u/thestateyourein

NCDOT has now opened a public comment period on the new tolls from Aug. 17 through Sept. 14, with five public listening sessions scheduled in Washington, Grantsboro, Knotts Island, Hatteras and Ocracoke.

That includes the ferries serving Ocracoke, where there is no alternate road. For residents, workers and businesses on the island, the ferry isn’t a tourist attraction. It is the road.

My vote: North Carolina residents ride free with an NC driver’s license. Visitors pay the toll. They’re the ones coming here to visit and adding tourism traffic to the system, while North Carolina residents already pay state taxes to support our roads and transportation infrastructure.

And for an island whose businesses depend heavily on people continuing to make the trip, adding another expense to getting there deserves some serious thought.

NC residents already paid for the road.

This one just happens to float.

Please choose your Flair & make suggestions for things you would like to see here.

For folks not from eastern North Carolina, this plate probably requires some explanation. That’s whole hog barbecue, meaning the whole pig cooked and chopped together, dressed with a thin vinegar and pepper sauce. The yellow stuff is their tangy coleslaw. Brunswick stew is a thick tomato based stew with meat and vegetables, and those little fried-looking sticks are cornsticks, basically skinny cornbread that we use to scoop up the stew because apparently spoons weren’t edible enough.

Then there’s fried chicken brought out on platters and passed around the long tables family style, with sweet tea poured over crushed ice.

You can argue about whether Parker’s is the best barbecue in NC. We do. Arguing about barbecue is nearly a side dish here.

But the lesson is this: when a restaurant has been feeding families the same food, at the same long tables, for 80 years, eventually it becomes more than somewhere to eat.

At some point, supper becomes history.

A little Eastern North Carolina education for the newcomers.

This is what we call barbecue sauce, although admittedly it does not look like what most of the country has agreed barbecue sauce ought to look like. It’s mostly vinegar, pepper and seasoning, thin enough to run straight through the meat instead of sitting on top of it looking important.

That matters because Eastern North Carolina barbecue is whole hog, cooked slowly over wood coals, chopped together with those little pieces of skin and fat mixed throughout. The vinegar cuts the richness, the pepper wakes up the pork, and the whole thing works because none of it is trying to cover up what the pit already did.

We sometimes call it Eastern North Carolina Holy Worter.

Which is admittedly a little dramatic.

But wait until you see somebody bless a freshly chopped hog with it and tell me I’m wrong.

For those of you who didn’t grow up around here, that dark stuff beside the biscuit is molasses, and with North Carolina continuing to receive new residents at an alarming rate, we apparently need to cover some fundamentals. Around here it was often made from sorghum, crushed for the juice and cooked down until it got thick, dark and sweet. It kept well, it was cheap, and it made a hot buttered biscuit considerably better, which was really all the justification anybody required. Tear off a piece, drag it through the molasses, eat it, repeat. Our grandparents didn’t call this Southern cuisine or farm to table because the farm was forty feet from the table and saying such a thing would’ve made you sound ridiculous.

Anyway, that’s biscuits and molasses.

There will be a test.

This requires a little imagination, obviously. You have to ignore a few automobiles and the occasional person staring into a telephone, but those cobblestone streets are doing most of the heavy lifting.

We’ll get breakfast at Big Ed's, then stroll around City Market like we’ve got important mercantile business to attend to. Maybe inspect a brick. Admire a doorway. Look down an alley like we’re waiting on a shipment of dry goods from Wilmington.

Then we eat lunch at Woody's.

After lunch, more strolling.

I don’t know what people did for entertainment in 1897, but based on our reenactment, it involved an unreasonable amount of walking around between meals.

By supper at Vic's we have generally covered about six blocks, eaten three times, and accomplished absolutely nothing.

Which I believe makes us historically accurate.

The USDA establishment number printed on the new Neese’s Country Sausage package is M-9065.

M-9065 is Wampler’s Farm Sausage Company in Lenoir City, Tennessee.

