Chef and wine-maker Pamela Mack was born and raised in Cross, a small town outside of Charleston, South Carolina. It’s there that she learned to cook and grow a love for Southern classic recipes.
“I am what you call an apron-trained chef, meaning I was taught to cook by hanging on to the apron strings of my grandmother, my great-grandmother or my mama,” Mack said.
Growing up on a family farm meant Mack and her family got most of the ingredients for their meals right from their backyard. This included wine made from muscadines, a thick-skinned grape native to the southeastern United States.
After college, Mack moved to Atlanta, where she and her friends would host Sunday dinners, just as she had back home. It was one of her friends who suggested that Mack consider going into catering, a step Mack did not take until 10 years later, when she began participating in a dinner series in Atlanta.
Eventually, Mack submitted a menu for herself at one of the supper events.
“I spent an entire Sunday putting together a menu. They accepted it. They put my menu out, and my supper was sold out for two nights in two days,” Mack said.
From there, Taste of Satira, Mack’s Gullah Geechee catering company was born. She began hosting cooking classes, but decided she wanted to add more to her dinners, so she started learning how to make wine. This led to the creation of her Gullah Geechee Wine-making course, which is booked via her website.
Mack uses her classes as a means to share the Gullah culture with her students.
This Saturday, she’s bringing her wine-making class to the Queen City for the first time.
Tell us more about the Gullah Geechee culture.
Gullah folks were the original farm-to-table people. It’s popular now, but when we were little, we grew up off the land. My family, on our farm, cultivated corn, okra, tomatoes, cabbage and collards. We even grew sugar cane. We grew peanuts, black walnuts, plums, muscadines, blackberries, and Juneberries. We had a plum orchard on our property of about a half-acre
We grew everything; we didn’t have to go to the store for produce. And what we didn’t have in the winter, my mama would can in the summertime, so in the wintertime, we did have vegetables and things of that nature.
That is one of the core beliefs of Gullah people — living off scraps. You know, ox tails and pig knuckles and ham hocks. People try to make it seem like it’s fancy. Well, back then, that was something that our slave owners threw away. Now it’s somewhat of a delicacy, especially oxtails. We are true farm-to-table people, and I still try to use that method when I cook and prepare dinners for others.
Participants at a wine-making class in Charleston, South Carolina,Photo courtesy of Taste of Sarita
Dining and Cooking