The regional table / Georgia
Savannah Red Rice
Fry the tomato first. Everything else about this dish is ordinary, and that one step is the difference between red rice and rice with tomato in it.
Red rice is rice-kitchen food, and the rice kitchens of the Georgia coast were African. The National Park Service says it plainly on the page for Fort Frederica National Monument, on St. Simons Island: the Gullah Geechee are "descendants of enslaved Africans from various ethnic groups of west and central Africa," and people taken from what the traders called the Rice Coast "were considered very valuable" because "they were skilled workers who possessed detailed knowledge of large-scale rice production," knowledge they "were forced to utilize" to produce immense profits for the men who owned them. The same NPS page notes that the sweetgrass baskets still woven on that coast "were commonly used on plantations to harvest rice," and that the ring shout "evolved from Africans enslaved on rice and cotton plantations." The tidal rice fields below Savannah were built, diked and worked by those people; the way rice is cooked in that city — grain separate, dry, steamed rather than boiled and drained — came from them, and so did this dish.
The printed trail runs through two Georgia cookbooks. Mrs. A. P. Hill of Georgia, whose New Cook-Book carried her receipts from the 1860s into an 1898 edition, gives No. 135, "Tomato Pilau": fry a cut-up fowl and an onion in lard, add a pint of peeled tomatoes seasoned with pepper, salt and a teaspoonful of sugar, pour boiling water over, stir in a pint of washed rice, simmer gently — "This should not have gravy." Then The Savannah Cook Book, sold in 1909 for the building fund of Westminster Presbyterian Church and printed by the Morning News, gives the dish almost exactly as Savannah still makes it, under the name "Tomato Pillau a la South Carolina": one quart of tomatoes, one dozen small slices of bacon, three cups of rice, the bacon fried crisp, the tomatoes drained and chopped fine and their pulp fried in the hot drippings before the juice and bacon go back, salt, pepper and a little sugar if the tomatoes are acid, then the rice and boiling water an inch over the top, set at the back of the stove and stirred only now and then with a fork. Note what that book does not say: it does not call the dish red rice, and it credits South Carolina. The name Savannah made its own later — when the Savannah Tribune ran a notice for the Rib Hut on West Bay Street on 5 August 1981, the plate was ribs, red rice, collard greens and muffins for $2.50.
Why this version works
A covered steam and no stirring. Once the rice is in, the pot is a steamer. Stirring breaks grains and releases starch, which is precisely the gluey result Savannah cooking avoids. The old direction — set it at the back of the stove, lift a fork through it only occasionally — is a low even heat and a closed lid, which today means the oven.
The tomato is fried, not stirred in. Draining the tomatoes and cooking the pulp in bacon fat until it darkens and catches is the whole technique of the 1909 recipe and the reason the finished rice is brick red rather than pink. Raw tomato added with the liquid stays sour and thin; fried pulp turns sweet, concentrated and fatty, and fat is what carries that color onto every grain.
Liquid measured by depth, not by ratio. The old book says water to the depth of one inch over the rice, which sounds careless and is smarter than a ratio. Tomatoes vary wildly in how much juice they give up, so a fixed cup count either drowns the rice or leaves it hard. Level the rice, pour until a knuckle's depth stands over it, and the pot corrects itself.
Bacon fat, then the bacon back at the end. The fat does the cooking and the meat does the eating. Frying the bacon crisp first, then returning it late, keeps it in pieces you can find; bacon left in the pot the whole time goes soft and disappears into the rice, leaving salt behind but nothing to bite.
