Chicken Bog

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joey.

Where are you calling from?

Greenville, South Carolina.

Greenville, South Carolina. What’s going on in Greenville?

Well, I grew up in the low country of South Carolina.

And we had a dish there called chicken bog.

And I know y’all like regional dishes.

Love them.

And this chicken bog is made of rice and chicken and country sausage and lots of black pepper.

And my dad used to make this for some of his workmen periodically.

We’d make it in a big iron pot with a gas burner or a burner that came out of an old tobacco barn.

And like Friday at 5 o’clock, we’d make this up and have some slaw with it and corn dodgers and light bread and Pepsi.

And that was kind of a celebration for us.

I’m getting hungry.

What’s a corn dodger, by the way?

A hush puppy.

Okay.

-huh.

But the whole big dish with chicken bog, is that what you called it?

B-O-G?

B-O-G.

I have to say that I don’t know that from growing up in Missouri.

Never heard of it.

Okay.

Well, even here in Greenville, people don’t know that term.

So, I mean, I’m only 250 miles away from home.

Oh, really?

They don’t know that.

And we also used to, some people call it chicken perlo.

There’s another similar dish called backbone and rice,

Which is made of pork backbone cooked in the same way.

Now, perlo I have heard of, and this is because perlo has a really interesting history.

Have you ever heard of rice pilaf?

Yeah.

It’s directly related to that.

Perlo and pilaf come from the same roots.

It’s a Turkish or Persian word, and they’re all rice dishes.

I mean, they’re made a variety of different ways, but it comes into English probably from French and maybe from Spanish.

But it’s got a really rich, incredible history.

Food words tend to travel pretty well, and they tend to be well-recorded and in print.

Okay.

Yeah, so I’ve seen chicken perlo, pilaf, pillow, perloo.

And perlo has a similar history, I’d bet, to bog, chicken bog,

Which is it’s mainly used in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

Okay.

So it’s interesting.

But so chicken bog, so you get together.

What do you do with the chicken?

You fry it?

You boil it?

Well, like I say, you’ve got to have a big iron pot.

Yeah.

And you get the water boiling, you pour the rice and let it cook.

And then in the meantime, you’re preparing the chicken.

And you just basically put the whole chicken in there.

It’s been, you know, just the whole chicken in there.

And it will boil to pieces.

And then towards the end, you put the sausage and the pepper.

And, Joey, do you have a special name for that kind of gathering?

A bog-a-thon?

No, no.

Or competitions or anything like that?

I mean, just to get together and eat like that, it’s just, you know, there’s no name for it.

But it sounds like a good group entertainment, though.

I mean, it sounds like something you do with friends or family, right?

It’s not something that you don’t get to go by yourself to the kitchen and make chicken bog.

Well, you can, but, yeah, generally it’s an event, like something that you would hold after work.

And it’s usually kind of on the blue-collar end of the spectrum.

Sure, like a pig roast or a fish fry.

Exactly.

Joey, thanks for sharing that with us.

Bog, that’s an interesting regional food dish.

I did not know that.

I had that one to my list of foods to eat when I traveled around the country.

Well, I enjoy your show very much.

Thank you for calling us today.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We could do a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week show about food words,

So I hesitate to say this, but you know what?

What the hay?

Oh, say it.

If you’ve got some regional food words you’d like to share with us,

By all means give us a call.

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