The Eaten Path » Carolinas

Time Well Spent, Indeed

James Boo — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 07:28:36 +0000

In early September, I spent five days in the Carolinas. Most of my time was spent sniffing out stories in barbecue country, and those experiences became the core of Serious Eats columns on the Lexington style, barbecue sides in the Carolinas, the Mustard belt of South Carolina and my pilgrimage to Scott’s Variety Store.

The Examiner and I could have worked twice as hard to catalog the Carolina barbecue experience, but that would have sucked the road trip spirit out of our week on state highways. Slating one smokestack per day, we filled the rest of our time with beer, board games and our first tastes of South Carolina cuisine. Forcing myself to keep my computer in the “off” position and avoiding the tedious research that usually goes hand-in-hand with my meals, I relied on a few meandering ten-minute Google sessions and casual tips from friends to settle on our non-barbecue meals, most of which were obvious destinations to the local diner.

Hominy Grill – Charleston, SC

Hominy Grill was my second favorite stop in South Carolina (the first was Scott’s). Recommended to me by a friend in Brooklyn, this locals’ favorite opened in 1996 and soon became a destination with its own cookbook, James Beard award and Food Network segment. The dining room of this informal restaurant hits a perfect pitch between authoritative and cozy – creating the right environment for its superb southern cooking.

Okra and shrimp beignets, served on a bed of cilantro-and-lime-tinted sour cream and sprinkled with a mild pico de gallo, overcame the toughest challenge presented to any appetizer: answering the question, “Why did I pay seven dollars for this?” The answer in our case was because it was fucking delicious.

I guess I’ve described food more eloquently in the past, but when it comes to justifying expense and justifying a recommendation, that’s probably the best case I can make.

I was tempted by the presence of “low country purloo” on the dinner menu but ultimately decided to order a fish dish from the specials menu. The cornmeal-crusted snapper that ended up on my plate reflected the same playful-yet-grounded spirit of the kitchen’s beignets. While I do take some pride in having eaten in only one white tablecloth restaurant in New York, the balance of a pan-fried fish this technically perfect and a flavor profile this planned made me rethink my biases and wish for a moment that I could afford to eat at restaurants of this caliber every night.

That future isn’t in my plans, so I’ll just have to work harder at my fish-frying game at home.

The restaurant’s buttermilk pie was just as inspiring. Fluffy and silky, its baked buttermilk filling merged precisely with its layer fresh lemon curd for a heavenly series of bites. Tart, sweet and creamy flavors swirled together, and I remembered why I’ve completely stopped accepting the lifeless entreaties of store-bought pies.

Our second meal in Charleston was preceded by a walk to and from the city’s Atlantic boardwalk. I may have only seen this town through a tourist’s visor, but these lazy moments were some of my favorites in our road trip residence. Strolling through the calm of streets lined with old money and some of the most downright prestigious front porches I’ve ever seen, I added Charleston to the short list of small-to-medium cities I could actually see myself making home if only I had something real to do with them.

Virginia’s on King – Charleston, SC

Virginia’s on King, which despite a more heartwarming back story is more or less an upscale casual restaurant in the vein of Hominy Grill, kept the appetite going with their fried green tomatoes. Lightly dredged rather than breaded, these dressed-and-paired slices were as thoughtful as they were simple.

Virginia’s fare was generally a bit too heavy on the salt for my tastes; this, however, did not stop me from drowning my senses in the house’s rendition of shrimp and grits. Tasting of butter and sitting in a lively, uneven pile of lumps and grains, the grits would have been fantastic on their own. The generous allowance of shrimp, sausage, peppers and cream gravy piled on top to complete the low country standard was just as tasty. I love most of all the fact that even a bowl of shrimp and grits as well dressed as this one cannot escape the fact that bowls filled with (tantalizing) chunks of stuff make for one one ugly meal. I’m fairly certain I licked my bowl clean.

Time Well Spent – Summerville, SC

On our last morning in Summerville, a suburb of Charleston where we had rented a house for the duration, I ambled through some Google searches for morning coffee and discovered afternoon tea.

Time Well Spent, a Victorian-style tea house, has been emulating the stylings of a Scottish tea room in southern fashion since the mid-1990s. Owner Eve Mickendrow caters to locals and visitors, and was more than happy to take our last-minute request for afternoon tea. She gave us a full tour of the place and curated the day’s offerings with what I’d like to recognize as grace.

Afternoon tea, mostly a weekend affair at Time Well Spent, is split into four distinct choices. I opted to accompany my blueberry tea with a freshly baked scone, fruit salad and cinnamon butter.

The Examiner went his own way, requesting a strong black tea and a brownie a la mode, Eve’s dessert of the day.

