Father Knows Best

You have to want to go to Springfield, South Carolina, west of Orangeburg in a town that time has seemingly forgot, except for the Governor’s Frog Jump and International Egg Strike and, oh yes, Goodland Barbecue restaurant. Look for the jumble of pickup trucks outside, cueing up to the restaurant like hogs at a trough.

They’re all there to get a week’s worth of food — for $8 on weekdays, a little more on weekends (but a dollar off if you bring your church bulletin). Once you get inside, do like my daddy would have done, look over the buffet before even think about getting in line.

It’s not by accident that the potatoes and rice and hush puppies and other starchy foods are usually first on a buffet. Often the best is last, which is where the barbecue was, along with the pork skins — and what was easily the best thing I ate at Goodland, the ribs.

Next, make sure you’re standing in the line behind everyone else in your party, even if there are only two of you. That way you can issue advisories to those in front of you such as, “Look at that fried okra.” Or “MMM, m, Mmmm: Potato salad made with boiled eggs.” While I usually find fried okra and potato salad disappointing on buffets, that doesn’t mean they always are. So I prey upon the preternatural weakness on the part of my wife for fried okra or my sister’s irrational love of potato salad, even if it’s mediocre, so they’ll pile up their plates and then I have advantage of their opinion without taking up room on my plate or in my stomach. (By the way, Goodland has a sign at the front of the line that asks patrons to wait until they get to their tables to begin eating. That may seem obvious from a sanitary perspective but by the time I got to the end of the line, I needed the reminder to keep me from pinching at the pulled pork.)

Rule two: Be sure to look at what others are doing. As I was checking out the multiple rice choices, I noticed that the woman behind me was using the sweet-potato ladle to dip out the pan juices that had mixed with the barbecue sauce to form a thick gel. They’d sort of caramelized with the sweet sauce in the bottom of the pan. “Is that good chicken,” I asked her, not even noticing it was chicken when I went by. “Gravy’s as good as the chicken,” she said. “Here, let me borrow that ladle while you have it out,” I said.

Rule three — and I don’t need to tell you this, but it’s so easy to say and so hard to do. Take small portions, no matter how good it looks and how much you like it. Unlike church picnic, they’re not likely to run out of something.

Consider doing what I did: As you can see, I got just a little of the gooey chicken, one pork rind to see whether it was potato-chip crunchy, a good portion of the barbecue (It’s very lean and perfectly moist), a big enough rib so I could judge both its taste and texture (I resisting getting two to check for consistency), some rice and, OK, a whole bunch of collards (I could see they were almost chunky with black pepper and shiny with seasoning, i.e., fat back.

By the way, the ribs were cooked to perfection, slightly chewy, so that you had to pull a little to get them off the bone and not in the least soggy. In short, first-rate).

Now look at my wife’s plate.

She loaded up on the first thing she saw, sweet potatoes, which turned out to be too sweet and cinnamony for my taste, but which suited my wife’s sweet tooth; two kinds of rice and lots of it (she IS from South Carolina) a whole bunch of butterbeans and green beans; a hush puppy I induced her to get; a little barbecue, a tiny pork skin and a little bit of barbecue hash, all because she ran out of room — DUH! That’s why she had to get a separate plate for slaw and potato salad.

Which is not a bad strategy. Nothing other than the stares of other people (and perhaps the hostess) should keep you from utilizing multiple plates. However, if you’re an innately shy person like myself, you can, without attracting undue attention, assemble a collection of small bowls to assemble your own mini-buffet. You’ll that notice that, at my suggestion, my wife used a separate bowl for her slaw and potato salad. I’m so glad because the potato salad was a good as I’ve ever had, worth a trip in itself. The decor, in fact, is worth a visit. Instead of farm implements and 19- and early 20-century “junque” collected by some interior decorator, the photographs and memorabilia commemorate the hunter-gatherer culture of this area of South Carolina, with an incredible selection of largemouth bass, photos of catfish weighing more than my first- and second-born children combined, and a marvelous collection of hunting dogs, some nearly as fine as my springer spaniel.

Finally, a word about etiquette. Buffets like this where you can eat fried fish and chicken, three kinds of barbecue, homemade vegetables and side dishes and other delights until you feel as if you’re going to pop will be a thing of the past if we aren’t careful not to waste food. My Pennsylvannia mother had an old saying about this: “Better bad belly burst than good food waste.” The good at Goodland is, in fact, way too good to waste. Y’all behave and be nice.