Taste of the South
The ‘road trip’ was no more than a taxi across London. But, after meeting US food and drink ambassadors, Rupert Bates is dreaming of journeys across the Southern States
In my mind, to borrow from James Taylor, I’m gone to Carolina. Make that Mississippi and Tennessee too.
In reality, I am at the Gas Station in King’s Cross. The southern states of America have come to me, but, with due respect to this London restaurant, I know where I’d rather be, especially after hearing from some of the South’s finest chefs – with barbecue their go-to cooking.
First up the Carolinas. Would North and South be happy to share the interview ring? Or do we keep the chefs apart for fear of a food fight?
Enter Ricky Moore from the North and the South’s Chris Williams. There is no sparring, only laughing and the joy of comparing cooking styles and recipes, coupled with a shared and searing love for barbecue, underpinned by heritage and celebration.
“The Carolinas are the birthplace of American barbecue. It’s just a case of whether it was North or South,” says Williams.
Linn Cove Viaduct North Carolina
North Carolina is home of the whole hog, with pork BBQ invariably on the menu, but even this has regional variations, be it the whole hog smoked low and slow over oak in the east, or just the pork shoulder to the west, but vinegar sauce a constant, and tomato sauce also used to soften the tanginess.
In the company of Ricky Moore, a James Beard Foundation winner, the country’s premier culinary accolades, we are soon talking seafood and there is nothing Moore does not know about fish and fire, having opened his Saltbox Seafood joint in 2012
in Durham, North Carolina. He draws inspiration from classic American waterside shacks, with the menu, celebrating local, fresh seafood, handwritten on a chalk board and his signature dishes crab grits and charcoal grilled oysters.
Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall bring the likes of blue fish, grey sea trout, black sea bass and Spanish mackerel to Saltbox.
Backpacking around Europe and Asia opened Moore’s mind to a variety of food cultures and flavours. He honed his cooking skills in the US Army before graduating from the Culinary Institute of America.
“I love working with the different textural elements of fish – whether it is oily and decadent, grilled or smoked,” says Moore, who has written the Saltbox Seafood Joint cookbook, filled with 60 recipes in homage to his coastal culinary heritage.
Chris Williams grew up on a South Carolina farm, watching his grandparents tend the fields, rear the animals and grow the vegetables to plenish the table, while he remembers fondly the handwritten recipe card index he compiled with his mother in Olar.
“I learnt about the value of locally sourced food and hard work – farm to table and being self-sufficient,” says Williams, “We had cows, goats, chickens, rabbits and peach and apple trees. We only had a few acres, but everything we needed. My grandparents ignited my passion for food and cooking.”
He focuses heavily on the ingredients and loves the community of BBQ; its effortless ability to bring people together.
“There is always something coming off the grill and barbecue is my calling card.”
Roy’s Grille is his restaurant, opened in 2014 and named after his grandfather Leroy Carter. It started, appropriately given our location, at a Lexington gas station in South Carolina and now operates out of Irmo, Columbia.
“I love cooking dishes from scratch and trying things I’ve never done before. You are forever a student in this game and the day you’re not, is the day you check out.”
Try his brisket sandwich with the Bold & Beautiful sweet and spicy sauce, one of the restaurant’s five signature sauces.
The British can, at a stretch, take a soupçon of credit for Williams’s cooking. He was previously head chef of The British Bulldog Pub in Columbia, voted the best sports pub in South Carolina – more bangers and mash than beef short ribs.
Both Williams and Moore talk of how American chefs covet the ‘100-mile BBQ’ – would you drive 100 miles to eat at your favourite barbecue joint?
I’d fly 4,000 miles to dine with both of them.
It is time to head west to Mississippi and meet Nick Wallace, officially voted the state’s best chef in 2020.
Wallace grew up on a Mississippi farm near Jackson, embracing the homestead lifestyle and plucking ingredients off the fence line, learning at the feet of his grandparents and remembering his grandfather’s smokeroom.
“I grew up on the farm. Off in the woods, walking through the blueberry bushes, shoes off; I ate dirt as a kid. When I tell you I was living off the soil, I was living off the soil because I know what it tastes like.”
Ever curious to find new cooking cultures and flavours, Wallace, who runs Nick Wallace Culinary, loves to innovate as well as educate, tapping into eclectic influences from Mississippi and the wider world.
He loves cooking over wood and is a previous winner of the Food Network’s Fire Masters TV series which, as the title suggests, is all about barbecue, cooking in smokers and over firepits. He won with his grandfather’s 100-year-old recipe called brick-pressed chicken which is, well, chicken pressed with a foil-wrapped brick.
Wallace loves to give back and started Creativity Kitchen to support schools in providing tastier and healthier meals for underprivileged children.
He is both a scholar and freshman of food and loves to test his creativity. “Most chefs get bored easily.”
When we think of museums in the UK, we tend to focus on the exhibits, before grabbing a sandwich in the foyer café.
Williams has elevated the art of museum food in the United States, by pairing menus with the artists and the curations, culinary journeys to match the museum’s stories. It is an ingenious concept to support the arts and bookmark history.
One example was honouring civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was murdered on the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. Wallace talked with the family and devised dishes based on Evers’ favourite foods, such as oyster bolognese, and preparing a tasting menu.
We need something to wash down all this Southern food, so time to turn to Tennessee and meet Jack Daniel’s whiskey maker, Lexie Phillips. With deep family ties to the iconic distillery in the small town of Lynchburg, Phillips is the first woman to become an assistant master distiller.
We start however with barbecue, for the state of Tennessee has its own fire food flavour and culture. Indeed, Jack Daniel’s very own World Invitational BBQ can attract over 20,000 visitors, as well as the kings and queens of competition Q.
Phillips is both alchemist and agronomist, with her command of the corn, malted barley and rye, combined with a degree in agricultural science. Working with master distiller Chris Fletcher they remain true to the spirit’s authenticity, with Jack Daniel’s dating back over 150 years and surviving Prohibition, but never short of a dash of innovation and imagination.
Phillips reveals a common thread that links barbecue food to Jack Daniel’s whiskey.
“We use a charcoal filtration process, which mellows and softens the whiskey.”
The charcoal mellowing is known at the distillery as the Extra Blessing. The Jack Daniel’s website explains how it is ‘an old-time process Jack insisted on and that has been in continuous use ever since’ with the Old No.7 whiskey mellowed through 10ft of sugar maple charcoal.
“Once distilled to 140-proof, we send our clear, un-aged whiskey on a painstaking journey. Drop by drop, it crawls through our handcrafted charcoal at a pace dictated by gravity and nothing else. The trip takes three to five days to complete and once it’s done, the whiskey is transformed. One might even say blessed.”
It is what makes the drink a Tennessee whiskey and not a bourbon, accomplishing in days what may take two years in a barrel.
As such, any barbecue deserves an Old No.7, a Gentleman Jack, or perhaps most appropriately, a Tennessee Fire to accompany it.
The fabulous four were brought together by Taste the South, part of Travel South USA. There are BBQ trails and road trips aplenty, so it may be a while before you see me again.
In the meantime, thank y’all.