It's Beaufort, Y'all
For anyone who just moved here, we don't honk the second the light turns green. This is the South. Simmer down.
Welcome to the land of shrimp, collards, and grits. It has to do with driving down dirt roads with sleeping dogs, houses painted haint blue to ward off evil spirits, workers picking tomatoes in the vast fields of St. Helena Island, and the sound of Gullah hymns rising from a nearby church.
When I first arrived in Beaufort decades ago, it was all about Wednesday nights at the Beaufort Yacht Club downtown, the sounds of laughter and dice games, and Larry Taylor fixin’ everything there was to fix, especially loved for his to-die-for fried chicken. Then there was that notorious fella named Skeet who mastered the art of traveling through town with his long legs jumping from rooftop to rooftop.
It’s remembering how local fishermen stood on the river banks gathering up pluff mud, mixing it with fresh meal, getting ready for their nightly trip down the river to bait shrimp.
Everywhere I went, whether it was an oyster roast, a church gathering, or a political supper, there was some sort of shrimp-corn-sausage stuff. One night, I approached a tall man with a toothpick in his mouth and asked him, “What is that?” Looking at me in disbelief and almost losing patience with me, he said, “Frogmore Stew.” I wondered about whether they put frogs in the stew. I thought I’d better not ask.
It kept happening - those funny-sounding words kept coming up. Words like Purloo or was it pilau, and was it related to Kentucky Burgoo? Of course, there was a lot of chatter about chicken bog or hog, and what was that?
Best I could figure out, it was a chicken “bogged” down in rice and a boggy, soggy mess. Folks in town loved it and served it often.
Venturing over to Bay Street, Harry’s restaurant is where we could order the blue plate special. There were local fixins at their finest…and known for the best “mess of collard greens”, catfish chowder, and biscuits with cream gravy you could ever eat anywhere on the East Coast. When you ate fried chicken at Harry’s, there was a rule one must abide by at all times. Pick your chicken up with your fingers, no knives or forks allowed, and eat it right off the bone.
At one of the tables, several men were talking about rib meat and fatback and things like streak-o-lean. They got into a heated argument with a waitress about the superiority of one over the other.
Experiencing Lowcountry cuisine at Harry’s ranked high on most tourists’ to-do list. But nailing down exactly what constituted Southern cuisine was a bit tricky. Was it the Frogmore stew, fried green tomatoes, gumbo with okra, and Hoppin’ John?
This story was first published in the original Shrimp, Collards and Grits in 2011. I wrote this book in honor of the Beaufort Tricentennial Celebration. It was sold in Cracker Barrel Country Stores up and down the coast, became the gift of choice at the Legends Golf Tournament in Savannah, Ga., and was gifted to all the Toyota Dealers from around the world at their annual meeting in Charleston. It was featured in Charleston Style and Design magazine and others, and sold in gift stores everywhere in the Southeast and Texas.
Contact me at pat@patbranning.com if you would like to purchase one of the last remaining “Collector’s Editions,” signed and personalized.
Whispers of stories never to be forgotten. Long live the Beaufort Yacht Club with its notorious characters and wild, crazy nights, which never could happen here in modern times. We have become much more civilized lately, and I promise to protect the names of the innocent!