David S Shields

Nat Fuller David S Shields

In the 1840s a culinary genius emerged in Charleston, S. C. Nat Fuller, a slave, trained by the free black pastry chef Eliza Seymour Lee, became the foremost private chef in the antebellum city. In the 1850s he negotiated a kind of semi-liberty from his master, financier William C. Gatewood, and with his master's aid became superintendent of the city's game market, Charleston's foremost caterer of public events, and finally Charleston's greatest restaurateur. His eating-house, the Bachelor's Retreat, became a temple of fine dining during the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War he hosted a banquet that brought whites and blacks together as his guests. On the 150th Anniversary of that visionary event, this life and culinary repertoire are reconstructed in this narrative. The unusual circumstances that permitted an enslaved African-American to become a celebrated culinary artist, indeed the greatest slave cook in the Civil War-era South, are recalled and his contributions to an extraordinary dynasty of African American cooks in Charleston that shaped the city's cuisine from the end of the 18th-century to the First World War documented.