After we had finished our tea, Eve showed us to the yard, where she hosts jazz concerts and parties in warm weather. An 800-year-old oak tree dwarfed the entire establishment, a hint at how much history resides in our United States.

Visiting South Carolina without having a bag of boiled peanuts would be like visiting Manhattan without stopping for a hot dog. This particular batch from the brined bean family of southern legumes was purchased at a lonely roadside stand on the road between Batesburg and Columbia. It went down with pints of porter, the 1960 Presidential Campaign and one of the most soothing and sapid travel experiences of my life.

Hominy Grill
207 Rutledge Ave.
Charleston, SC 29403
843.937.0930

Virginia’s on King
412 King St.
Charleston, SC 29403
843.735.5800

Time Well Spent
211 Stallsville Loop
Summerville, SC 29485
843.875.2408

When Pigs Fly: Scott’s Bar-B-Que, a Living Legend

James Boo — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 19:07:38 +0000

My newest barbecue column for Serious Eats is the last of the stories I’ve written on my recent trip through the Carolinas.

This piece is about the experience of eating at Scott’s Variety Store and Bar-B-Que, a country smoke house that is enough to make a man believe every barbecue legend in the book. Click here to read more, and for a much better story and photo album on Scott’s, check out this column by southern food champion John T. Edge.

When Pigs Fly: The Mustard Belt of South Carolina

James Boo — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:42:18 +0000

My newest barbecue column for Serious Eats is the third of four stories I’m writing on my recent trip through the Carolinas.

This piece includes a set of reviews focused on the region stretching from Columbia to Charleston in South Carolina. Referred to by some as “The Mustard Belt,” this area is known for pairing mustard-based barbecue sauce with wood-smoked whole hog. Click here to read more, and for a much more interesting story on the topic of mustard sauce, check out this piece of food culture journalism by native son Jack Hitt.

When Pigs Fly: Southern Sides on the Carolina Barbecue Trail

James Boo — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:32:16 +0000

My newest barbecue column for Serious Eats is the second of four stories I’m writing on my recent trip through the Carolinas.

This piece is devoted to the incredible side dishes of North and South Carolina. Featured: Brunswick stew, hush puppies and the Palmetto state’s barbecue hash (pictured above), which is essentially the American South’s take on Japanese curry. Click here to read more!

Smoking at the Skylight Inn

James Boo — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:39 +0000

James Howell has been working as one of the main pit cooks of Pete Jones’ BBQ, AKA The Skylight Inn, in Ayden, North Carolina, for about fifteen years. The day I spent with him and the rest of Pete Jones’ staff in October of 2009 will figure heavily into a proposal I’m writing for a book on American BBQ, to be pitched vigorously in 2010.

This post documents a single day with a steward of culinary history.
Those who don’t wish to see dead pigs be warned at this juncture.

The Skylight Inn is one of the few remaining barbecue restaurants in America to cook whole hogs over wood coals. Sixteen hours of smoke before the first quarter of the day is cut. No gas, electricity, steel, liquid smoke or sauce. No shortcuts. When it comes to traditional American barbecue, quitters never prosper.

The Lexington BBQ Festival: Play by Play

James Boo — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:47:59 +0000

Last weekend I went to North Carolina with Joon and The Inspector for the 26th annual Lexington BBQ Festival.

Departing from Alexandria, we cruised down I-95 toward the holy land of traditional American barbecue. A detour towards the Skylight Inn promptly resulted in our getting lost for an hour and a half in Eastern North Carolina, but we eventually made it to the Piedmont and checked into a hotel minutes away from downtown Lexington.

After a few minutes on Main St. we confirmed suspicions that the BBQ Festival was much less about barbecue than it was about funnel cake. The atmosphere was wholly that of a state fair, minimally tailored to pork and complete with a $2 shuttle to the local Wal Mart Supercenter. Lexington’s most hallowed barbecue establishments don’t participate in the festivities directly, instead beefing up their own production for what is one of the biggest weekends of barbecue restaurant business of the year.

Accordingly, the barbecue we sampled throughout the BBQ Festival was on the good side of tolerable. Barbecue sandwiches were served at centralized stations, placed two blocks apart on the main drag. While it was easy to call out the local restaurants that had contributed their Q to be served to the masses, it wasn’t nearly as easy to tell where any given sandwich had been prepared – at one station, meat from Jimmy’s BBQ, Speedy’s BBQ and Smiley’s BBQ was being doled out without distinction from plate to plate.

