Savor the stories

Story by Barry Kaufman + Photography by Lisa Staff

Food is so much more than just what you eat. It’s an art form on par with any great song or painting. Just as you can recall the way a film may have pulled at your heartstrings or the way a novel moved your soul, you remember the way a great meal’s flavors and textures danced on your palate. It lingers on your tongue, the experience of it always tantalizing you to have another helping.

And just like music and movies, there are entire subcultures built around food. There are the chefs, whose creativity and passion rival any director or rock star. There are the foodies, discerning fans who will tell you exactly where to find that next remarkable meal with the same zeal as a film critic reviewing the next best-picture winner. These are the faces of food, and our area is blessed with some of the art form’s most ardent practitioners.

Rachel and Michael Lively

This local couple turned their love for cooking and hospitality into two flourishing businesses.

It’s a long way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Hilton Head Island. And while Rachel and Michael Lively may have physically made that move, they did so as part of a much longer journey, one that started with the couple operating a pediatric therapy practice together, and culminated with them as the best friends to foodies across the Lowcountry. As owners of Le Cookery and Hilton Head Olive Oils and Balsamics, they have cornered the market on everything a culinarian needs, wants and desires. 

So how did the two of them go from treating pediatric patients in Oklahoma to researching and curating kitchen tools and developing profiles for carefully aged balsamics on Hilton Head Island?

“We took a sabbatical year on Daufuskie Island to hang out with our kids and get some back porch game-playing time,” said Rachel. “We fell in love with this part of the world, so we sold our practice, not knowing what we were going to do next, but ready for a new adventure. We permanently moved to Hilton Head.”

Fortunately, the island’s go-to source for elevated cooking gear, Le Cookery, had just gone on the market. And even more fortunately, the Livelys loved to cook and entertain, always having a heart for hospitality. The Livelys jumped at the chance, despite knowing they’d be in over their heads, at least at first.

“Neither one of us had any retail experience, so there were a lot of late nights,” said Michael. “We’d be up opening boxes at 3:00 a.m. Ironically, we didn’t have any time to cook. Our kids joked that we bought the stores because we loved to cook so much, but that first year we ate a lot of take-out pizza. Now we are back to cooking and exploring new recipes almost every night.” 

But the hard work started to pay dividends as the couple fell into the rhythm of retail and began fine-tuning the offerings.

“We are researchers by nature, and that’s what has helped us be successful,” said Rachel. “We were diving deep into everything in the store and asking, ‘What would we use in our kitchen?’ And we built a lot of trust with our customers. If we wouldn’t use it, we don’t sell it.”

They took a decidedly different approach when they bought Hilton Head Olive Oils and Balsamics. Rather than whittling down the number of SKUs, they aggressively expanded their stock.

“When we bought the store, it had 17 flavors. Right now we offer 56 different flavors,” said Michael. “We’ve quadrupled the space and fine-tuned who we’re ordering from, sourcing our oils and vinegars directly from three families with vineyards and groves in Italy, Greece and Spain.”

They now offer popular salad dressing-making classes, booked months in advance, with more being added to meet demand. Island chefs like Trey Place of Michael Anthony’s are regulars, using their tools and hosting events like Wine Down Wednesdays. Many top local restaurants, including Jazz Corner and Sea Pines Country Club, use their oils and balsamics in their dishes. “Memories are made around the table, and we love helping customers build those traditions,” said Rachel.

Cooking for life

Owning Le Cookery and Hilton Head Olive Oils and Balsamics hasn’t just made Rachel and Michael Lively better chefs. It’s also helped them live healthier lives.

“We’ve been really focused on the Mediterranean diet. We’re making sure we’re offering the highest polyphenol levels in our olive oils,” Michael said. In fact, they offer a medicinal grade Greek extra virgin olive oil that contains over 1800 mg/Kg per serving.  “Physicians are sending their patients to us to purchase our olive oil for health benefits.”

For those of us who don’t have a scientific background, polyphenol is a compound found in plant-based foods that acts as a powerful antioxidant. More and more studies are finding that polyphenol provides protection against certain cancers, cardiovascular diseases and neurodegenerative diseases. High-quality, single-sourced and first-pressed olive oils and aged balsamic vinegars, like those sold in the Livelys’ store, are considered “superfoods” and are healthy additions to people’s diets.  

“It has definitely taught us a healthier way to cook. We’ve completely cut butter out of our cooking, and I’m learning how to cook on our Smithey cast iron skillets and roasters, which is incredibly healthy and improves the flavor of food,” Rachel added. “Both of our stores complement each other, one providing incredibly delicious and healthy ingredients, and the other providing the cookware, tools and pieces to serve it beautifully.”

Sallie Ann Robinson

This local icon is keeping the spirit of Gullah culture alive through food and stories.

Most people’s first introduction to Sallie Ann Robinson, Daufuskie Island icon and author, doesn’t happen on one of her tours of the island. It doesn’t happen at a signing for one her many cookbooks. It happens on the page.

As one of the young students taught by Pat Conroy during his tenure at a tiny, one-room schoolhouse, a time immortalized in his memoir, “The Water is Wide,” Robinson’s youth was captured in the character “Ethel.”

“Back then everybody raised a child. It wasn’t about my child and your child, it was about our kids,” she said. “That’s what made the community special.”

The Daufuskie of her youth was far more isolated than it is today, and as a result its people relied on community and self-sufficiency. Robinson remembers raising chickens, falling in love with them despite knowing they were destined for the plate. She remembers learning why they only slaughtered hogs when it was cold – “No flies!”

