The confusion begins with the name… so let’s start with what barbecue hash isn’t:

1. Barbeque hash isn’t “barbequed” i.e., it’s not cooked on a barbeque grill. It’s served with barbeque, which, in South Carolina at least, is a noun that refers to the meat itself (which is always pork, by the way) not the method of cooking.

2. Barbeque hash isn’t even a distant cousin to the greasy, canned corned-beef-and-potato stuff served at roadside diners everywhere

Barbeque hash is a side-dish staple at any self-respecting South Carolina barbecue shack or buffet. Beyond defining it as a thick savory liquid often ladled over rice (especially here in the Lowcountry,) it really is open to broad - often very broad - interpretation. Consider the three recipe links below, all from the same site, and all calling themselves South Carolina-style hash:

http://www.bbq-porch.org/recipes/html/r1944.htm
http://www.bbq-porch.org/recipes/html/r1344.htm
http://www.bbq-porch.org/recipes/html/r1871.htm

BBQ hash can range in color from orange-red to gray-brown and can contain a wide variety of vegetables (or no vegetables at all) and just about any meat (and meat “parts”) you can imagine. Spices, sauces, and other condiments often find their way in, and their identities are often jealously guarded. The texture ranges from applesauce smooth to sausage gravy chunky. It can be peppery, hot, tangy, sweet - or any combination thereof.

Barbeque hash, in short, has a broad mandate and is limited by few requirements except that it be flavorful, tasty, and addictive. This recipe was inspired by the hash at Duke’s in North Charleston, where they keep it simple with just four main ingredients: pork barbeque, potatoes, onions, and ketchup. Here, I use both white and sweet potatoes, and use finely minced country ham (the real stuff!) for its inimitable flavor.

Horseradish and a good dose of pepper “bring the zing” and balance the sweetness very nicely.

Here’s a photo of the Sweet Potato and Country Ham BBQ Hash below.

Ingredients:

2 lb lean country ham, cut into small chunks
2 lbs russet potatoes, peeled
2 lbs sweet potatoes, peeled
2 lbs yellow onions, peeled
Water
1 tsp cider vinegar
3 Tbsp prepared horseradish
1/2 cup ketchup
1 Tbsp Kitchen Bouquet or equivalent
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp celery salt
1 Tbsp black pepper

PREPARATION:

Fry the country ham chunks in a heavy skillet over medium heat until lightly colored, stirring frequently. Set aside to cool.

In a food processor, grate or mince the russets, sweet potatoes, and onions and place in a large pot. Add about 3 cups of water and the cider vinegar and bring just to a boil. In the meantime, finely mince the country ham in the food processor and add to the potatoes and onions. Stir in the horseradish, ketchup, Kitchen Bouquet, Worcestershire, and celery salt, and cook over very low heat for 1 hour, stirring frequently and adding more water as needed (you want a ‘thick soup’ consistency.)

Add the black pepper, taste for salt (add a bit of plain salt, if necessary) and cook 15 minutes more. Serve over Carolina rice.

Enjoy!

You Can Read More of Doug’s Recipe Corner Here.

Please join us tomorrow for the seventh day of this week’s Southern Comfort Foods Series when we’ll be sharing details, photos, and memories about a very special culinary road trip where we’ll explore the four corners of Carolina BBQ.

According to an article in Gothamist:

“Between the New York Times barbecue cover story last week and the giveaway pulled pork yesterday in Madison Square Park, it would seem as though New York is going all kinds of rubbed and sauce-slathered crazy (don’t forget to free up the second week of June for the mammoth Big Apple Barbecue).

While the current media blitz over toasted bones and brash pit masters inevitably continues, Gothamist would like to divert just a little of your attention to some barbecue-appropriate side dishes and accoutrements, in particular, from the Carolinas and Georgia.”

You can read more of the article here.

Gothamist also has a nice article about The Carolina Country Store in Brooklyn here which was discussed here on Chowhound. Mentioned in the previous article, Poor Freddies Rib Shack was named one of the best places to eat in NY by the Village Voice and was raved about here by the folks at Chowhound.
Among the often hard-to-find items expats from the South can enjoy there are bone-in country ham, pimento cheese, hoop cheese (rat cheese), red franks, and boiled peanuts as well as the far easier to find hush puppy mixes and bags of grits.

Just how addicted to coffee are you? Do you ever wish you could be permanently hooked up to a coffee I.V.? (If so, see the cartoon to the right.)

What about using coffee as a homemade beauty treatment to firm and tone the skin? (Supposedly you can.) Do you have Starbucks Finder installed on your handheld PDA so you can get your fix anywhere you go?

Then cooking with coffee is the next step in your addiction cycle.

Beyond tiramisu and other obvious coffee flavored desserts, coffee and/or espresso can be used to make a wide variety of interesting marinades, rubs, and sauces. If you’ve ever known the deep pleasure of eating country ham and red-eye gravy, you’re already well on your way to enjoying coffee as a culinary enhancement.

Here’s a few main meal recipes featuring coffee as an ingredient:

• Steak in Indonesian-Java Marinade from Kate’s Global Kitchen

• Charred Buffalo Medallions with Coffee BBQ Sauce from The Food Network

• Grilled Pork Chops with Coffee Barbecue Sauce from About.Com Home Cooking

• Chicken And Coffee Barbecue Sauce from Cooking With Gourmet Coffee

• Coffee Glazed Roast Leg of Lamb from CooksRecipes.Com

• Beef Short Ribs & Coffee, Ancho and Cinnamon Sauce from VisualRecipes.Com

By the way, it is said that French writer Honore de Balzac drank up to 40 strong cups of coffee a day. He went on to write 92 novels and his essay, The Pleasures and Pain of Coffee, gives one a fascinating/horrifying glimpse of his all-too-caffeinated life.

As Balzac goes on to write in the essay…

“For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of (creative) stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.

For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.

When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he’d been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.”

Balzac died at the age of 51. Ironically enough, Ebook Takeaway offers 51 of his books that you can download free of charge here. There’s also some great coffee trivia here as well as Food & Wine’s Obsessive Guide to Coffee.