Local Honey

Green Valley General Store
Bodenham, Tennessee
Hiighway 64 between Lynchburg and Lewiston

Heading west through southern Tennessee on Highway 64, you'll no doubt want to stop off and check out the Jack Daniel's distillery if you're a whiskey buff. If your inclinations also run towards pork, or southern foods in general, you might as well pull in at the Green Valley General Store.

You'll know you're getting close when you see a bunch of farm equipment rusting about outside. When you get throught he door you'll find an array of Southern staples...chow chows and other pickled whatnots, fried pies from peach to cherry to key lime, as well as nuts and nicknacks too numerous to catalog. In additon you'll find local honeys of all description, no doubt the sweetest of which is the proprietress, Ms. Becky. She was in there making biscuits when I showed up, which is always a good sign. I picked out a ham biscuit, and she mentioned that the bacon and cheese sandwiches could be heated up as well. I went with the biscuit, as I'm on a bit of a health kick, as you've no doubt noticed. I told her I was up to and she said that I didn't look as though I'd been living on barbecue for a week and a half. I put that down to the fact that I was wearing my most billowy of shirts.

Bodenham also lies well within what my buddy Teyo refers to as the Sundrop belt, a blessed geographic region that runs through the tops of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, as well as southern Tennessee, and at least as far north as Nashville on a good day. Sundrop, to the uninitiated, is a carbonated beverage something like Mountain Dew. In fact, in a blind taste test, anything could happen. I don't think I know any blind people yet, so we'll have to come back to that when and if the conditions present themselves. For the time being, I grabbed one out of the cooler. All told, I walked out with a country ham biscuit, a sack each of pumpkin seeds and dried peas, some green tomato relish (which turned out to be really first-rate) and the cold drink.

Speaking of cold drinks, having travelled around a bit, I've noticed that my fellow Americans and I diverge widely on how to refer generically to carbonated beverages. As a boy, I went to the movies once with my neighbors, who grew up somewhere north of Kentucky. At that time, though less so now, I mentally lumped that all into one hazy geography as "the North". We were all four of us sharing a huge drink and bucket of popcorn. Just as Indy was handing some Nazi his ass, my friend asked me to pass the pop. Perplexed, I handed him the corn. No, he said, the pop. My hand to God, I had no idea what he was talking about. Finally, he took it out of my hand and I figured it out. Other Northerners of my acquaintance, my cousins from Michigan, also say pop. Myself, I grew up calling anything with bubbles that wasn't beer Coke, that being a general term for a range of sodas running from Sprite to Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, and maybe even Tab, as far as I know. That's coming from East Tennessee. I'll admit it lends itself to misinterpretation, but somehow we've survived. I've also heard, as I imagine you have, cola, soda, bubbly water, and cold drinks. My buddy Rodney once found himself totally at a loss at the Piggly Wiggly when some kid came in looking for the hot cold drinks. After a lot of head scratching, describing and gesticulating, it was determined that what he was after was unrefrigerated sodas. Hot cold drinks.

Back to the biscuit, the star of our show. Country ham on a reheated biscuit. They makes biscuits fresh on site, it's just that when I was there Becky was still in the process of doing so for the afternoon, so what was available was from the morning. I'm a big fan of the biscuit, and miss them when I'm overseas. In Japan, at KFC, you get a roll. How's that for a slap in the face? Even reheated these were good, though the original intent, fresh from the oven, was no doubt what God and Becky intended. The ham itself was just what country ham should be. Salty, but not unbearably so, chewy, rich and savory. The biscuit had absorbed some of the aura of the meat, and was, in spite of its morning on the shelf, flaky and fine.

And so, without warning Bodenham as blessed me with an unexpected pork treat. I don't know why I was surprised. It's got "ham" right there in the name.