In the spirit of celebrating regional barbecue, this was hardly a problem; the unfortunate fact that none of the sandwiches was particularly eye opening helped us gloss over the fact that we couldn’t source our food. The worst sample of the day by a wide margin was a ramshackle collard greens and bacon sandwich, made from inoffensive middle-of-the-road ingredients but entirely ruined by the dry, tasteless and wilting slabs of cornbread used to hold everything together.

The best of the fest happened to be a sandwich served alongside barbecued turkey legs at an independent stand – the meat was tender and juicy with a strong scent of wood, a judicious amount of sauce and a fruity sweetness to its slaw that cut through the too-sweet, too-saucy, too-shredded servings of barbecue flying from the official Festival stands. I tried to find out where the meat had come from in hopes of trying it directly from the source, but was given what turned out to be a dead-end name of a cafe/caterer that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t exist in Lexington.

Set free from gustatory obligations by the pounds of barbecue, sweet tea and fried pie in our bellies, we greeted the reticent North Carolina sun and spent the rest of the afternoon taking in the most glorious of festival spectacles.

The Festival lumberjack competition was particularly impressive, especially when it summoned an eleven year old girl to hurl a double-edged axe into a wooden bullseye from twenty paces.

No amount of lumberjackery, however, could top the Festival pig races, a blazing fifteen minutes of glory for the pig (and billy goat!) linearly cognizant enough to be the first to cross the finish line and dive snout-first into the styrofoam plate of victory Cheetos waiting beyond.

After our day at the races, we made our way to Lexington BBQ #1 for some serious swine. Locals and visitors alike formed a line well stretching from front door to back, waiting patiently for a tray of Lexington’s finest.

We took away a pound of outside meat – pulled pork mixed with generous bits of smoky, chewy, brown from the edge of the shoulder – and a pint of slaw. A bottle of Fine Swine Wine was waiting to round out our meal at the hotel.

Sadly, the wine was nearly undrinkable. Crafted once a year in accordance with the BBQ Festival, the premier novelty of the Childress Vineyard is more or less sweet tea made from grapes: Its unbearably sweet flavor and unnaturally tannin-free smoothness is much less a complement to barbecue than it would be to Pringles. This wouldn’t feel like much of an insult if the bottle hadn’t cost us $15; nevertheless, having nothing MSG-infused to salvage our bottle of swill, we set it aside in favor of a modestly priced malbec from Trappiche.

The quality of the meal that followed did not disappoint. Lexington’s regular barbecue can seem a bit on the bland side, but when served with outside meat it creates one of those definitional moments in which the true form of a particular type of food is delivered from the gods, sucker punching your understanding of barbecue and casting a blinding light over every other shade of pulled pork that might cross your path in the future.

The next morning, we had our final Lexington meal at Jimmy’s, then hit the highway back east. I got out of the car in Raleigh to continue my week of barbecue adventure. What follows will have to remain a secret until I can get someone to pay me to eat pork!

Booking It to BBQ

James Boo — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:15:03 +0000

After almost a year away from the Deep South, I’m finally back in North Carolina. I’ll be bouncing around the state for the better part of a week, tearing through the Hold Steady catalogue and conducting small n research for what I hope will be the book proposal that gets me a publisher’s ear in early 2010.

In the writing of this proposal and in preparation for this trip, I’ve been soaking my eyes in barbecue literature, particularly books focused on North Carolina (of which there are quite a few). I have yet to take on the intellectual sphere of BBQ academia, but as far as pages in public go, I’m getting a good idea the strengths and weaknesses of the barbecue sub-genre.

Some thoughts on what I’ve read so far for anyone looking to learn more about pork’s highest plain…

Searching for the Dixie Barbecue: Journeys into the Southern Psyche – Wilber Caldwell
Searching for the Dixie Barbecue is one of the worst paper products I have ever read, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone who doesn’t want to see the human soul stolen from words right before his eyes.

A book that literally purports to answer the questions, “What is real barbecue?” “How do you find it?” and “What does it mean to be Southern?” this 108 page novelty, which resembles a Geocities web page circa 1997 more than anything on a book shelf, lands embarrassingly far from providing any kind of substantial insight into such topics.

What Caldwell offers instead is a collection of blood-drained photographs squeezed between a lurching series of tropes on Southerners and Southern food (including chapters entitled “Savoring Less Than Pristine Rural Ambiences” and “The Difference Between Black Barbecue and White Barbecue”). Writing exclusively in the second person (!), almost never referring to real people or real locations and taking every possible opportunity to convert perfectly normal words into an exoticized Southern lexicon – “barbecue” becomes “bah-bah-cue” in every other paragraph – Caldwell renders pretty much every subject he approaches unreadable.

