by John T. Edge
Do you believe in farm-fresh produce?
Filbert
SANDERS’ PEACH SHED
Peach sheds, tomato stands, and truck farm stalls; peanut shacks, apple barns, and farmers’ markets: no matter the name, they are a fixture of the Southern roadside. Most are cobbled together from scrap lumber with a strip of roofing tin tacked on top. Some are nothing more than a tarp thrown over the bed of a pickup truck to ward off summer showers. A precious few are sturdy structures built of cinder block and asbestos shingles.
Traveling the country roads of South Carolina in the summertime, when the peach trees begin to bear their lush, flesh-colored fruit, it seems as though with each curve you take, another peach stand comes into view, stacked high with wire and wood-slat baskets full of sweet, fluent peaches.
As pervasive as peach stands may be, there are a few spots that are truly exceptional, stands where the peaches are juicier than you ever imagined, the proprietors warm, welcoming, as sweet as the product they proffer. In the York County community of Filbert, Dori Sanders and her family run just such a place, an open-air market hard by Highway 321. Though Sanders is famous in Southern literary circles as the author of the novel Clover and the cookbook Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking, come late May she still takes to the orchards, harvesting Sunhighs and Georgia Belles, Blakes, Albertas, and Redskins. Longtime customers with a yen for a certain variety look for the cardboard signs tacked up to announce the projected date of first picking.
“Our first peach of the summer is called Starlight,” Sanders tells me. “It’s a white peach, sweet as can be. They usually come in just before Memorial Day and from then on out we’re picking peaches until September. In the fall, we’ve got greens in profusion: mustard, rape, and turnip, every kind of green you can imagine. And sweet potatoes; we’ve got white sweet potatoes, my favorites. There’s nothing fancy about our little farm shed. No air conditioning, no refrigeration, no nothing. Just fresh fruits and vegetables, straight from our farm.”
HIGHWAY 321 BETWEEN YORK AND CLOVER / 803-684-6062
For Dori Sanders’ Peach Cobbler recipe, see page 241.
Greenville
**Eugenia Duke** The First Lady of Mayonnaise
Take a look in the refrigerator of a good Southern cook, and chances are that front and center between that jar of Osage pimentos and a twelve-pack of Coke, just to the left of Aunt Ruth’s pickled okra, back behind the dilly beans Uncle Sam put up last spring, you’ll spot a bottle of Duke’s mayonnaise. It’s the South’s favorite condiment, whipped white gold sold in squat glass jars affixed with a simple yellow label.
Though the business is now owned by a Richmond, Virginia–based company, Duke’s mayonnaise still has strong ties to Greenville, the city of its birth. “We still make it here,” Duke’s employee Kathy Morgan told me. “Now don’t think we’ve got the three witches from Macbeth out back stirring it up. We got rid of them years ago. We’ve got machines that do it now.”
* * *
“Now don’t think we’ve got the three witches from ‘Macbeth’ out back stirring it up.”
* * *
That may well be the only thing that’s changed about the making of Duke’s since Mrs. Eugenia Duke mixed up her first batch down on Manly Street sometime in the early years of the twentieth century. Eugenia got her start making sandwiches and selling them to local drugstore soda fountains and corner groceries. She baked her own bread, roasted her own meats, and most important, whipped up a fine mayonnaise, which she slathered on with a heavy hand. Unlike the commercial versions that were coming on the market, Eugenia didn’t use a drop of sugar, nor did she whip in egg whites as filler. And thanks to her use of cider vinegar, her mayonnaise had a pleasing tartness others lacked.
By the time of World War I, Eugenia had expanded her business, selling sandwiches to servicemen stationed at nearby Fort Sevier, many of whom returned home after the war with a taste for her mayonnaise. Soon soldiers were writing her asking that a jar or two be shipped to faraway Georgia or Virginia, and Eugenia was in the mayonnaise manufacturing business. But her reign would be a short one. In 1920 she sold the sandwich company and in 1929 she sold her mayonnaise business, lock, stock, and egg dasher, to the C. F. Sauer Company. Last anyone saw of Eugenia, she was hightailing it to California, a sack of money in tow.
