a dishchicken bog

Chicken, rice and smoked sausage cooked together in the chicken's own broth until the rice has taken up the liquid and sits wet and plump — a pilau (rice cooked in stock) that is deliberately wetter than a pilau. It belongs to the Pee Dee, the northeast of South Carolina from Horry County west to Florence, and to the Lowcountry beyond it; Loris, a town of about two thousand north of Myrtle Beach, has held a Bog-Off cook-off every October since 1979. The pot is a fifty-gallon wash pot and the dish is cooked for crowds: tobacco crews, church suppers, the stump meeting at Galivants Ferry.

The rice came first. South Carolina grew more rice than any other state from the 1700s until the Civil War — Carolina Gold, planted and worked by enslaved people in the Lowcountry — and the culinary historian Damon Lee Fowler reads chicken bog as a localized pilau, 'probably of African provenance', found nowhere else in the country. The name was never written down by the people who used it; Stan Woodward, who made a documentary on the dish in 2002, concluded it went unrecorded because it was a commonplace high-protein meal that fed a lot of people in a poor place. The marker that Loris put up in 2022 says the dish fed crowds by the 1920s and was eaten after gathering tobacco in the northeast of the state: the crew that had primed and strung the leaves all day sat down to a wash pot of bog. The Democratic stump meeting at Galivants Ferry, on the Little Pee Dee, serves it with snap beans, white rolls and Pepsi, and Loris, which calls itself the chicken bog capital of the world, made it the theme of an October festival in 1979; by 2001 the Bog-Off drew about twenty thousand people. To the south, in Georgetown County, the same pot is cooked drier and called chicken pilau.

An old hen past laying is the first choice, a fat rooster the second. The bird is poached whole with onion, salt and plenty of black pepper; the meat is pulled from the bone, not chopped, the fat is skimmed from the broth, and the rice, chicken, smoked sausage and onion go back in to simmer until the rice is done and still wet. Woodward's bogmaster's test: the rice is plump and moist, holds together, sits up above a little gravy in the bottom, and does not cling to the chicken. Fork or spoon depends on the cook. Green peppers and other vegetables appear in some recipes; the Loris standard is chicken, sausage, rice, salt, pepper and perhaps onion.

The Loris Bog-Off runs every October; the town's marker, put up by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation in 2022, stands on Main Street outside the library. Bog is a church-supper and fundraiser dish across Horry County and the Pee Dee, and the Galivants Ferry stump meeting still serves it.