You'll also find red franks, black walnuts, and three brands of snuff.
Every two weeks a massive Peterbilt (nosing onto the scene in the exterior photo below) makes the run from North Carolina to central Brooklyn, replenishing this small, easy-going grocery with little-seen specialities like Mrs. Campbell's chow chow (16 oz., $3.29 as of several years ago). A "home-style Southern relish" — supply your own punchline for its other handle, "the great American put-on" — it's a loose vinegary blend of finely chopped cabbage, red bell peppers, and onion, in two styles, hot or sweet. (See a much coarser chow-chow from Pennsylvania's Millport Dairy.)
Some of these products surely found their way into the associated Country Kitchen Restaurant, a steam-table operation one block to the west that now, unfortunately, is closed. The store does offer a few snacks to enjoy on the spot, including a sage sausage ($2, while they last each day), slit and dressed with a spoonful of chow chow, and "stage planks" (two-pack, $1), iced, molasses-flavored ginger cookies. According to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, "the spicy treat is named for the Mississippi River and the steamboat stage plank, or gangplank, the movable walkway connecting a boat to the shore."
Also shown: across the street, a Georgia-rooted produce market of long standing; in much the same location a number of years ago, a nuts-and-produce truck bearing Georgia plates, with an ad hoc stand marked "shotgun potatoes and melon"; down the road, a florist and, presumably, its delivery wagon.
Carolina Country Store
2001 Atlantic Ave. (Roosevelt Pl.-Saratoga Ave.), Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
718-498-8033