BAR-B-Q KING:
THE INFERNAL MACHINE THAT’S KILLING ’CUE
IN THE CAROLINAS
I’ve got a friend, a typically mild-mannered fellow, who has some rather unseemly things to say about the inventor of the Barbecue King electric smoker. “Maybe we ought to hang the son of a bitch in effigy right out front here by the pits,” my friend said, as he unloaded cord after cord of wood from the bed of a weary old pickup. “That damn electric smoker has done more towards killing off barbecue in the Carolinas than the health department and the IRS put together.”
The object of my friend’s scorn, the Barbecue King electric smoker, is the invention of Bob Wilson, a onetime pitmaster, who, while running a Greenville barbecue joint called the Smoke House, devised what he thought was the perfect replacement for an open pit. (Now, in Wilson’s defense, this was the 1950s when faster, cheaper, easier was the mantra of the day, but don’t tell that to my friend.) What Wilson built for himself, and later sold to friends and then a host of customers, was an electric-fueled pit, an extra-large oven really, to which he added little smoke boxes where wood chips would smolder, theoretically infusing the meat with a smoky taste. Wilson peddled a slew of the things. He even sold one to President Eisenhower and was granted the honor of preparing a barbecue dinner at the White House. Soon, there were competitors on the market, brands like Bar-B-Q Buddy and Bar-B-Q Slave.
Now the first time I came across one of these heretical beasts was at Little Pigs Barbecue in Anderson, where pitmaster Joe Dukes was kind enough to show me how the thing worked. Joe’s was a rotisserie-like model, outfitted with all manner of switches and toggles, connected presumably to internal heat sources which released, according to the labels on the stainless-steel box, either grease smoke or wood smoke. When I asked Joe about what type of wood chips he used to generate the smoke, he fixed me with a look that was somehow both conspiratorial and apologetic and said, “We don’t use any smoke these days. People don’t have a taste for it.” I thanked Joe for his time and exited.
In 1986, perhaps in response to this blight upon barbecue, the South Carolina legislature passed a Truth in Barbecue Law, requiring that restaurants post a state-issued sticker advising patrons as to whether they cook with wood or not. Said South Carolina State Representative John Snow, “If you’re eating barbecue, you deserve to know exactly what you’re getting.” I didn’t see any stickers in my travels, but at more than half the South Carolina barbecue houses I visited, there was not a cord of wood in sight.
Holly Hill
SWEATMAN’S BAR-B-QUE
A beacon for the barbecue bereft.
Bub Sweatman’s family has been making barbecue as long as anyone in this part of the state can remember. As far back as the 1910s there al ways seemed to be a weekend barbecue at the old Sweatman home-place. The men would dig a hole in the ground, burn down some oak limbs until they were white and smoldering, and throw a pig on the grate, staying up all night telling stories and stoking the fire. In the morning the men would wash up, maybe take a nap, while the women set to work picking meat from the bones and stirring up kettles of hash and pots of rice. By midday, the whole county seemed to be gathered in their backyard. And so it went weekend after weekend, year after year. It wasn’t until 1977 that Bub staked a claim to barbecuing as a business. “Until then, well, we just cooked hogs for friends,” he told me a few years back. “That was just what we did on the weekend. Still do. Some people go bass fishing; we cook hogs.”
Set in a weathered old farmhouse with a wide, welcoming front porch, Sweatman’s, like many of the best pits in the state, is a weekends-only operation. And it’s a far piece out in the country to b
oot. But that doesn’t dissuade the faithful. By 10:45 Friday morning the packed-sand parking lot starts to fill with late-model pickups and import econo-boxes alike. Above, an almost solid canopy of pecan trees gives needed shade to the old home, bleached pale by the unrelenting rays of the summer sun. Around back, clouds of smoke hang heavy in the sky above the cinder-block pit house where split whole hogs have spent the night on a pit stoked with oak coals.
