march 2014 savor — guide to food & dining on the azalea coast Most cooks below the Mason-Dixon line agree that a Brunswick stew pot should include corn, potatoes, lima beans and tomatoes. From there, debates flare. Some folks prefer their Brunswick stew more sweet than sharp. Others mull over black pepper versus cayenne pepper. Discussions drag around a thin or thick consistency. Georgians like their Brunswick stew in a bowl; North Carolinians prefer it as a side dish to pulled pork or fried chicken. While champion Brunswick stew makers use chicken, pork, beef, or a combination of two, or all three, purists roll their eyes. Squirrel is the choice for true Brunswick stew, they’ll say — unless you’ve trapped a raccoon or opossum. “The mystery arises out of the fact that just about everyone who claims to know the true secret of Brunswick stew disagrees about what the secret is,” author Wilber W. Caldwell writes in “Searching for the Dixie Barbecue: Journeys Into the Southern Psyche” (Pineapple Press, 2005). “Indeed, it would appear that there is not just one secret but even tens of thousands of secrets, at least one for every Southerner who makes the stuff.” When asked about his own Brunswick stew experiences, Wilmington chef Larry Casey suggests that all those secrets may boil down to, growing up “dirt poor” and making do. “When I was a kid, we nor-mally put ‘whatever’ in it,” says Casey, who serves his Brunswick stew at Casey’s Buffet Barbecue and Home Cookin’ restaurant on Oleander Drive in Wilmington. His stew is far different from the one he preferred as a kid growing up in New Bern, North Carolina. “Me and my cousin trapped raccoons and sold them … in a Brunswick stew, it’s absolutely perfect,” he says. His memories sum up cause for the great Brunswick stew debate. Like Casey, many Southerners recall homespun concoctions full of foods their families raised and hunted. That, it seems, is how Brunswick stew was invented. Although Brunswick, Georgia, residents claim their town created the stew, and some folks in Brunswick Larry Casey makes heaping batches of his signature Brunswick stew, a local crowd favorite. Fried chicken is pulled from the bone and added to the stew pot. Corn, green beans, lima beans and potatoes along with whole crushed tomatoes and Larry Casey’s secret spice mixture are staged for the stew pot. 74 WBM
2014-3
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