a style · SCPee Dee whole-hog barbecue

Whole hogs cooked overnight over hardwood coals, pulled or chopped, and dressed with a thin sauce of vinegar, salt, black pepper and red pepper — the same sauce as eastern North Carolina's across the state line. The skin is taken off and fried into skins sold by the bag. Hash over rice, chicken bog, slaw and white bread fill the plate, often from a buffet. The style belongs to the Pee Dee, the northeast of South Carolina along the Pee Dee and Black rivers — Hemingway, Kingstree, Manning, Florence — and runs down the coast, where the state tourism office marks vinegar-and-pepper as the sauce of the shore.

The vinegar-and-pepper sauce is the oldest in the Carolinas; the state tourism office calls it 'the oldest sauce, perhaps the oldest in the nation'. The South Carolina Barbeque Association ties it to the Scots who settled Williamsburg County, and Wikipedia's history of barbecue sauce credits enslaved African cooks with popularising the vinegar, black pepper and chili-flake sauce of the eastern Carolinas. Tradition holds — the Pee Dee's whole hog is the same cooking as the Coastal Plain's north of the line, one tradition with a border through it.

The pits that carry it are family stores. Theron Burrows opened an Esso station and country store on the new Highway 521 between Manning and Georgetown in 1937; George and Adalyn Cooper took it over in 1974, and Russell Cooper cooks whole hogs there beside the hardware and the hams with a sauce he calls 'downright vinegar and salt and pepper'. Roosevelt and Ella Scott opened a gas station and variety store in an oak grove at Hemingway in 1972 and cooked a hog or two on weekends; their son Rodney cooked his first at eleven, and by 2012 the store cooked eight to ten a night. Thomas Brown, a farmer, began selling plates from a window on his farm outside Kingstree in 1981 and built a dining room a decade later. Kingstree holds a Pig Pickin' Festival each fall, judged on vinegar-based barbecue, and Hemingway a Bar-B-Q Shag Festival each spring.

Rodney Scott left the family business after a quarrel with his father in 2016 and opened Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ in Charleston with Nick Pihakis in February 2017; in 2018 the James Beard Foundation named him Best Chef: Southeast, the second pitmaster to win a chef award, and after his Chef's Table episode in 2020 the restaurant set sales records three days running. Roosevelt Scott died in 2010 and Ella in 2023; the Hemingway store closed for five months and reopened in May 2024 under Ella's brother Sam Wilson and grandson Dominic Scott. In May 2026 the Charleston company's locations were reported closed temporarily under lawsuits and liens.

At Scott's the wood — freshly cut hickory, pecan and oak — burns down in a barrel of sheet metal with old truck axles for a grate; the embers are scooped from the bottom and hauled into the pit house under cinder-block-and-brick pits to hold the heat for twelve hours or more while the hog cooks overnight. Cooper's cooks chickens on one half of the pit and hogs on the other. The meat is pulled at Scott's, chopped at Brown's, 'picked and mixed' at McCabe's after up to twelve hours; at Brown's the vinegar-and-hot-pepper 'gravy' is mopped on as the hog smokes. It is served as a sandwich on white bread or a plate with beans and slaw, with skins sold on the side.

Scott's Bar-B-Que at Hemingway is open Wednesday to Saturday; Cooper's Country Store sells gasoline, groceries, hardware and whole-hog barbecue on Highway 521; Brown's in Kingstree and McCabe's in Manning cook whole hogs for their buffets. Rodney Scott's Charleston restaurants were reported closed temporarily in May 2026.