Bona Fide BBQ

By Tom Poland

 

Writer’s Note: This feature originally appears in SC Farmer. See the full feature online.

 

A bona fide barbecue joint should be way out in the country. It’s best if it isn’t open seven days a week. People need to anticipate the approaching banquet. Moreover, a bona fide barbecue joint needs to sit where you can see the smoke rising off hog drippings and coals as red as magma. A bona fide barbecue joint should issue an intoxicating 200-proof smoky bouquet for there’s something about the commingling of meat and smoke. You can savor that intoxicating fragrance at three bona fide barbecue establishments in South Carolina.

 

Sweatman’s BBQ

At 1427 Eutaw Road in Holly Hill stands a wooden-shingled farmhouse with a rusty tin roof. Come Fridays and Saturdays you can dine here on fine barbecue. Bub and Margie Sweatman opened a small barbecue place in Holly Hill when Ike was president, 1959. When they closed that location, they limited their cooking to family gatherings in an “old dairy” close by their home. The Sweatman’s found themselves in business again in 1977 when they purchased the old farmhouse. For over three decades they served up great barbecue. When they retired, Mark Behr bought the business.

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Behr kept the recipes and uses veteran cook, Douglas “Bubby” Oliver in a consulting capacity. “Gone cook seven hogs tonight,” says Bubby as he jams a shovel into red-gold coals. Oliver says hickory, oak, and pecan give their barbecue flavor. Whole hogs cook over hot coals for twelve to fourteen hours, basted continuously with a secret mustard-based sauce. They separate pulled pork into two pans: charred “outside meat” with more intense smoke flavor and flavorful “inside meat.”

I asked Oliver how many people they feed a weekend. “Ah man, got to be over a couple thousand.” All leave happy thanks to the all-you-can-eat specials, BBQ sandwiches, plates, and a full take-out menu complete with barbecued chicken and side items.

When you go, the statue of the pig out front and that fragrant smoke tell you you’re in for a treat.

 

B & D Bar-B-Que

At 17245 Hunters Chapel Road near Smoaks, you’ll find a barbecue place in the middle of nowhere. Go, however, and you’ll be somewhere all right—in the middle of some good eating.

It’s rustic. Something about seeing a tractor and farm equipment close by feels right. A split-rail fence reinforces the feeling that you’re at an authentic barbecue joint. Some two decades ago Bobby and Dixie left farming to set up a barbecue joint. Today, the people line up come Saturday afternoons and evenings. People fill the seats as others queue up for take-out orders by the pound.

What appeals to people is the savory barbecue. If you’re a fan of a heavy tomato sauce, this place will suit you to a T. They cook only the hams and make a very good hash from the shanks. Sides are minimal. A mammoth exhaust fan pours that fragrant smoke into the air and the people come. As Ms. Dixie put it, “Around here barbecue is a community enterprise.”

B & D dishes out a distinctive heavy tomato sauce barbecue. How good is it? A huge sign on the red metal building proclaims that B & D “Serves the Best … Dixie-licious!”

 

Scott’s Variety Store

Robert Johnson’s blues tune goes “I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.” Go down to where Hemingway Highway and Highway 261 cross and get on your knees and thank a barbecue place that looks like a general store for some fine eating.

Ella and Roosevelt “Rosie” Scott brought that tantalizing smoke to Hemingway in 1972. Today, they sell pulled pork, two types of skins, and smoked barbecue chicken as well as a smoked barbecue ribeye steak. You can get a half and whole pit-cooked hog. They cook 10 to 12 hogs a night and slather one of the spiciest vinegar sauces you’ll ever taste all over them.

The barbecue world is rife with stories of secrets handed down by family members. Rosie’s uncle taught him to slow cook whole hogs over a wood-burning pit. In the Scott’s own words, “We built our own wood-burning pits to slow cook the whole hog overnight. Come morning, we’re ready to sell our mouth-watering bar-b-que with a side of skins and our secret family sauce.”

 

The Secret Ingredient

Down South barbecue possesses mystique. When it comes to that smoky meat, that addictive flavor, folks love to speculate about secret ingredients. Bona fide barbecue does have a classified ingredient, and if you know where to look, behind a door or in an outbuilding, you’ll spot the secret—the cook, an artist with knowledge, technique, and years of experience—a sure-fire recipe for success, and Sweatman’s, B & D, and Scott’s understand that. To that they add consistency, continuity, and originality. As it all comes together, smoke signals rise into the sky, and the people get the message. They come by the droves, mesmerized as it were, by the tantalizing smoke of bona fide BBQ.

 

 

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”