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“Learn how to trim meat, to skin the membrane off the ribs. They’ll look a whole lot better. Use good charcoal and good wood – we use apple wood and cherry wood. Get yourself a good dry rub and a good sauce. Play around with it until you find your own flavor. Cooking time is about 20 hours for a whole hog. You can cook it faster but it won’t be nearly as good.”

John Wheeler, barbecue pitmaster, Southhaven, Mississippi

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While passing through Tennessee, remember to stop for a MoonPie and an RC Cola. MoonPies – chocolate-covered marshmallow and cookie sandwiches – have been baked in Chattanooga for nearly 100 years and are a gas station staple across the South. Georgia-based RC Cola came onto the scene in the 1930s, and the two treats have been inseparable ever since.

Cross the Great Smokies and spend the night in Asheville, North Carolina. A favorite of jazz-age luminaries such as F Scott Fitzgerald, this stylish mountain town is notable for its art deco architecture and arty, liberal-minded residents. Spend the night at the Grove Park Inn, an Arts and Crafts–style colossus of red tile and gray stone clinging to the side of a mountain like a fairy-tale castle. Inside are 510 rooms, numerous shops and restaurants and a grotto-like basement spa complete with fake waterfall.

In the morning, call in to the self-consciously rustic Mast General Store to load up on old-fashioned candy like horehound drops and Squirrel Nut Zippers. Pick up a jar of sourwood honey – a pale, slightly spicy honey gathered from bees that feed on the sourwood trees of the southern Appalachians. You may see highway-side vendors in these parts hawking “authentic sourwood”. They’re not always telling the truth. Grab a cold Cheerwine for the road – the syrupy burgundy-colored soda is made in Salisbury, NC.

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BOILED PEANUTS

If you spot a hand-lettered sign on a house or gas station window advertising the sale of “BPs” while you’re driving, you know you’re in boiled peanut territory. These Carolinas roadside delicacies are immature or “green” peanuts boiled in their shells, then scooped right out of the salty brine and into a big Styrofoam cup. They’re much softer than roasted peanuts, with a mildly nutty flavor.

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If you’re passing through South Carolina’s sleepy state capital of Columbia around lunchtime, stop in for a pimento cheeseburger at the Rockaway Athletic Club. Pimento cheese consists of grated cheddar, mayo and chopped sweet peppers. Spread on white bread, it’s a staple of Southern school cafeteria lunches. The Rockaway, a rather ordinary sports bar and grill, creates an aura of secretiveness by forgoing a sign and having its main entrance in a parking lot facing away from the street. But the thick, drippy pimento cheeseburgers are worth the search.

A short detour off Hwy 26 takes you into the town of Holly Hill, where the Holly Hill Country Restaurant serves up retro country cooking in a cafeteria setting. Stop off for an enormous plate of fried chicken, okra and mac ’n’ cheese or whatever else is on the daily menu.

Gardenia-scented Charleston is heaven for food and architecture lovers. Downtown is neatly contained on a small peninsula; most of the action is found below Calhoun St. Stroll the cobblestone back streets admiring the multicolored antebellum mansions before digging into the port city’s refined seafood delicacies.

Right in the middle of the historic downtown action, casual Hyman’s Seafood is always slammed with tourists, local families and College of Charleston students. Expect a wait. The sherried she-crab soup, a Charleston classic, is worth it. Or go for one of the irrationally huge made-for-two (or five!) mixed seafood platters.

The Charleston Cooks! kitchen store (owned by the same people who run S.N.O.B.) offers “Taste of the Lowcountry” cooking classes. Guests sit back and sip wine as instructors prepare dishes like stuffed squash, red rice and blackened pork tenderloin.

Just across Charleston Harbor is the resort