The package lists Neese Country Sausage, LLC in Raleigh, North Carolina as the distributor.

Headed to Ocracoke...

Learn the lingo first.

This is how folks out there have talked for generations, and if you get outed as a dingbatter, don't be surprised if service gets a little... slow.

O'cocker (n.): A person born and raised on Ocracoke; a native as opposed to a nonnative resident.

dingbatter (n.): A nonnative of Ocracoke or the Outer Banks.

buck (n.): A good friend, usually male. A female friend may be a puck.

barnacle beans (n.): A cup of coffee.

call the mail over (v. phrase): Distribute the mail.

foreigner (n.): An off islander.

meehonkey (n.): A game of hide and seek played by earlier generations of children on Ocracoke Island, or a call used while playing this game.

mommuck (v.): To harass or bother.

quamished (adj.): Sick to the stomach.

slick cam (n.): A very calm water, typically used with reference to the sound waters, as in, "It was a slick cam out there today." Cam is pronounced so that is rhymes with ram. Also slick calm.

puckberry (n.): A boberry biscuit.

water fire (n./v.): Light that appears on the surface of a body of swampy water at night, caused by gases released by decaying plant matter.

Ocracoke (n.): The name of the island, probably derived originally from the Algonquian word waxihikami, meaning "enclosed place or fort." Through misspelling and English like pronunciation, the word became Wococon and, eventually, Ocracoke. In one popular island legend, Ocracoke comes from the phrase, "Oh, crow cock," which was spoken by the infamous pirate Blackbeard as he waited to do battle at sunrise with the governor's forces that had come to capture him.

Y'all know any of these already, or are we all dingbatters here... 

Ask ten people in this state how barbecue's supposed to be cooked and you'll get an argument before you get an answer. East of Raleigh, it's the whole hog, cooked low and slow and chopped up dark meat with light, dressed in nothing but vinegar and crushed pepper, no ketchup anywhere near it. Head out toward Lexington and the rules change entirely, pork shoulders only, a heavier tomato tinted dip standing in for that thin eastern vinegar, red slaw riding shotgun instead of the mayo kind.

Neither side's backing down, and honestly, neither should have to. But the sauce fight isn't even the whole argument. Bring up sides in Eastern North Carolina and you'll open a second one, and it usually ends with somebody pointing at a plate of little red tinted potatoes.

Those are BBQ taters, and they didn't come from nowhere.

Bob Melton started cooking whole hog out of open pits on the banks of the Tar River in Rocky Mount back in 1922. Two years later he built himself an actual restaurant, the first sit-down barbecue house in North Carolina and, for a while, the only one east of the Piedmont. Alongside the hog, he served potatoes boiled down in bacon grease with salt, black pepper, and paprika, plain food cooked the old way. Something about that grease and paprika turned the potatoes a deep reddish color, and something about the flavor made them stick.

Melton's place stood on the Tar for decades until Hurricane Floyd sent the river through Rocky Mount in 1999 and flooded the restaurant past saving. It closed for good not long after. The original spot on the river is a small park now, named for the restaurant that used to be there.

But the potatoes never needed the building to survive. Grady's BBQ still turns them out in Dudley. Stephenson's Bar-B-Q does the same up in Willow Spring, Doug Sauls BBQ in Nashville, and Parkers BBQ over in Wilson, keeps a version going too. Different pits, different families, same red potatoes sitting next to the same whole hog, because that's just what a proper Eastern North Carolina plate looks like now.

The barbecue gets all the attention. The taters are the ones that quietly won the argument.

Barbecue Center

Lexington, NC

The perfect North Carolina BBQ plate.

Grady's BBQ (rhyming with daddy)
Dudley, NC (Dud-lee)

Mrs. Gerri Grady, the heart of Grady's Barbecue in Dudley, North Carolina.

Parallax Coffee in Wendell was transformed into Cafe Kahan ahead of the sold out performance at Carter Finley Stadium in Raleigh tonight.