#20  NORTH CAROLINA – Livermush!

I was not familiar with livermush, “the poor man’s pate”, until I starting searching for a breakfast spot in North Carolina and saw it on a few on-line menus. Frankly, it sounded like something you would feed your sled dog team at an Iditarod rest stop, but nevertheless, I wanted to give it a try.  Apparently, you can only find it at small mom and pop restaurants in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.  We were going to be driving from the home of my favorite sister near Charlotte to Chapel Hill and this would take us through “The Livermush Belt” that extends from Shelby NC to Greensboro NC.  There were a number of livermush breakfast possibilities in and around Salisbury NC and I settled upon this one in a little strip mall on a busy highway outside of Salisbury:  

Wahoo’s Diner
Granite Quarry, North Carolina

 

AMBIENCE:  Wahoo’s Diner looked like the type of place where Andy, Barney, and Goober would stop in and linger over a cup of coffee while discussing the latest stop sign violation. It only opened a couple of years ago but gives the appearance of being well worn and loved. Wahoo was the name of the co-owner’s father.

The diner has 66 seats (no, I didn’t count them; I read this in a newspaper article) of which only one was occupied on this Monday morning.

 

Upon sitting down, we were presented with our silverware which came in a small paper bag. I hadn’t seen anything like this since my dentist pulled out his little instruments of torture from a sanitized packet. Perhaps, there was some infectious disease rampant in Granite Quarry and the cutlery had to go through some sterilization process and couldn’t be touch by human hands before being used. Ironically, The Healthy One came down with some sort of stomach bug the next day.

The fork and knife are snug in bed. The spoon had run away with the dish.

4 1/2 out of 5 stars

FOOD:  I ordered the Steak, Egg, and Cheese Wrap and, of course, a side of livermush. The Wrap was decent enough, but I would have liked it better with some salsa inside.

The livermush was very much like scrapple (see my Delaware report). This is not surprising given that it was first introduced by scrapple happy German farmers who had migrated from the Mid-Atlantic to the North Carolina Piedmont region in the mid-1700s. Livermush by law must be at least 30% hog liver. The rest is made up of ground pig parts mostly found above the neck. It is flavored with sage, salt, pepper, and cornmeal.

  

  

The Parisian, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimond de la Reyniere (1758-1837) who wrote the world’s first restaurant reviews (his byline must of taken up half the page) stated “everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted his name to become a term of opprobrium?” Alexandre, I suspect, would have been a big fan of livermush because as one commentator noted it contains “everything but the squeal”. I, on the other hand, thought it was just okay. I much preferred the scrapple I had in Delaware for two reasons. First, I could taste a much more funky liver flavor in the livermush than in the scrapple. Second, this livermush was grilled in a pan while the scrapple was deep fried. Deep frying gave the scrapple a much more, hard, crunchy exterior than the grilled livermush and my palate just preferred more crunch and less mush.

Both The Healthy One and my sister readily declined to order a side of the livermush and even did not want a taste of mine. The Healthy One went “traditional” and got scrambled eggs, bacon, and potatoes which she thought were all very tasty.

My sister went “big league” and got the Open Face Steak Biscuit with Gravy.  She thought it was excellent but could not clean her plate. She should be sent down to the minors.

4 out of 5 stars

COFFEE:  The coffee was not memorable – neither great nor awful.

3 out of 5 stars

SERVICE: The waitress, who also happened to be one of the co-owners, was very nice and welcoming. She kept calling The Healthy One “sweetheart”.  I thought a waitress, who I guessed to be in her 30s, calling an older female customer “sweetheart” was both endearing and disconcerting. I just couldn’t help but remembering that the caretakers in my mother-in-law’s assisted living facility often called their charges “sweetheart”.

5 out of 5 stars

COST: $22.00 with tip. This was the first breakfast place we’ve been to that offered a senior discount and it was a significant one at 10%. I am both discomfited and pleased to say we qualified.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT GRANITE QUARRY:  A few words about Granite Quarry are probably too many words about this small town of 3000 people. Quaintness and charm are not to be found here.

A little “digging” on the internet turned up the fact that there is still some quarrying done in Granite Quarry but the town is well past its stone age heyday.  Curbing stones once quarried here can be found in cities all over the United States.

There wasn’t much going on as we took a post-breakfast walk up and down the not so beautiful Route 52 corridor. We passed a few small businesses, including the ubiquitous North Carolina barbeque establishment. We did stop in a small grocery store and I bought a can of Cheerwine, a locally produced, super-carbonated soda that taste nothing like wine.

BURN THOSE BREAKFAST CALORIES OFF:

-          - Walked around the pretty little town of Pittsboro NC.

-         -  Walked the length of downtown Chapel Hill and the campus of the University of North Carolina.

November 7, 2016

NEXT UP: The plan is to take the winter off and then visit 6 states in the Southwest in the Spring: Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Arkansas.