Continuing from our previous installment across Tennesse and Alabama, we pick up Walsh and Lovett’s journey in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and head east and north to South Carolina and North Carolina. Disclaimer: The route linked below maps the odyssey Robb and Rufus traveled in the process of writing Barbecue Crossroads. To get the most out of this journey, we recommend buying and reading the book in full before embarking. Enjoy!
Access the Google map here: http://goo.gl/maps/U0IU0
From the book:
At around five in the afternoon, Rufus and I pulled up to Scott’s Variety in Hemingway, South Carolina, a rural convenience store that sells barbecue. On the front porch were containers of okra and rows of watermelons. A sign advertised fresh field peas by the pint or quart—the peas were kept in the cooler inside, along with the Pepsi. In the winter, bushels of sweet potatoes and huge heads of freshly harvested cabbage are available.
Rufus and I wanted to look around and buy some barbecue for dinner and then come back before dawn to watch the whole hogs being cooked. The shelves were stocked with Sunbeam King Thin White Bread and staples like Dixie Crystals sugar. According to the hand-lettered sign over Scott’s kitchen window, the store will cook your hog for $110. You can buy a medium-sized barbecued whole hog for $400—half a medium hog is $200. That’s quite a bargain—depending on the size of the hog, it comes out to somewhere between $2.65 and $3 a pound. Barbecue sauce is $22 a gallon.
“Who buys a whole hog?” I asked the young pitmaster, Rodney Scott, when he came inside the store.
“Tailgaters buy them on Saturday mornings during football season,” he told me. “They pull up and load a pig on the back of their pickup truck on the way to the game so they can say to their buddies, ‘Look what I’ve been doing all night!’”
