Matthew Raiford

“…I began to understand that the food I grew up with wasn’t a singular entity. It was the alchemy of Native American fires, Spanish conquest, Caribbean inflection, and West African ingenuity.”¹

Matthew Raiford

Matthew Raiford was born in 1967 in Glynn County, Georgia, and he is a chefarmer. That is both a chef and a farmer at once. “For a time, I served as the executive chef at the Lodge on Little St. Simons Island, threw down with Bobby Flay, collaborated with Alice Waters on the fiftieth anniversary of the agroecology program at Santa Cruz, opened (and closed) my own restaurant, and was named in 2017 a semifinalist for the James Beard award for the Best Chef of the Southeast.”² All of these accomplishments have happened within the last decade, since Raiford moved back to the farm on which he grew up; and the farm itself is as remarkable as the chefarmer.

“I am the great-great-great grandson of Jupiter Gilliard…[who] was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1812 and was sold or traded at some point before the Civil War to a landowner in Glynn County, Georgia.”³ After emancipation, Jupiter Gilliard was able to acquire land, which he settled, farmed, raised a family on, and then sold most of it, but not all. A little over 40 acres was passed on to his sons, and this land is now called Gilliard Farms and has nourished eight generations of Jupiter Gilliard’s family, Raiford is part of the sixth generation.⁴

Jupiter’s Almanac – Welcome to Gilliard Farms on Stitcher

For the inaugural episode of Jupiter’s Almanac, host Matthew Raiford introduces himself, along with his family history and the history of his farm. These lineages go hand in hand, dating back nearly 150 years ago when Matthew’s great-great-great grandfather, Jupiter Gilliard, bought Gilliard Farms.…

Raiford shares the knowledge he has gained by working the land, as well as the wisdom passed down by his ancestors, in both his cookbook and a podcast series called Jupiter’s Almanac. Check out the first episode above to hear Matthew Raiford and his partner, Jovan Sage, introducing their farm and talking about the land.

Raiford’s first cookbook entitled Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer came out in 2021, and it is part of the foundation of this website. It gives readers absurdly delicious recipes—like “Buttermilk Griddle Cakes with Muscadine Jelly”—while it also shares the history of his family on the land—like how Raiford makes his muscadine jelly from the muscadine vines his great grandfather Horace found growing wild in the woods and replanted on what is now Gilliard Farms, where they still grow today.⁵

“Bress ‘N’ Nyam”—Gullah Geechee for “bless and eat”—is an invitation to the table and an introduction to the ancestral recipes of a sixth-generation farmer.”⁶

Matthew Raiford

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Sallie Ann Robinson

Chef, author, preservationist and a sixth-generation Gullah from Daufuskie Island, South Carolina.

Footnotes

1. Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 16. Available here.
2. Ibid, 19.
3. Ibid, 11.
4. Ibid, 20.
5. Ibid, 51-52.
6. Ibid, inside cover.