EDITOR’s Note: This story was originally published in the Post and Courier on Feb. 17, 2020. Whole-hog maestro Rodney Scott had already opened locations of Rodney Scott’s BBQ in Charleston and Birmingham, Ala.
, when he revealed to a reporter in Atlanta that he’d like to sell barbecue all over the world. A true evangelist for the Pee Dee cooking style, the James Beard award winner dreams of anointing foreign lands with peppered vinegar. It’s not a wholly surprising ambition.
Scott’s commitment to disseminating South Carolina customs drives the menu he replicates wherever he goes. As he put it in the Atlanta Magazine interview , promoting a restaurant he’s opening there in April, “My food is my life growing up. .
.. It’s all based on the flavors I remember as a child.
” That’s why the catfish is fried, the cornbread is sweet and the greens are cooked with lard. But one of the state’s most cherished barbecue traditions is conspicuously absent from the Rodney Scott’s sides section. Amid the hush puppies and potato salad and greens, there’s no mention of hash.
“We had hash years ago in Hemingway,” Scott says of the convenience store and barbecue takeout his parents, Rosie and Ella, in 1972 opened in Williamsburg County. “My mom made it. She was doing it with like all the bits and pieces and stewing it, so to speak.
Man that was so much work. But growing up where I did, most of the talk was hash-and-rice.” A variety of spices will be added to the pot.