For this 89-year-old Gullah Geechee chef, cooking is about heart

Lots of home cooks would be excited to get a book deal. In the case of one home chef, she got that opportunity at the age of 89 years old. Emily Meggett is from the low country of South Carolina, and NPR traveled to her home on Edisto Island to appreciate some of her cooking.

Edisto Island is a beautiful, quiet community of about 2,000 people, nearly an hour's drive south of Charleston. The roads are framed by massive oak trees draped with Spanish moss; there's a tang of sea salt in the air. Ms. Emily Meggett is known far and wide as the matriarch of Edisto.

I'm with her in her cozy home kitchen, where she's going to teach me how to make a local classic: shrimp and grits with gravy. As she chops up some salt pork to get us started, she recalls the first thing she remembers making as a girl. "Grits!" she exclaims. "And the salt pork right here."

Ms. Emily is a member of the Gullah Geechee people. Her community can trace their ancestry to West and central Africans brought to these shores and enslaved. In insulated locations throughout the coastal areas of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, they managed to preserve much of their rich culture, language, and music.

Her cookbook is called Gullah Geechee Home Cooking (get recipes for Benne Cookies, Red Rice and Chicken Perloo). Right now, Ms. Emily is focused on making her gravy: salt pork, onion, flour and some seasoning salt. That's it.