Charleston Women Spring 2021

www. Char l es tonWomen . com | www. Char l es tonWomenPodcas t . com | www. ReadCW. com CW necessarily her mother’s food. “During college, I taught myself to cook by watching Food Network shows and asking friends for recipes,” she shared. Hudgins soon enough began to throw small dinner parties for her friends. She always left the Vietnamese cooking to her mother, until one day, Miss Ha told her daughter it was time she learned to make the dishes for her own family. “My mom is one of those people who doesn’t write down recipes. It’s all in her head, so it was a process we worked through together. She wanted me to smell and taste everything, so that I had a sensory memory of how a certain dish should turn out. ‘Can you smell how much pepper is used here?’ she would ask me, or ‘Can you taste the ginger in this?’” Around that time, Butcher & Bee was experimenting with ethnic food pop-ups. Knowing Miss Ha’s cooking reputation, they invited Hudgins and her family to participate. Once a weekend, every month for a year, they worked together: the parents prepping the food with Hudgins in the front of the house. “It was really successful, and my mom, who loves to cook and entertain and make people happy through food, had a ball.” But it was also very tiring for her parents, and so they eventually stopped. Hudgins turned back to hosting private dinners, first for friends, but as her newfound cooking reputation grew, so did her clientele. “My goal was four events a month, so I still had plenty of time for my family,” she said. When she started exceeding her quota, her husband had a suggestion: Why not make egg rolls and sell them by the dozen? Her announcement coincided with an article in the Post and Courier. The orders started to pour in. It was not lost on Hudgins that there they were — back in a kitchen on an egg roll assembly line like the old days. Only this time, she enlisted her brother Ryan, who was now cooking in restaurants on his own. “I taught him to roll them while I fried them. It was right before the holidays in 2017, and we were making them like crazy. I kept wondering if I should just tell everyone I was sold out, but my husband just told me to keep rolling and hire more people.” Those egg rolls were just the beginning. Butcher & Bee had launched lowcountry cuisine Photo by L i ndsay Nar c i s so.