a dishboiled potatoes

Potatoes boiled whole or in halves until they are soft and served beside chopped whole hog on the eastern North Carolina plate — the side the Piedmont does not have. At Parker's in Wilson and, by Bob Garner's account, most eastern restaurants they are stewed rather than plainly boiled: peeled potatoes, often with onion, simmered in water with ketchup or red sauce, hot sauce, paprika, sugar, salt, pepper and a spoon of bacon grease, so the broth seasons them through. They come on the plate with slaw and the plate's bread, a corn stick or hushpuppies, and they have been there since Melton's in Rocky Mount charged 45 cents for barbecue with boiled potatoes in 1929.

The potato is the eastern plate's own vegetable, and the first record of it is a price. When Bob Melton's shed on the Tar River in Rocky Mount — the state's first sit-down barbecue restaurant, Wikipedia says — printed its prices in 1929, a plate of barbecue with boiled potatoes was 45 cents and a sandwich 15; by 1988 the plate came with slaw, hushpuppies and Brunswick stew, and the potatoes stayed on the side list with the corn sticks until the restaurant closed in 2005. Clyde Cooper's in Raleigh opened on New Year's Day 1938 with boiled potatoes, French fries, coleslaw and Brunswick stew beside the pork, and the core of that menu has not changed. Bob Garner's North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time (1996) prints Tad Everett's barbecue potatoes — potatoes and onions in chunks, bacon drippings, catsup, Texas Pete and a little sugar, covered with water and simmered until soft — as a variation on the boiled potatoes of most eastern restaurants, and places the dish around Palmyra, Hobgood and Oak City. Tradition holds — the seasoned broth is the pit's idea of a potato: the pepper and a spoon of ketchup in the pot, so the side tastes of the same table as the meat. A Barbecue Bros writer touring the whole-hog pits in 2022 called B's potatoes a simple side not really found in the Piedmont; in Lexington the tray's starch is the hushpuppy.

Small potatoes, scrubbed, whole or halved, or larger ones peeled and cut in chunks, go into a pot with cold water and salt and boil until a fork slides in. The stewed way, as Mandy Rivers reconstructs Parker's version and as Garner prints Tad Everett's, adds onion, a quarter-cup of hot sauce, smoked or sweet paprika, black pepper, bacon grease and half a cup of red sauce or a quarter-cup of ketchup, with a little sugar, and simmers twenty to forty minutes until the potatoes are soft and have drunk the broth. Inference — the ketchup and paprika are what tint them. They are served hot beside the slaw and the bread, and take the pork's vinegar sauce spooned over.

On the plate at B's in Greenville, where the sides are slaw, potatoes or green beans and the barbecue dinner was $7.75 in 2016; on Bum's buffet in Ayden with the collards and black-eyed peas; by the bulk order at Parker's in Wilson; on the menu at Clyde Cooper's in Raleigh (2026). Melton's closed in 2005 and its 1929 price survives on Wikipedia.