After your compiler’s recent convenience store exchange about “sacks,” he is tempted to go back in and ask the clerk if she has any sweet milk or light bread.     The first of those delectables was covered in a recent column, and “light bread” is simply pre-sliced, enriched white loaf bread – Colonial, Sunbeam, Wonder, Merita – to dredge up some brands from both present and past.

     Your complier does not know why it is called, “light bread,” but he has heard it called that everywhere in Georgia he has ever lived (Fayette, Fulton, DeKalb, Clarke, and Gwinnett Counties – he has never lived out of Georgia, and never wishes to), and thus believes it to be fairly common usage.   And as an aside, he far prefers eating hamburgers and barbecue pork on untoasted light bread than on any bun that can be presented. a personal preference may be less common.

    His favorite way to eat light bread, however, is with a concoction his hometown of Brooks has long been famous for – Brunswick stew.  A local fellow named Charlie Evans (1873-1950) developed a recipe for the elixir back around the turn of the last century, and he and his sons, Bid and Aubrey, would host large barbeques and stew-makings up until about World War II.   The Evanses sold their recipe to two local men, who in 1949 began a commercial food processing plant in Downtown Brooks that would be a mainstay until the mid-1980s – Mask & Gay Food Products Co.   And Mask & Gay’s Brunswick stew was the gold standard as far as anyone in or around Brooks was concerned.   Shoot, M&G for many years processed stew for Poss’s in Athens, using Poss’s recipe.   The Lord only knows how much money the Poss family made from their decades-long monopoly on Sanford Stadium concessions, but your compiler will go to his grave believing it would have been many millions more had the Posses allowed M&G to use the M&G stew recipe rather than the Poss’s one, which your compiler tasted two bites of once and turned away in disgust, not willing even to take the remainder home for his dog.  Poss’s had some fine and memorable food, which your compiler and many other members of the Bulldog Nation recall fondly, but Brunswick stew was not among its finer offerings.

      Brunswick stew, as the Lord intends it to be made, consists of boiled and de-boned Boston butts, boiled and de-boned whole chickens, cans of crushed tomatoes, cans of whole-kernel corn, cans of creamed corn, onions, chicken broth, ketchup, mustard, butter, vinegar-based barbecue sauce, and spices.  Somewhere in Leviticus is a prohibition against adding potatoes, okra, and/or butterbeans to it – if you want vegetable soup, then make that, for crying out loud, but leave it out of your stew or old Charlie Evans and all the folks who ever worked at Mask & Gay might come back to haint you!  The secret to proper Brunswick stew, beyond the limited ingredient list, is the texture, and perfect texture is derived from running every solid ingredient – even the creamed corn – through a grinder.  If one can see even one whole grain of corn in a bowl of stew, it has not been ground properly.

     Once your stew is made (and your compiler has never tried it in smaller than a thirty-gallon pot), then there are three things you’ll need for a meal that will make you think you have died and gone to Heaven:   a) the beverage of your choice, b) a bottle of Tabasco sauce or the hot sauce of your choice, and c) several slices of fresh light bread.   Nothing else is needed, for perfection cannot be topped.

     The good news is that if you want to try some light bread in this classical way, a group of men in Brooks still make stew the old M&G way.   Watch your compiler’s Facebook account every fall as October heads into November, for the men of his church, Brooks UMC, make gallons and gallons of it to sell in the weeks before Thanksgiving each year.  And while the BUMC men don’t sell white bread to go along with it, they highly recommend it.

     Light bread – the perfect companion to a local nectar of the gods, Brooks-made Brunswick stew!