The Dillard House

"Yeah, it's that good." An unidentified diner makes a dive for the roastingears at the Dillard House in Dillard Ga.

Do this: Rent a copy of the movie Deliverance. Fast forward to the final scenes, when Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Jon Voight walk into an old inn by the river and are met by an ample woman who feeds them home cooking and puts then up for the night. That woman was Nancy Dillard and her inn was a way station for river rats along the Chattooga in North Georgia for many years. It was her nephew Billy who played the part of the banjo picker in the movie.
The Dillards have had a long tradition of feeding the hungry in the Northeast corner of Georgia, along the Chattooga and the Stekoa. My wife and I find an excuse at least once a year to make the three hour (one way) trip to this picturesque part of the country where the peaks of the Blue Ridge seem to be melting into blue-green lumps and there is still breathing room between the conglomeration of strip malls and fast food joints that has polluted even the smallest of small towns in America.

Our excuse this time was the annual Foxfire Festival that is held on the grounds of an old Rabun school in Dillard Georgia. The Foxfire story deserves a column in its own right. The brainchild of Elliot Wigginton, who received a McArthur Fellowship for his work, Foxfire began as a small magazine written and edited by Wigginton’s Rabun High School English classes. His mission was to record the fading traditions, folklore and ingenuity of the old mountain folk so that it would be preserved for future generations. Forty-three years after its inception, the idea has become a movement, with the magazine still going strong and 14 volumes of The Foxfire Book in print. I stumbled across the first volume of the Foxfire book in a mall bookstore shortly after it was published in 1972. Printed on the cover was a short list of the topics covered: Hog dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain crafts and foods, Planting by the signs, Snake lore, Hunting tales, Faith healing, Moon shining. It was all the stuff of stories, some told to me directly, some learned by eavesdropping, that I had heard from the people of my grandfather’s generation since I was a small child. My grandfather, who was a Constable, made extra money busting moon shine still in the foothills of the Blue Ridge during the depression. He fed his family through hard times by hunting in the hills and raising crops and meat on a small holding in northern Greenville County, SC.

One of the stars of the first volume of The Foxfire Book is Aunt Arie, a widower in her eighties at the time of publication who lived in alone a small cabin in the mountains She was immortalized by Jessica Tandy in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie Foxfire not too many years ago.
Many of the books have old time recipes, including the recipe for Brunswick Stew my wife and I use today. These recipes were most likely repeated from memory into a tape recorder. The measurements are often spotty, and since much of the cooking was done on wood stoves, cook times and temperatures are often only a guess.

Next door to the old Rabun school is the Dillard House, founded by another member of the Dillard family many years ago. The Dillard house is a family style restaurant, meaning you don’t get to pick and choose from a menu, the entire menu is brought to your table in bowls and on plates and you can eat all you want and more. The rustic dining room looks out across the Stekoa valley to the bucolic campus of the Nagoochee school.

It was a chilly, wet afternoon when we stomped the rain off our shoes at the door to the lobby. We had arrived between the breakfast and lunch hours and were given a number. We browsed the gift shop until our number was called and then we were led to a table by the window which gave us a panoramic view of the valley. On the table were a Waldorf salad, a bowl of slaw and a salad of fresh tomatoes, onions and cucumbers in a vinaigrette. It wasn’t long until the rest of the food arrived, and the table top was covered in dishes, bowls and plates. Meats included country ham, barbecued pork ribs, and fried and baked chicken and roast beef. Sides included collards, braised potatoes, cabbage, their marvelous acorn squash souffle, fried apples, green beans, field peas and corn on the cob. Seconds were offered whenever the waitress noticed we had emptied a serving vessel. I took her up on several items including two refills of collards. Dessert was coffee and apple pie a’ la mode.

It’s easy to forgive a restaurant that provides this amount of food for skimping here and there on quality, but at the Dillard House everything is perfectly seasoned. It’s as if a squadron of grandmothers is scurrying around the kitchen putting their best Sunday Dinner efforts into the victuals. More than a meal, this is an experience to be savored. This is not a quick bite. This is slow food, to luxuriate in, taking time to enjoy every morsel. This is food that relaxes, that unleashes brain chemicals usually known only to long distance runners or Alpinists. This food gives you a natural high.

