Hog farms are North Carolina's number-one commodity (http://www.ncagr.com/stat...) and as such, the pig plays an important role in state cuisine. As in the rest of the South, pork meat particularly ham, bacon, smoked ham hocks and salt pork and pork fat fatback and lard are highly popular flavoring ingredients. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no part of the pig is wasted. Livermush, a delicacy that includes pig liver, parts of the head, and cornmeal is a favorite delicacy. The town of Shelby, NC has an annual festival celebrating the tradition of livermush and barbecue. A great local delicacy — albeit one that most people won't touch, if they weren't raised eating it — is chitterlings most often abbreviated to chitlings or chitlins, aka pig intestines, which are thoroughly cleaned, boiled and fried. Small local companies like Neese's (http://www.neesesausage.com/) manufacture souse also called headcheese, liver pudding, pickled pigs' feet and C-loaf made from chitterlings. For the less adventurous, North Carolina offers plenty of mainstream ways to enjoy the humble pig:
Chicken is also a highly popular food; while it may not be as ubiquitous as pork, it's much beloved. Fried chicken is commonly served as part of a traditional Sunday dinner although a roast ham is an equally popular alternative. There's also the classic comfort-food of chicken and dumplings, and roast chicken is often served at a pig pickin' for those rare few who choose not to gorge on pork.
Thanks in large part to the African influences on the entire South, traditional Southern meals — particularly barbecues and buffets — are incomplete without a spread of vegetable side dishes, usually slow-cooked or deep-fried. These include greens collard, turnip, mustard or kale, slow-cooked in a large pot with ham, and sometimes served with cider vinegar; the leftover liquid, or pot liquor, makes a side dish in itself, cabbage boiled, or fried in bacon grease, green beans slow-cooked with ham, okra most often sliced thickly, dipped in cornmeal batter and deep-fried, tomatoes sliced fresh if ripe, or deep-fried in cornmeal if green, potatoes boiled if new, or made into potato salad with mayonnaise and seasonings, field peas boiled with ham and black-eyed peas simmered with salt pork and hot pepper. Sweet potatoes are also a major North Carolina crop; although they don't figure hugely into local cuisine, you'll find them baked, served in casseroles, occasionally raw on salads, or as a delectable pumpkin-like pie filling.
One of the most prominent vegetables in North Carolina cuisine, and Southern cuisine in general, is corn. Aside from boiled or grilled corn-on-the-cob, cornmeal is frequently used to make local favorites:
Also in the bread category are biscuits, which are round leavened breads usually made from buttermilk, and are often used as the litmus test for any good Southern cook. They're usually split down the middle and spread with butter and possibly some kind of jam, or used for making breakfast sandwiches.
Because of its large coastal area, seafood is also a popular item on North Carolina menus: fresh fish, shrimp, scallops, clams, oysters and crabs can be found across the state, particularly in the eastern half. Preparation tends to be simple rather than elaborate, emphasizing the fresh taste of the ingredients. Calabash-style seafood is popular throughout the state; this is dipped in evaporated milk, then a dry breading mixture, and deep-fried. There's also catfish, found in rivers throughout the state, usually served dredged in cornmeal and deep-fried.
Around the Winston-Salem area, there's a large Moravian settlement which specializes in local delicacies that aren't found elsewhere in the state. Moravian sugar cookies are paper-thin and extremely labor-intensive to make recipes can be found online, for those of curious natures and muscular arms, and available in a wide variety of flavors including ginger, spice, lemon, Key lime, butterscotch, chocolate and black walnut, as well as regular sugar. Moravian sugar cake is a leavened cake topped with melted butter and cinnamon sugar. Lovefeast buns are tasty potato rolls flavored with mace and citrus peel, a favorite during the holiday season.
A snack which may have originated in North Carolina, and is certainly popular throughout the state, is cheese straws, crispy baked strips of extruded dough flavored with copious amounts of Cheddar cheese and hot sauce.
Popular throughout the South is pimiento cheese often spelled "pimento" — at its simplest, a spreadable mixture of grated sharp cheddar cheese, pimiento strips and mayonnaise. It's usually made into sandwiches, often toasted so that it melts, and topped with lettuce and tomato; but you may also find it as a spread for crackers or celery sticks. It can be found in tubs at the grocery store or in convenience-store sandwiches, but the flavor tends to pale in comparison to homemade.
Perhaps North Carolina's most celebrated food is the addictive yeast-raised Krispy Kreme doughnut (http://www.krispykreme.com/), a tradition in Winston-Salem since 1937. These light, fluffy, heavenly-tasting fried confections are now available all over the US and internationally; connoisseurs claim that they're the best doughnuts on the planet. If you're lucky enough to visit a town that has a Krispy Kreme store, you can stop by when the red light is on to watch the fresh, hot doughnuts go through the glazing machine, and buy one or a whole dozen of them before the glaze has even fully set. It's a treat not to be missed, if you're in the state.
