Tag: food

Lazy Sunday XXXII: Festivals

The Portly Politico48 Comments

This fall, I’ve been hitting up a number of small-town festivals in an attempt to get out more to see the forgotten by-ways of rural South Carolina.  I work pretty hard during the week (indeed, most of today will dedicated to finalizing first quarter report grades), so I’m making a point of enjoying my weekends more.

To that end, this week’s Lazy Sunday will look back at some recent festival-going.  I should note that the full versions of these pieces are Subscribe Star exclusives; to read them in full requires a subscription of $1 a month or more to my Subscribe Star page.

  • “Aiken Amblings” – This piece detailed my trip to my hometown for Aiken’s Makin’, a sprawling, two-day crafts festival that brings vendors from all over the Southeast to ply their wares.  I have fond memories of this festival from my childhood, and it’s still a major fall event.
  • “Yemassee Shrimp Festival 2019” – This post is all about a long day trip to tiny Yemassee, South Carolina, for the Yemassee Shrimp Festival.  The trip also included stops at the historic Old Sheldon Church ruins and St. James the Greater Catholic Church in Ritter, South Carolina.
  • “Candy Apples” – My paean to a typically autumnal fair food, the sticky, tart candy apple.  We had some good ones last weekend.
  • “Festival Circuit: Ridge Spring Harvest Festival and Clinton Scots & Brats” – Yesterday’s post detailed a two-for-one festival day—my trip to the Ridge Spring Harvest Festival and Clinton, South Carolina’s Scots & Brats celebration, the latter of which was the source of the candy apples that inspired the previous Saturday’s post.

Hopefully there will be more festivals to come.  For now, I’ve got to get back to grading.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Candy Apples

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Today continued the series of autumnal festivals my girlfriend and I are attempting to hit up as the long South Carolina summer turns to fall.  I’ll write a full account of our trip to the Ridge Spring Harvest Festival and Clinton’s “Scots & Brats” next Saturday.

Tonight, I’d like to write briefly about a delicious treat that only exists in the fall:  the candy apple.

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The Future of Barbecue

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The good folks at the Abbeville Institute have a great piece (originally published at The American Conservative) about the most beloved and controversial of Southern foodstuffs:  barbecue.

Barbecue, as author John Shelton Reed points out, is highly localized.  For me—and any true South Carolinian—the One True ‘Cue is mustard-based pulled pork barbecue from South Carolina.  It’s definitely not beef brisket or anything with ketchup.  It should come from a place that’s only open three or four days a week, and is served with hash and rice.

Unfortunately, much like the “old, weird America” whose passing John Derbyshire regularly mourns, traditional barbecue—regardless of the regional variety—is being shoved out by “mass barbecue,” the kind served up in chains that look like the inside of Uncle Moe’s Family Feedbag.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Yemassee Shrimp Festival 2019

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I kicked off an ad hoc autumnal tour of various festivals around the State of South Carolina with a trip to Yemassee, South Carolina, for the annual Yemassee Shrimp Festival.  Readers will recall our visit to Aiken’s Makin’ in my hometown of Aiken, South Carolina, earlier in the month.  That visit got us thinking about other fall festivals we could attend.

I stumbled upon the Shrimp Festival while researching the Yemasee War (note the single “S” in the tribal name; I’m not sure when the town decided to add the second), a brutal Indian war in which various tribes banded together to wipe out the Carolina colony.  The conflict lasted from 1715-1717, and the tide only turned for the colonists after the Cherokee Indians joined forces with the Carolinians in order to defeat their ancient enemy, the Creeks.

In reading about that unfortunate, disruptive colonial war, I came across the Shrimp Festival.  I love small-town boosterism, and these little festivals bring a good bit of money into rural communities.

More importantly, they’re just plain fun.  Where else can you eat curly fries hand-cut from a gigantic spud and fried fresh to order, or see a chihuahua dressed as a taco, complete with sombrero?  Yes, both of those were just part of the fun at the Yemassee Shrimp Festival.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Aiken Amblings

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

It’s been quite a nice week, Hurricane Dorian notwithstanding.  Last night I called my first varsity football game (I’ve been calling junior varsity games for a few years now), and I am eternally grateful to the eagle-eyed coaches in the pressbox who fed me some of my best lines.

After the game—a blowout of such proportions that the second half instituted a “running clock,” which meant an abbreviated evening for yours portly—I drove to my hometown of Aiken, in the western part of South Carolina.  My destination for the weekend:  the large arts and crafts fair known as Aiken’s Makin’.

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TBT^2: Happy Birthday, America!

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It’s Independence Day in the United States!  God Bless America!

I hope everyone has been enjoying #MAGAWeek2019.  Remember, you can read those full entries only on SubscribeStar with a $1/mo. or higher subscription.  Your subscription also includes exclusive access to new content every Saturday, as well as other goodies from time to time.

I’m happy to announce, too, that I have my first subscriber.  You, too, can support my work for just $1 a month (or more).  That’s the price of a large pizza if you paid for it over the course of an entire year—you can’t beat that!

In case you’ve missed them, so far has commemorated our second President, John Adams; our first Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton; and our national cuisine, fast food.  You can also check out all of #MAGAWeek2018’s entries.

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#MAGAWeek2019: Fast Food

The Portly Politico15 Comments

It’s here at The Portly Politico.  Each day’s post will be a SubscribeStar exclusive.  For a subscription of $1/month, you gain exclusive to each day’s posts, as well as exclusive content every Saturday throughout the rest of the year.  Visit my SubscribeStar page for more details.

It’s finally here—#MAGAWeek2019!  It’s the week of the year that we celebrate our great country’s birth, and I honor it with a daily post about a person, place, or idea that has, in its own way, made America great.

I’m writing this week’s posts from New Jersey, where I’m spending a week with my girlfriend’s family.  Contrary to my expectations, the entire State is not a dystopian, concrete-encrusted urban hellscape.  Its nickname, the “Garden State,” is apt:  it’s quite lush, and there are horses—horses!  It feels like South Carolina with less humidity and more crime and corruption.

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Championship Beef

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One of my favorite writers, Roger Kimball, offers up a beefy analysis of President Trump’s fast food feast for the National Championship Clemson Tigers (the hardest words I’ve ever had to write); you can read it here:  https://spectator.us/trump-burger-masterpiece/

Naturally, the Left is up in arms because, well, it’s Trump.  If President Barack Obama had served fast food burgers, we’d be reading think-pieces on The Root about the historical significance of fast food in the African-American community, and how the meal demonstrates Obama’s “cool, hip” side and authentic blackness.  Of course, because Trump does it, it’s probably racist.

I’ve seen all kinds of criticisms of this fun feast from Leftists.  One of the shots of the spread showed food in plastic containers, and—I kid you not—a Facebook Lefty with whom I’m acquainted complained about all the plastic, presumably because it’s bad for the environment (classist subtext:  food in plastic containers is for backwards rubes).

The president is also catching flak because he joked that if the First Lady had been in charge, the players would be eating salad.  Apparently, that’s a sexist remark.  Gimme a break.

You know these players loved eating Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, Whoppers, and Big Macs in the White House.

I sure would.  There are few things I enjoy more than a classic cheeseburger from McDonald’s.  It’s got everything you need (those onions are perfect), and it’s a no-fuss, quick, cost-effective meal.  Indeed, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger is probably the most calories-per-dollar meal in human history.

Of course, progressives not-so-secretly find poverty distasteful—thus the abundance of the soy latte set among limousine liberals—and shudder at the food of us common folks.

Kudos to the president for this clever, whimsical gesture.