The Dillard house has become my gold standard for good, simple food. It’s about the best use of a twenty dollar bill I can think of.

Diner rating: 5

Brunswick Stew
2 pounds cooked ground beef
1 pound cooked lean ground pork
1 small cooked chicken, chopped
3-4 diced potatoes
1 pint whole kernel corn
1 cup lima beans
2-3 chopped onions
1 pint tomatoes or tomato juice
catsup
chile powder
salt
black and red pepper
worcestershire sauce

The directions say,"Put all ingredients in a big pot and cook for a long time."

From The Foxfire Book, edited by Elliot Wigginton, New York, Random House, 1972

You can almost hear an old mountain woman rattling off the ingredients while tapping her fingers and gazing off into the distance. We substitute boneless skinless chicken breasts, which we boil, then cut into pieces, for the cooked chicken, and we add frozen green peas and a couple of bay leaves. We serve it over rice. The recipe calls for a “pint” of tomatoes and corn because the mountain people preserved their own vegetables in pint or quart canning jars. Of course now you get your tomatoes off the grocery store shelf. Use a 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes and frozen corn. This makes a hearty, highly caloric dish. It is designed for people who spend their days chopping wood, herding cattle or hoeing corn, not sitting at a desk punching buttons. Use your own judgment on the spices and condiments. This dish freezes well.

The Dillard House Acorn Squash Souffle

1½ cups mashed acorn squash
½ cup mashed butternut squash
¾ cup granulated sugar
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground ginger
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 eggs separated
½ cup heavy cream
¼ cup butter, melted
½ cup flaked sweetened coconut

Halve the squash and remove the seeds. Boil the squash until tender. Let cool and remove the pulp and puree in a blender or food processor.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Lightly grease a 2-quart casserole dish and set aside. Beat the squash well in an electric mixer. Add the sugar, salt, ginger and vanilla and beat well. Mix in the cream and melted butter. In a separate bowl beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. Fold the egg whites into the squash mixture. Pour into the casserole and sprinkle with the coconut. Bake 30-40 minutes until puffed and lightly browned.

(from www. projects.eveningedge.com/recipes)

Pigging Out

High Marks. Hite's Barbecue occupies a small cinderblock building on a two lane road in West Columbia, SC. Note the smoke emanating from the rear of the building and the pickup, which obscures a large pile of wood by the back door.

The Caroliner Diner's Rules for Spotting a Good Barbecue Restaurant

It’s a shame to go to a ‘Q joint and plunk down good money for sorry meat. So how do you know if a BBQ place is good or not before having to pay nine or ten bucks for a plate? Below are some guidelines that have served me in the past. Think of your favorite place and see if it doesn't fit several of these criteria.

1) SMOKE. Al Gore be damned! There must be smoke, and to hell with the carbon footprint! Real barbecue is cooked with smoke, and the smoke has to come from good hardwood trees. You should see it, and smell it when you pull into the lot, or at least when you get out of the car.

2) WOOD. There should be a wood pile on the premises, and it should be used for cooking. Oak will pass, but Hickory is king. Mesquite will do in a rush if you’re out west. Other viable woods are apple and pecan, though these are scarce and expensive and usually only used to put a finish on the meat. Beware of “decorator wood” that is only for show where the pork is actually cooked on a gas flame.

3) FAT PEOPLE. Fat people love to eat and usually know good food when they taste it. If there are no fat people eating there, the food is probably only so-so. Beware of a restaurant filled with skinny people in exercise gear. Those people don’t know how to eat.

However fat people can’t be the sole indicator. They sometimes indicate food that is simply cheap.

4) PORTABLE COOKING RIG parked outside. Serious barbecue cookers love to compete with their fellows to see who can make the best barbecue at a given time and place. This is where their skill is honed to a high art and where they learn secrets from other cookers about how to improve their product.

5) TROPHIES. If you’re gonna compete, you better be able to win at least once in a while.

6) PIGS. Like the ancient Minoans who worshipped bulls and kept images of them around house, True BBQ aficionados keep porcine totems around them. The more pictures, statues and stuffed pigs in the dining room the better the restaurant. One of my favorites is a sign hanging on the wall at Henry’s Smoke House in Greenville, SC. Inside the outline of a pig, it says, “People Eat People’s Meat."

