I've been commissioned to write a piece for The Observer Magazine on my Appalachia trip, using my quest for banjo tunes and good food as a guide. For reasons of length and story-strength, the food aspect has been removed, and it's now a story about my search for the banjo. I'm really sad about that; I met so many great people and ate so much amazing Bar-B-Q on my food trip, and so I as I cut chunks out my article, I shall post them here instead.

(I still feel like a cheat though; one Bar-B-Q in North Carolina gave me a plate of luscious roast pork, wonderful red coleslaw and a bowl of delicate crispy hush-puppies and refused payment. I don't know how I will explain to him what happened without sounding like a freeloading journalist (I did try to pay!).)

‘Southern’ food, the slow-cooked meals that shimmer with love and lard, starts appearing in restaurants somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, where northern reserve meets southern hospitality and charm. I plunged right in at Allman’s Pit Cooked Bar-B-Q, a joint off the highway near Fredericksburg, a town full of civil war history, for a mid-morning sandwich of slow-cooked pork and lovingly-made ‘slaw’, drenched in thin-but-sweet barbeque sauce.

“Ah been here so long I don’t eat barbeque anymore,” drawled Mary Elizabeth Brown, “better known as ‘Mom’”, a small smiling black woman with two gold front teeth that twinkled as she showed me the electric ‘pit’ where every night for the last 51 years she has roasted 29 shoulders of pork.

“Every day ah make 6 gallons of slaw and 8 gallons of sauce- they ma mother’s recipes. I wrote them down before she died.”

Tales of how a man once allegedly offered Mom $10,000 for her sauce recipe resounded in my head as I set off, encouraged by the load in my stomach, into the foothills of the Appalachians that loomed large and blue above Fredericksburg.