ISSUE 78, CHICKENS, Part 3: Chicken Bog
Chicken Bog
Chicken bog is a wet chicken pilau. You can think of it as a yardbird risotto—with the rice cooked more soft than hard, intermingled with well stewed shreds of chicken. Quintessential Lowcountry, it secured its name in the first decade of the twentieth century. The name surfaced in print in a 1906 article about Charlestonians partying up in the mountains resorts near Brevard, North Carolina, during the hot season: Dr. Allison fed his guests at Elk Lodge on “barbecue and chicken bog.”
Chicken Bog was a dish that became an event, much like barbecue, or Pine Bark Stew. In a newspaper article of 1920, we hear that “In the fall of 1918 a most successful Chicken Bog was held at Dalcho School [in Dillon].” All of these dishes were the focus of outdoor social gatherings. They were cooked by men instead of women in the open air for public sociability.
This meant it was cooked in large vessels over open fires, so the recipes were not scaled to domestic family consumption. This is worth keeping in mind because rice is extremely difficult to cook to a dry “every grain separate” state in cauldrons without a good deal of scorching. But if it is being cooked wet the scorching problem diminishes. Bog was a chicken pilau made wet to prevent being ruined in the difficult to control temperatures of open air cook fires.
Was Chicken Bog being cooked in the Lowcountry before it got its distinctive name? What other names might it have borne prior to 1906? When you consider a name such as “chicken and rice” the name will encompass “fried chicken and rice” and “chicken pilau.” The name pops up a good deal in description of picnics in the 1900-1910 period, but context does not permit a sure identification of the dish as a bog.
Two early centers of boggery were Dillon and Manning South Carolina. From 1918 to 1920 numbers of public entertainments occurred there in which chicken bog was either the focus of outdoor revelry, or a chief side to barbecue. For the first decades of the twentieth century the chief issue in making chicken bog had to do with how you treated the chicken. You put them into the cauldron with water first and cooked them till the meat slipped off the bones. The question? Did you fish the chickens out of the broth and debone them or did you prepare the bog leaving the bones in the mix. The answer often depended on the scale of the entertainment and the numbers of cooks available for labor. Every printed recipe calls for deboning by many oral histories record tossing the bones out of one’s plate as part of the experience. The early formula was simple: chicken, water, salt, pepper, rice. In the 1960s sliced smoked sausage came into the pot. Hubert M. Tyler of Gallivant’s Ferry claimed to have been the first to introduce the sausage—but that claim has been disputed. While seasoning might be creative (onion salt, celery salt, mace, cayenne), chicken bog never called for Worcestershire Sauce, a necessary ingredients in other event dishes such as Pine Bark Stew, Cat Fish Stew, Okra Soup, and Cooter Soup. Of the surviving publishes recipes, the ones that hew most closely to the spirit of the dish as a large scale public feed tend to be quite general in their formulae: “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.
In the 1980s Chicken Bog started attracting notice around the country. Loris SC a Bog-off, a Chicken Bog cooking contest. Newspapers in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Ohio offered recipes. These newspapers scaled the dish to family size, often added a vegetable such as chopped green pepper or onions, and most included the sausage. Of the newspaper recipes published after 1970, this from 1971 adheres closest to the original vision of chicken bog. It appeared in the Charleston News and Courier on August 1, 1971.
Sources: “Gay Times at Brevard,” Charleston Evening Post (September 3, 1906), 2. “A Successful Chicken Bog,” The Dillon Herald (May 20 1920), 17. David Crumpler, “His Chicken Bog Keeps “Em Comin’,” .” The News and Courier & Evening Post (April 27, 1980), 15. “Mystery of Chicken Bog,” Anderson Independent-Mail (May 16, 1982), 8.