Up on the porch there’s a crowd of folks milling about, stomachs rumbling, waiting for Sweatman’s to open. A little before 11:30 someone unlatches the door and the feed is on. Down the wide hallway we pour, headed for the buffet in back where crusty ribs and tender chunks of pulled pork wait alongside cauldrons of thick, pungent hash and dove-white rice. While most buffets are bad news, stew pots really, where the meat turns to mush and rice turns to gum, business is so good at Sweatman’s that you can be assured what sits before you has been there only a matter of moments. There are even pork rinds, oily treats fried to a teeth-shattering crispness, best slathered with a little of Sweatman’s mustard sauce, a mellow concoction with a sneaky vinegar kick.
Plates piled high, we retreat to what was once the family living quarters and is now a warren of smaller dining rooms simply furnished with trestle tables and calico curtains. I sink my fork into a mound of sweet pork just as my neighbor one table away bows her head to say grace.
HIGHWAY 453 BETWEEN HOLLY HILL AND EUTAWVILLE/NO PHONE
Leesville
SHEALY’S BAR-B-QUE HOUSE
Though touted as a barbecue joint, this gray ranch-style roadhouse is better appreciated as a reliquary of country cooking where they use every part of the pig but the squeal, every cut of the cow but the moo.
This is one of the few places around where during the winter, on Thursdays, you can taste liver nips: dumplings made from beef liver, sage, and flour, boiled in beef stock. On Fridays the specialité de la maison is potmeat, which the buffet attendant told me is “similar to hash but not chopped up so much. With potmeat you can still pick out pieces of ear, tongue, that sort of thing.” And day in, day out, you can count on great slabs of fatback and little nubs of cracklins to be piled up high on the forty-item buffet beside more traditional offerings like fried catfish and creamed corn, stewed tomatoes and fried chicken.
Victor and Sarah Shealy, who opened the ranch-style roadhouse in 1969, are of Pennsylvania Dutch stock and their cooking shows it. Like many of the natives around here and Orangeburg to the south, theirs is a cuisine that makes ample use of offal: gizzards are wrested from chicken carcasses, livers from cows, tongues from pigs, and testicles from lambs. It is a cuisine of frugality, honest, simple, and good.
The barbecue, by the way, is cooked on one of those infernal gas cookers. “We use whole hogs,” the pitmaster told me. “But we don’t cook over wood anymore. We found out that after we chilled the meat, most of the smoke flavor was gone. So we switched to gas. It’s easier and no one seems to be complaining.” I would have told him exactly what I thought of his damned gas cooker, but my mouth was full of liver nips.
340 EAST COLUMBIA AVENUE / 803-532-8135
South of the Border
BLENHEIM GINGER ALE
Just south of the North Carolina line, nestled among the apocalyptic commercialism of South of the Border, the ticky-tackiest tourist trap this side of Tijuana, is a nondescript brick and aluminum-siding building that turns out the spiciest libation I know of—Blenheim Ginger Ale.
Like a slap in the face from a spurned lover, Blenheim commands your attention. I can still remember my first bottle. With the first swallow, my neck went loose, my lips went numb. This was not a soft drink. And though Blenheim is indeed pungent stuff, its taste is not solely defined by heat. There is pleasure as well as pain. Take a second sip and your palate, indeed your whole body, comes to life. Locals claim that “it’s good for what ails you,” and they may well be right.
Created in the 1890s by a doctor who added Jamaican ginger to the local spring water curative in an attempt to mask the taste, the resulting concoction quickly built a reputation as a digestive aid. Bottled since 1903, Blenheim has, until recently, avoided any attempts at modernization. Until the early 1990s, each bottle was taken off the production line and shaken by hand to mix the granulated sugar into the ale. That laborious process ended when the Schafer family, owners of S.O.B., bought out the bottler. The old plant was closed and production moved to its new home amid the faux Mexican façades of South of the Border.
Despite the efforts of the Schafer family, Blenheim Ginger Ale is still not widely distributed. In fact, it’s damn hard to find—so hard that if you want to be assured a steady supply, you had best stop by the bottling plant. Until recently this was a simple proposition. You needed only to find Blenheim, South Carolina, and you had found Blenheim Bottling Company. Now, with the company’s acquisition by the South of the Border folks, things are a bit more difficult.
