WOW! What a treat it was recently when Sean Brock called up and invited me out to view the McCrady’s Farm (including the new pork project that helps turn the farm waste into sausage) and for dinner at the Wadmalaw Supper Club, a private club of farmers and good ole’ boys that have been gathering and eating every Wednesday for over twenty years — except this time Brock was manning the stove. He produced some crazy barbecue that had been cooked in the Cvap oven for something like two days (it literally melted) and then pulled out some of his new charcuterie project in the form of about ten pounds of guanciale (that’s unsmoked Italian pork jowl), rendered down and paired with fresh local shrimp sous vide (in olive oil, no less). That was some mighty fine eating.
Special thanks to Shawn Thackery and the rest of the Supper Club crew for being so welcoming to a wayward city slicker who wandered upon their camp. Shawn, it turns out, runs Thackery Farms, where those bodacious tomatoes that we ate were grown, and he markets them through Whole Foods across the southeast as “Wadmalaw Fugglies”, but that’s another story altogether. They were the best tomatoes that I’ve had all summer — just sliced and sprinkled with salt and pepper.
It’s hard to describe in words the connection that one feels to the land and the people at a gathering like this. This is real food, with real people, who would give you the proverbial shirt of their backs. I went home with a cantaloupe, a full tummy, and a newfound impatience for the time we are going to have to wait until McCrady’s pigs are fat enough for slaughter, but I’ll have to let my snapshots do most of the talking…
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