When we answered California, he shouted, “You win!” Apparently, we hailed from farther away than any of his other customers during the annual Highway 127 sale that stretches 450 miles from Gadsden, Alabama, to Covington, Kentucky.
Our award was sausage biscuits, pork sausage patties placed in a split buttermilk biscuit, then wrapped in foil and left in the smoker to cure all day. The meat was spicy with black pepper, the biscuits greasy from the pork drippings--high-calorie, high-cholesterol goodness.
In August last year I traveled with a troupe of relatives to Tennessee. We started off our vacation at a resort in the southern part of the state, then piled into a van and headed north to my brother’s little farm in the Cumberland Plateau. Our route was Highway 127, and the sale was at its peak. All along the highway, a back road along the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains, residents and small vendors piled their goods onto tables and blankets, some out in the sun, others under tarps, a few in old shacks, hoping for a sale. They offered just about anything: butter churners, puppies, cell phone accessories, hair cuts, costume jewelry, Hawaiian shirts, guns, exercise bikes, fake plants, bubble wrap, Confederate flags, Pez dispensers, cigarettes, guitars.
We pulled off the highway now and then to check out the quilts and a few antiques, but mostly we braked for food, especially the grub with local character. With a full day ahead of us, three teenagers, one rapidly growing kid, and three adventurous adults, there was plenty of eating to be done.
At our first stop, in a muddy field dotted with decrepit wood shacks, my mom found a vendor selling a cornbread, bean and buttermilk combo for $3. She ordered the dish and was asked, “Do you want your cornbread in the beans, or in the buttermilk?” It was a choice she’d never faced before, so she had to think about it, but she picked the beans. We were handed a bowl containing a square of white-corn cornbread soaking up the bacon-flavored pinto bean broth along with a cup of sweet, fresh buttermilk. We took a bite of broth-soaked cornbread, slurped down a few beans, then sipped the buttermilk: chewy and salty, silky and smoky, rich and tangy. The trio worked.
Farther down the road, a hand-lettered sign for fried apple pies, $1.25, stopped us short. A woman with the good fortune of living right on the highway was selling hand pies hot out of the fryer. We bought one and passed it around the group, each of us taking a bite. It was so freshly made, so sweet-tart good, we had to buy several more.
I asked the woman selling the pies how they were made, and she said, “My mom’s making them in the house right now. This is what you do: You peel the apples and dry them in the sun. When you’re getting ready to make the pies, you soak the apples in water and add sugar and spices. The dough is just flour and water; you roll it in a circle, add the apples, fold it over, and fry it up.”
A few miles down the highway, we found cherry pies made from canned cherry filling and topped with a nutmeg glaze. They were good, too, but the apple pies were better.
“Roasted corn” called us off the highway for our next stop. Roasted wasn’t really the right word--the vendor had boiled the corn, still wearing husks, in salt water for 20 minutes, then smoked it for 30. It seemed like a lot of fuel for just $1.50 an ear, but then there wasn’t any shucking involved.
We added our own squeezable margarine, honey-flavored spread, salt, and Tabasco after peeling off the husks. This was starchy, meaty corn, not the sweet kernels we’re used to in California, so it took the smoking and the aggressive toppings well. Canned jalapeños were for sale, too, as were porch rockers and gospel tapes.
By this point, we were nearing our turnoff and all pretty stuffed, but we still hadn’t tried barbecue. It was Gerald Stout’s massive smoker, spewing out a cloud of gray smoke, that caused us to stop at Hill People BBQ.
In his smoker, Stout was cooking pork tenderloin, which he smokes at 150 degrees for 7 hours over a hickory wood fire. We ordered a few sandwiches, and he pulled out a section of pork tenderloin, expertly sliced it on a cutting board, and served the pieces on a hamburger bun. Crispy on the edges, tender on the inside, full of the flavor of the hickory smoke, the tenderloin was superb. I liked it even without the peppery sweet barbecue sauce, but the sauce was good, too. Stout said he pulls his smoker, which he hitches to the back of his pickup, to events all over his corner of Tennessee.
At a little carnival-type stand nearby, I ordered a diet Coke from a kid, who yelled out back to a man tending a grill, “Dad, a diet Coke.” The man reached into a cooler, handed the can to the kid, who handed it to me.
It was then that Stout asked where we were from and we won the award, eight of the sausage biscuits. Already past full, we shared one and saved the rest for breakfast at my brother’s house. They were still good the next morning.
This piece first appeared in the Daily Gullet on August 12, 2004 http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=home
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