Nice Rack. Stacks of decorator wood outside Maurice's Piggy Park in Cayce, SC. The Barbecue is actually cooked next door.
7) COUNTRY MUSIC has to be playing on the speakers. Anyone who cooks pork in the presence of any other mode, except gospel or bluegrass has no sense of proportion.

8) PICKUP TRUCKS in the parking lot. A lot full of BMW’s indicates the pork is either too expensive or too artsy or both.

9) SAUCE ON THE SIDE, not on the meat. If they have to sauce the meat to make it palatable, there’s something wrong with it.

10) THE BUILDING. Don’t even slow down for one of those cookie cutter fancy brick and steel facades that look like they were built last year. Somebody has to pay for that building. Real barbecue cookers build the pit first and then as an afterthought put some kind of enclosure around it, perhaps getting the idea when they hear the first raindrops sizzle on the grill. Look for a simple wood or cinderblock building, preferably out in the country. The fewer lanes to the road that goes there the better. Extra points are given if it has a gravel parking lot, tables in the yard, or a porch to eat on. Barbecue is meant to be eaten outside where the smoke in the air enhances the smoke in the meat for a complete barbecue experience. Screens are optional.

11) THE MENU should have barbecue as the main, or only item. If the menu has the barbecue listed somewhere down there between the Fiesta Chicken and the Shrimp and Sausage Penne, It probably comes to the restaurant frozen in a tub or plastic bag.

12) A SINGLE ENTITY. Beware of chain restaurants. A man runnning a pit out in the country is free to live his dream. Chains come with a large beauracracy whose main job quickly becomes maintaining the status quo vs. making excellent food.

I Couldn't Eat the Sausages

People are always telling me where to go. Once-in-a-while they’re talking about a restaurant. When two of my colleagues individually recommended the Thunderbird in Florence, I decided the next time I was down there I would give it a try. My chance came a few weeks ago. The Thunderbird is actually a trio of businesses sitting just off I-95. Included are a motel, a bar and grill, and a “country buffet.”
First the good part: for about $10.00 you can gorge yourself with a wide variety of food. The day I was there, entrees included fried chicken, ham, turkey and dressing stewed beef, and some rather lewd-looking fried sausages. Sides included macaroni and cheese, green beans, collard greens, and candied yams, among others.
The salad bar was pretty extensive and the vegetables were all either shredded or coarsely chopped making them easy to handle. There was a wide variety of desserts including two or three cobblers and banana pudding and a menagerie of cake and pie slices.
However, what the buffet offers in quantity, it lacks in quality. The ham was full of gristle. The collards and many of the other vegetables seemed to have been dumped directly from cans, with little or no seasoning. Much of the food was bland. Some of it tasted downright strange. Three saving graces were the fried chicken, the salad bar and the apple cobbler.
I couldn’t bring myself to eat the sausage.
The tea is served in small 12 ounce glasses, which get emptied pretty quickly, though the servers are attentive most of the time. Soft drinks aren’t on the menu.
The place was busy with an early supper crowd and most of the customers seemed satisfied with their meals, but I didn’t see a lot of people returning to the bar for a second pass.
At the Thunderbird you can shovel in food until you throw up. Just don’t let it spend a lot of time around your tongue.
Diner rating: 3
Next up: How to spot a good barbecue joint.

