point for destination brides, most of whom have no inkling of seafood salad until she describes it.

“They’re used to tuna or macaroni salad, or seafood salad where there’s no pasta, maybe a lump crab cocktail,” Jenkins says. “When you tell them, they say, ‘That’s interesting.’”

Shrimp schemes

Campbell is planning to collaborate with Gadsden on an all-salad cookbook. “He makes macaroni salad, potato salad, tuna salad,” he says admiringly.

“Everything but the healthy ones,” Gadsden adds, laughing.

Gadsden taught himself to cook as a young man in West Ashley, where his mother worked as a mail carrier. She was grateful to find supper waiting when she came home, hot and exhausted from walking her route. Gadsden soon found that other people were equally appreciative of his specialties, including seafood salad.

“I’m an entertainer, so when I found out people got excited over food, I loved it,” says Gadsden, who produces music under the name DJ Akfool.

When Gadsden and Campbell were working on the current cookbook, they carefully measured out each ingredient, determining the exact ratio of onion to celery, mustard to onion. Made correctly, seafood salad is creamy, salty and sweet, much like other invaluable American inventions, such as the Reuben sandwich and ranch dressing. Gadsden doesn’t need tablespoons to achieve that balance: He prepares the salad at least once a month.

“Marion is well-known because of this dish,” the recipe’s headnote points out.

Although Gadsden prefers small shell-shaped pasta for his seafood salad, he’s not opposed to elbow macaroni. And he’ll add as much to the bowl as the crowd demands: “Any little occasion, you’re always having seafood salad,” he says. “So if there are a lot of people to feed, we use noodles to spread it out.”

Guests are on to that party trick, which is why they scheme to get first crack at the salad. The prize is Gadsden’s tender local shrimp, boiled in water seasoned with Campbell’s “Palmetto Blend,” a spunky mixture of salt, pepper, paprika, garlic, rosemary and cayenne; a tiny bag of it is stapled to every copy of "Charleston’s Gullah Recipes."

One unnamed acquaintance of Gadsden and Campbell’s is particularly skilled at getting her share.

“She does it quick, though,” Gadsden says. “You can’t even tell she’s doing it til she leaves. I don’t know how she can grab all that shrimp in one spoon.”