Kettle-Cooked South Carolina Hash Endangered?

A kettle of hash. Photo: Uptown Greenwood Development Corp.

Southern stew maven Stan Woodward will be rooting for the kettles at Greenwood, S.C.'s annual hash cook-off this week.

Carolina hash, an iconic Southern one-pot meal typically comprising chopped meat, potatoes and seasonings, is meant to be made in a black iron pot. But Woodward says apprehensive legislators and frantic health inspectors have conspired to endanger the open kettle tradition.

"I think it's sliding out from under view quietly," says Woodward, whose documentaries include "Brunswick Stew," "Burgoo," "Joe Gunn's Sheep Stew" and "Carolina Hash." "There used to be hash houses all over South Carolina."

Hash is one of the few dishes that seems to rigidly obey state boundaries: It's rarely found on menus over the South Carolina line. In the Palmetto State, though, the plantation-era concoction is a cherished barbecue accompaniment.
According to Woodward, the first hash cooks were likely enslaved Africans who needed high-protein meals to fuel their hard labor. "They were given hogs' heads, feet and lights," he says, using the old-timey word for what highfalutin chefs call offal. "They'd cook this all down and then chop it up, put it back in the pot, and create a meat gravy with a mixture of Caribbean and African spices. It took advantage of everything but the hog's squeal."

Other regions soon developed variations on the low country recipe, with upstaters turning up their noses at assorted pig parts -- Woodward gravely recounts the tale of a fellow in Clemson who "made the mistake of serving liver hash" -- and cooks refining their own unique (and always secret) seasoning blends.

What remained the same across the state was the hash house itself, which Woodward describes as "six tiers of brick, a tin roof and screen." Families would congregate there on holidays to fire up the kettle and make hash.

Although Woodward claims "people have been cooking in them safely for 300 years," the Department of Health and Environmental Control began cracking down about a decade ago, notifying hashmasters they'd have to open regulated restaurants if they wanted to keep cooking. And stringent new laws made it hard for the hash houses to hang onto their black iron pots: Just as increased inspections drove many barbecue belt pitmasters to cook with gas rather than wood, most hashmasters today cook in stainless steel pots.

Eating hash remains a vibrant tradition in South Carolina: While the dish may sound quaint to folks outside the state, Woodward says getting his fellow statesmen to try hash "would be like trying to persuade them to eat grits." That is to say: pretty darn easy.

It's hash making that's threatened. Woodward is adamant that he can tell the difference between hash cooked in stainless steel and hash cooked in a kettle.

"It's an ancestral tradition, passed on from one stewmaster to another," Woodward says. "We need to honor that tradition."