Taber's
Chicken Bog

Rice comes up the Carolina coast

From the early 1700s until the Civil War, South Carolina grew more rice than anywhere else in America. The know-how to grow it in tidal swamps came with enslaved West Africans from the Rice Coast — and so did the habit of cooking rice and meat together in one pot. Carolina Gold made the Lowcountry rich in the 1780s. The pot came along with it.

A word travels, and a dish with it

Pilau, perloo, purlow, pillow — all cousins of pilaf, a Persian and Turkish word for a rice dish that wandered into English by way of French. Every Lowcountry kitchen had its own spelling and its own version. Charleston kept the rice fluffy. Georgetown County liked it moister. Head inland toward the Pee Dee, and it got wetter still.

The Pee Dee makes it its own

The northeast corner of the state never had Charleston's tidal rice fortunes. What it had were farms, hogs, chickens, and a lot of mouths to feed at once. Enslaved cooks simmered chicken, sausage, onion, and rice together in iron washpots over open fires until it was one thing — wet enough to hold together on a plate, rich enough to carry a workday. One Horry County account remembers two of those cooks by name: Gibbie and Pody.

Where the name came from is argued at every table. Food writer James Villas put it plainly: a bog, unlike a pilau, is any stew with wet, soggy rice. Others swear it's for the swampy country it comes from. Either way, it stuck.

"A very big pot filled with 400 pounds of chicken, 150 pounds of good pork sausage and 100 pounds of rice will feed at least 1,000 people."

Dr. David Shields, Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina

Politics, preaching, and a pot

At a crossroads called Galivants Ferry, on the western edge of Horry County, candidates started speaking from a stump during Wade Hampton's 1876 run for governor. By 1880 the merchant J.W. Holliday had made it a fixture at his store, and the Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting has been held every election year since — one of the oldest political gatherings in the country. Speeches, gospel music, clogging, and chicken bog.

That's the pattern for the whole region. Church homecomings, family reunions, fire-department fundraisers, Friday-night ballgames: if there's a crowd in the Pee Dee, somebody's stirring a pot.

Tobacco country

When bright-leaf tobacco took over the Pee Dee, it brought the busiest weeks of the farm year: putting in tobacco, July and August, when croppers, handers, loopers, and barn crews worked from first light until the last barn was full. Somebody had to feed all of them, and one pot that fed forty was the answer. By the 1920s, bog was the standard crowd meal of northeast South Carolina, cooked on burners pulled out of old tobacco barns.

Loris throws a Bog-Off

In 1980, Loris put a chicken bog cooking contest on the calendar for the third Saturday in October, and it's been there every year since. The Loris Bog-Off now draws around 35,000 people a year, and somewhere along the way the town started calling itself the Chicken Bog Capital of the World. Nobody's argued.

It's on a marker now

On February 9, 2023, Horry County unveiled a "Hungry for History" marker in front of the Loris Library on Main Street. It's cast in metal, so it's settled.