While a couple of snippets of dialogue and an uncharacteristically detailed chapter on Brunswick Stew provide much needed relief from Dixie Barbecue’s tongue-through-cheek idiom, it’s not nearly enough of a saving grace to make this book worth anyone’s time.

Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue -John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed
Holy Smoke is a substantial and well-written exploration of North Carolina barbecue, the most religiously praised barbecue in America. Halfway to the university in its research on the history of barbecue, the demarcation lines of Carolina barbecue styles and the general evolution of barbecue as a traditional and mythic food, the writers Reed do an excellent job of plumbing the depths of North Carolina Q.

They also devote a good deal of effort to capturing the salient details of the barbecue experience; while not quite in the category of food entertainment, Holy Smoke exudes the certain joy of sharing a good story when it zeroes in on the legends of barbecue. The Reeds’ chapter on individual pit masters and barbecue business owners serves as exhibit A: While much of the storytelling gives way to extensive quotations from the barbecue masters themselves, it’s much more a move of humility than a weakness in writing.

The shortcomings of Holy Smoke lie in what I feel is a general drawback of BBQ literature: It seems as if the publishers of these books have little confidence in the attention span of its target audience. To that effect, the Reeds’ quality writing is constantly interrupted by factoids, recipes and asides that ruin both the flow and aesthetic of a book that deserves to be read from page to page. A thorough accounting of the origins of the word “barbecue” is boxed in by random chunks of barbecue trivia. A rich and wholly engaging chapter on the methods of barbecuing is a gold mine of information for those who want to understand the challenge of the North Carolina tradition, but the mostly unnecessary inclusion of barbecue recipes only detracts from a noble effort to impart its workman’s quality to readers.

The value lost in Holy Smoke’s delivery is, in the end, marginal. Mine are minor gripes with what is a great resource for anyone with more than a passing interest in North Carolina barbecue.

North Carolina: Flavored by Time – Bob Garner
Written by an arguably unparalleled expert on the topic, Flavored by Time is probably the best book on North Carolina Q on the market. The making of this book stems from Garner’s work as a television reporter with a great love for his native food, and this history of rooting out and presenting the details of barbecue to a general audience shines in Garner’s use of facts and anecdotes to tell the most straightforward story possible.

Starting the book with stories of his own North Carolina upbringing, Garner sows the seeds of an organic exploration of his favorite subject, one that fits naturally with his own personality and shares years of accumulated observation with the reader. While his writing does dry out on occasion, especially when he gets into the gritty, technical details of barbecue method, he never overreaches in content or style.

Garner’s everyman explanations of craft and consumption pay plenty of dues without losing sight of the book’s function as a guide – not only to the people and places that make North Carolina barbecue what it is today, but to the life that BBQ has taken on in its growth as a statewide tradition. For anyone who wants to know why North Carolina BBQ is such a big deal (and wants to know exactly where to go to test its status in person), Flavored by Time is all good things rolled into one easy-to-read book. I hope that it’s booked for an update and reprint as long as Garner continues to travel the state with a healthy appetite.

Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country – Eric Lolis Elie and Frank Stewart
The only barbecue book I’ve found that explicitly approaches the topic on a storytelling vector, Smokestack Lightning is by far the most pleasurable piece of writing on the subject and the closest thing to what I want to write in my own piece of the greater barbecue story.

Driving from one side of the country to the other, our two heroes – a Louisiana journalist and a Memphis raised, New York based photographer – explore the roots, manifestations and impact of barbecue, wrapping all of their experiences in stories that adapt to fit the scene. One chapter focuses on the visceral narration of traditional Tex-Mex barbacoa. Another reaches deeply into Frank Stewart’s formative years on the south side of Chicago. Yet another takes a detour from the Texas trail to document the simultaneously reverent and raucous Juneteenth, a relic of an independence day celebration for black America that continues to find expression in the state of its founding.

Always on the trail and concerned less with barbecue itself than the details that put barbecue in context, Smokestack Lightning makes no attempt to sell readers anything that it is not. Yet, in focusing on narrative with a journalist’s eye, it ends up being just as informative, if not thorough, as any other book on the subject. Few sweeping statements on barbecue rise from the print, but a broad sense of wonder and understanding is achieved nonetheless. Stewart’s photographs are used sparingly, the sheer artistry of each shot playing perfect counterpoint to Elie’s writing. The resulting product is simmering long form: vibrant in its respect for regional character, tactful in its blend of observation and rumination and honest in its conclusions about the journey. This is a book that cannot be recreated or grafted, and in this quality it stands head and shoulders above its peers in the Q canon.

In twelves hours I set foot on the hallowed barbecued grounds of the Piedmont.
Let’s hope a new story finds its way through the smoke!