And it’s in these memories of a culinary culture that she sees what Daufuskie once was.

“I’m proud to say I learned so much through the process that makes every meal,” she said. “Even when it came to the work that was put into it – farming, hunting, fishing, crabbing… all of these things brought the joy to the table.”

That upbringing formed the foundation for her cookbooks, works that not only codified recipes that had been passed down through generations but also shared her veneration for the community that wrote those recipes. 

Through Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way, Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night and Sallie Ann Robinson’s Kitchen, she introduced readers to the love language of native islander cooking – fried chicken, red rice, collard greens, sweet bread pudding. But more importantly, it introduced readers to the culture behind it. Through her guided tours of the island, she continues that education. Through her tireless advocacy, she ensures that those who came after her will still be able to tell those stories.

Whether that means maintaining the sacred grounds of five Gullah graveyards on the island or restoring historic Gullah homes that have been nearly lost to time, she holds the line against her community vanishing into history.

“I’ve had a passion for this going back to the ’80s. I’m never going to stop fixing things up because I want to show people the love that I grew up with. Because these folks are gone, and I remember them like it was yesterday,” she said. “Whether it’s cooking or feeding someone, taking the tour and sharing the laughter and joy, or just holding their hands and saying something positive. All of us don’t wake up to the same joy.”

Hearth and home

When Sallie Ann Robinson thinks back to the Daufuskie Island of her youth, one defined by its deeply enmeshed community, she remembers Sunday dinners.

“Every Sunday was a big dinner – family, friends, we would sit and have conversation on top of conversations,” she said. “There isn’t a house I can recall going to where they didn’t offer you something to eat.”

Sometimes it was at her own family home. Sometimes a neighbor’s home. But wherever she found herself, she knew one thing. “You know that food was going be good. But you have to add love to food to get that aroma.”

Thanks to these roving Sunday dinners, she came to know many of her neighbors’ homes as her own. And now she’s looking to save them – and her own home — from destruction.

“These houses are deteriorating. I’m doing them one at a time, turning them into Airbnbs to benefit not only the families but also people who love visiting those homes,” she said. “I hope that others will find some joy in it, too.”

You can help by visiting gofundme.com/f/saving-the-robinson-house or by emailing Sallie at mygullah@yahoo.com.

Karla Angel

This local chef is redefining healthy eating, one crave-worthy bite at a time.

You might think that just because Chef Karla Angel built her reputation on “creating crave-worthy food to help you achieve all your health goals,” she can’t cut loose every once in a while. That her dedication to reinventing recipes to unleash their full nutritious potential might keep her from joining us mere mortals in line at the burger truck. But that’s exactly the stereotype she’s trying to break.

“That’s what I based my cookbook off of – a fear of food,” she said. “There’s a generalization that food is always either good or bad, that there’s this black and white, which causes stress and confusion. It doesn’t need to be that way.”

That cookbook, Dig In — For the Love of Food encapsulates her long journey as a chef, starting as a teenage athlete who found herself compelled to cook for her own health. “It was just my dad and I, and he worked a bunch when I was in high school,” she said. “We were just going to Panera a lot. I put two and two together that eating out all the time can’t be great.”

She devoured instruction, whether that meant raiding the cookbooks at Barnes and Noble or binge watching Food Network. Even as she went off to college, studying exercise science, she’d often unwind by writing out recipes in class in the same way many of us doodle in the margins of our notebook. 

“That’s the point where I realized I really enjoyed this,” she said. “I’d been studying exercise science, but I realized I could improve the food people eat rather than working from the outside in. So I jumped into a whole new field.”

Earning a bachelor’s degree in nutrition science as well as an associate’s degree in culinary arts, she quickly found her niche when one of her instructors gave her the opportunity to create a healthy meal plan for him. “He gave me the opportunity to cook for him, and he ended up losing 50 pounds over a year,” she said. “It was awesome to see my love for healthy food match his discipline for traditional cuisines.”

That set her on a path that led her to Hilton Head, serving as executive chef at Hilton Head Health before launching her own business, Chef Karla, LLC, five years ago. Whether it’s consulting with a restaurant on adding healthier items, rebuilding an entire menu with an emphasis on nutrition or simply cooking privately for small groups, she has dedicated herself to bringing that balance to food.

“You should be empowered when you make food decisions,” she said. “I look at it in terms of quality food and sensible portions. If you fuel with quality ingredients, you’re going to feel better… You just have to be mindful.”

Better eating for life

In her book Dig In — For the Love of Food, Chef Karla Angel outlines how a few changes to a recipe can have a big impact on its nutrition while maintaining its flavor profile.

“We want to think of food as fuel,” she said. “I don’t like a lot of restrictions… if you want to lose weight, you think, ‘I have to eat less or I have to eat low calories’ and that’s not where your energy should go. It should go to quality foods.”

And quality foods start with quality ingredients. “Organic fruits and vegetables, meat, dairy… everything organic is going to be more nutritionally dense.

She’s also big on responsible preparation. “You want to respect the classic cuisine and how it’s prepared, but you can ask, ‘does it need to be deep fried, or can it get a nice sear with healthy oils?’ And choosing the right oil is key, getting away from canola and vegetable oil, swapping it with olive oil for raw cooking or avocado oil or ghee for high temps.”

And, naturally, eat your vegetables. “Some people aren’t a fan of veggies, but if you give them some love? Crank up that oven and get some carmelization.”