It seemed easy enough. I called ahead for directions. “You can’t miss us,” they said. “Take the South of the Border exit. We’re right across from the observation tower,” they claimed. With the world’s tallest sombrero as my guide, I couldn’t lose my way. Or so I thought … I stopped and asked directions. Numerous times. Everyone tried to help: “There, through the Ape’s thighs, to the right. Just beyond Pedro’s Pleasure Palace. Yea, that’s it. A little farther. No, turn left, not right, at the thirty-foot gorilla.” I was lost, hopelessly lost—that is until I rolled down my window, caught a whiff of spice in the air, and began sniffing my way toward the land of ginger and fizz.
843-774-0322
Spartanburg
BEACON DRIVE-IN
Founder J. B. White, who opened the Beacon back in 1946, sold the place a few years back. And, as you might expect, there have been a few changes. No longer are Easter services held at sunrise in the asphalt parking lot. Revivals, once staged each Sunday in August, complete with a gospel band and throngs of worshipers, have been discontinued. And the gang of curbhops that once worked the lot has dwindled to a few, the most recent loss coming in December 1998 when Thomas Bird retired after fifty-two years of service.
And yet, much has endured. J. C. Stroble, a veteran of more than forty years, is still perched at the end of the counter, ready to take your order. “Let’s Don’t Boogie Jive. Let’s Merchandise!” says the placard hanging above his head. Though a bout with glaucoma has dimmed J. C.’s sight, he’s still a fireball of energy, a model of efficiency and economy. “Talk!” he booms as I approach. “I’m ready for you. Come on with it. Tell me! Tell me!”
A beacon of grease and goodness.
I sputter out my order, parroting the guy in front of me—“I’ll take a chili cheeseburger a plenty”—not really aware of what that means, but somehow sure it’s the right thing to do. J. C. calls it down the line, his voice a ringing baritone worthy of a cantor. Thirty seconds later, no more, my order is plopped in front of me on the stainless-steel counter: a soft burger, oozing chili and cheese, barely visible beneath a foot-high tangle of onion rings and fries. It’s a bewildering sight, at once appetizing, and, thanks to the sheer quantity of food, vaguely disgusting. (I later learn that back in the days when J. B. was in charge, if a competitor opened nearby, the old man’s response was, “Put more meat on the bread, pile more fries and rings on top.”)
I slide down the line, past the sign advertising a Pig Dinner—ten scoops of ice cream atop two bananas, the whole affair smothered in a three-foot blob of whipped cream—and snag a tall tumbler of iced tea. I take a seat in the cavernous dining room, hodgepodge of early 1970s greenhouse architecture with malt shop mod touches, and eat my way through the top layer of the greasy onion rings in search of my burger. Found it! The burger is a colossal mess, erupting with chili and cheese, the top bun gilded with a thin skein of grease. It’s also delicious.
On the wall opposite my table, there’s a banner proclaiming that the Spartanburg chapter of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellows
hip Inter national meets here on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month for breakfast and Bible study. Above the din of the dining room, I can hear J. C. calling out, “I’m ready for you. Come on with it. Tell me! Tell me!”
255 JOHN B. WHITE SR. BOULEVARD / 864-585-9387
Peach Cobbler
from Sanders’ Farm Stand
Serves 6 to 8
This recipe, adapted from Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking: Recipes and Stories from the Farm Stand, reminds me of what my mother used to call a dump recipe. As in “dump it in a casserole dish and bake.” It’s simple as all getout, but it’s not simplistic. And should you consider making it with canned peaches, think of Dori—and think better of it.
½ cup unsalted butter, melted
2 cups sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 cup whole milk
4 cups peeled, pitted, thinly sliced peaches
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
Several dashes of cinnamon or nutmeg
Preheat the oven to 375° F.
Pour the butter into a 13 x 9 x 2–inch casserole dish and set aside. Combine 1 cup of the sugar, the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir to combine. Add the milk, mixing until just combined. Pour this batter over the butter, but do not stir to combine.
In a small saucepan, combine the peaches, the remaining cup of sugar, and the lemon juice. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Once it’s reached a boil, pour the peaches over the batter without stirring to combine. Sprinkle with cinnamon or nutmeg. Bake until golden brown, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove to a rack to cool slightly and then serve.