Luck of the Draw

Lake High stands in the middle of about fifty people huddling in the shade of the small canopy on the football field of Myrtle Beach’s Market Commons.
“One thing I can assure you new people is that every event after this will be better,” he says, in his typical manner of trying to put everything in a positive light.
We are at the Myrtle Beach, Boogie and Barbeque festival on the grounds of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force base.
High has had a frustrating morning. As marshal of the judging for the South Carolina Barbecue Association, (SCBA) he is responsible for making sure the event runs smoothly for both the judges and the cookers.
This year the Beach Boogie and Barbecue organizers threw him a curve. They invited another set of judges from the rival Kansas City Barbecue Society to judge the event, and let cookers choose which group would judge their barbecue. It was apparently a bid to increase interest, but the accompanying hike in the entrance fee may have had the opposite effect. This year the entries are down by a third, and the competition between judging organizations means that there will be only about a dozen teams for SCBA to judge.
The two judging groups were supposed to share a large tent, but we arrive onsite to find that SCBA has been banished to the other end of a football field. We trudge the 150 or so yards to the other tent, consoled by the fact that we have to walk through the cooking area where we savor the aroma of smoked pork which must be what it’s like to walk into Heaven’s dining hall.
We arrive at the other tent, but after only a few minutes, a golf cart pulls up and an event manager tells us we are in the wrong tent and points us back across the field to a small canopy near the opposite goal post. The canopy is about half the size needed and there is not enough equipment. Some of us will be sitting out in the September sun for the entire event. Calls go out tables, chairs and sunscreen.
On top of it all, Lake has about 20 “newbies” to contend with, including this reporter. These novice judges must be shepherded through the judging process, and their scores won’t count. Usually each novice table has a trainer, but today only one trainer Greg Gladney, is available, and he has the unenviable task of guiding 18 or 20 novice judges through the event.
Each of us is given a blotter; an 11 x 17 sheet of heavy paper divided into 8 equal sections on which to put our samples. Score sheets are passed out and we are given our preliminary instructions. Greg, a rotund, gregarious, bearded fellow who looks to be in his late thirties, sporting his “Master Judge” straw hat explains that each box will be passed around the table twice. The first time is for judging aroma and appearance. On the second pass we are to get a few ounces of barbecue and place it on our mats to complete the judging.
At the appointed time, High steps away from the tent and fires off one of those compressed air horns that boaters use in emergencies and drunks annoy people with at sporting events. It’s a signal that the cookers have only 20 minutes to present their product to the check-in table.
This is “blind box” judging, where we don’t see the cookers, or their pits. The plain, Styrofoam boxes containing the barbecue are identified only by a numbered ticket taped to the top of the box. One big difference between SCBA and KCBS is that the KC guys do onsite judging, where they go out and visit the cook teams and judge the meat, as well as the organization and cleanliness of the site. Some say that onsite judging is more subjective, and it’s easy to see how cookers might try to influence the judging.
Earlier as we walked through cookers row, A man ran out from his pit and greeted us enthusiastically. “Are you guys judges?” he asked.
“Were SCBA.” I say.
“Oh,” he mutters and unceremoniously turns and trundles back to his tent.
But as one KCBS judge confided, “You get some really good barbecue.”

The first sample is passed around. I get the box first, and find it almost empty. The sample was puny to begin with and the official judges table took most of it. I look at the sample, and flap the lid like I saw a master judge do a few seconds earlier to get a good whiff of the aroma. The pork is coarsely chopped and has good color, but the smell is a little off, as if the meat is not fresh. I put my numbers down in the boxes on the score sheet. On the second pass, I get a few scraps of meat. Greg has told us to get our hands in the meat, to pull at it to check for tenderness—The easier it pulls apart the more done it is. This sample is pretty tender but the flavor is just a little off. I fill out the rest of the boxes on my score sheet and tally them up. The sore is 10.5.
The samples come around quickly. The next two are finely chopped; almost minced. When I total up the scores, I find even though I have carried out the scores to two decimal places, (some nerds will go to three) the second and third samples are tied at 10.86. Not wanting to have a tie score, I go back and forth in each category between the two samples. My concentration is interrupted by the receipt of my fourth and last sample. It is not in the running. Pale and underdone, it has almost no flavor at all (after the judging I gave some to my wife, who thought it was chicken). I scored it a scant 7.9.
After going back and forth again between the two tied samples, I finally decide that sample three is over-spiced, and shave a few points which allows sample two to eek out the win.
After the judging, Greg interviews our table.
“Which sample was the best?” he asks.
To my relief, the consensus was sample two.
He polls the table to see what every one’s score was. The scores were all in the 10-12 range, with one person scoring a thirteen.
Greg points out that the average score is usually between 13 and 17. He makes no comment about our lower scores, leaving us to sort that out ourselves. Rookie mistake? Harsh standards?
I decide that, for me at least, it was neither. I feel the overall quality of the
product to be lower than I had expected. Despite the talk of good barbecue at these events, I find these offerings to be of lower quality than I could have gotten at, say, Bucky’s in Greenville, or Belly’s in Lexington, SC.
I have no explanation for this except that, since I only tasted a small number of the samples prepared for the event, it could have been just the luck of the draw.
Up next: The Thunderbird, Florence, SC.

Photo courtesy of Lora Garrett