I hope they have these in Colorado…

But I doubt it.

If there’s one thing all South Carolinians love, it’s food. And I’m not talking about some tofu, seven-grain, low carb or low calorie or low anything dishes. We love good food and we’ve gotten pretty good at making it. Hot spots for South Carolina’s best cooking can usually be found close to the coast, where Lowcountry folks have spent generations passing down, and honing, their family recipes. Today the New York Times featured just such a spot in its “Dining & Wine” section.

AT 3:45 on a recent Saturday morning — as frogs croaked into the void and a mufflerless pickup downshifted onto Cow Head Road — Rodney Scott, 37, pitmaster here at Scott’s Variety Store and Bar-B-Q, gave the order.

“Flip the pigs,” he said, his voice calm and measured. “Let’s go. Some char is good — too much and we lose

him.”

A. J. Shaw, a college student home for the summer, and Thomas Lewis, a onetime farmer, left their seats and joined Mr. Scott in the pit room, a rectangular shed dominated by two waist-high concrete banks, burnished ebony by wood smoke, ash and grease.

Ten butterflied pig carcasses — taut bellies gone slack, pink flesh gone cordovan — were in the pits when Mr. Lewis reached for the sheet of wire fencing on which

one of the pigs had been roasting since 4 the previous afternoon. In lockstep, Mr. Shaw topped that same pig with a second sheet of fencing, reached his gloved fingers into the netting, and grabbed hold.
As the men struggled, the 150 pounds of dead weight torqued the makeshift wire cage. When the carcass landed, skin-side down, on the metal grid of a recently fired pit, skeins of grease trailed down the pig’s flanks, and the smoldering oak and hickory coals beneath hissed and flared.

“I cooked my first one when I was 11,” Mr. Scott said, as he seasoned the pig with lashings of salt, red pepper, black pepper and Accent, a flavor enhancer made with MSG.

Working a long-handled mop, he drenched the pig in a vinegar sauce of a similar peppery composition. “You’ve got to always be on point, when you’re cooking this way,” he said. […]

The crowd that Saturday afternoon was typical: Half black and half white, half locals and half pilgrims.

Locals, many of whom work at the Tupperware plant, on the other end of Cow Head Road, came to pick up half-pound orders, pulled from various quadrants of the pig and tossed with sauce in the manner of a meat salad. They knew to ask Virginia Washington — Rodney Scott’s cousin, the woman behind the high-top order counter — for a cook’s treat of fried pig skin, still smoky from the pit, still crisp from the deep fryer.

DeeDee Gammage planned to eat her barbecue between slices of white bread, in the car, on the way home. Lou Esther Black told Mrs. Washington that she would serve her take-away atop bowls of grits on Sunday morning. “I let the grease from the meat be my sauce,” Ms. Black said. “You don’t need butter.”

Locals knew that if they dawdled until the serving table ran low, Jackie Gordon, Rodney Scott’s aunt, would break down another pig on the bone table. They knew that, with a little luck, they might score a rack of spareribs, wrenched hot from a carcass.

Pilgrims lacked the locals’ foresight, but made up for it in appetite. The average out-of-town order was two pounds.

In addition to pork, day-trippers bought sauce by the gallon, hot or mild. (They were probably not aware that the sole difference is how far Mrs. Washington dips her ladle into the jug and whether she stirs, to loosen the pepper sediment.)

At the register, out-of-towners bought quart jars of locally grown and ground cane syrup from Ella Scott, the 67-year-old mother of Rodney Scott, and wondered aloud whether any of that syrup made it into the family’s sauce. (When asked, all the Scotts will say is that it has “a little sugar.”)

Visitors took side trips to the smoke-shrouded pit house where pigs lay splayed and sauce-puddled. They stared down into the mop sauce bucket, where sliced lemons bobbed.

They ogled the five-foot-tall burn barrels, where hunks of wood the size of footstools flame, then smolder, then break down into the coals that Mr. Scott and his colleagues shovel into the pits. They traded theories about the barrels’ construction, about how the coal grates within are formed by piercing the steel barrels with a crisscross of truck axles.

“Back home they’ve just about gone to gas for cooking,” said David Hewitt of Florence, S.C., as he waited for his order. “And they serve on buffet lines. This place is the last of a breed. If you like history, this place is full of it.” […]

“This is a business for us,” [Mr. Scott] said. “We don’t do it the old way. We do it the best way we know how. That means a lot of oak. That means a lean pig, which means less grease and less a chance of grease fires. No matter which way you do it, though, some folks don’t want you to go nowhere.”

His son echoed his feelings. “People keep talking about how old-fashioned what we do is,” he said. “Old-fashioned was working the farm as a boy. I hated those long hours, that hot sun. Compared to that, this is a slow roll.”

Pig, Smoke, Pit: This Food Is Seriously Slow (NY Times)

The Scotts won’t make the trip to New York’s Big Apple Barbecue Block Party this weekend, but South Carolina will be represented by Jimmy Hagood and his BlackJack BBQ out of Charleston. New Yorkers might get a small taste of barbecue done right this weekend, but they’ll miss out on the complete experience provided by the Scotts and countless other slow roll specialists found all over the Palmetto State.

For more on South Carolina barbecue, check out this article by Charleston City Paper's Jeff Allen. If you have the chance, be sure to visit the Scotts. It doesn't get more organic than this.