Cook's Corner: Southern barbecue hash.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Linda Cicero

Q: I am looking for the recipe for old-fashioned barbecue hash. It possibly contained chicken along with the barbecued pork. _ Pat Lord

A: I was not familiar with the dish, so I consulted my Great Aunt Carrie, a South Carolina native. "Barbecue hash was the way we made sure not a scrap was wasted when we'd barbecue a whole pig," she explained.

"We'd stew the meat off the bones, plus any pieces of meat that were too close to the fire and got hard or blackened. We'd have a big cast iron pot going, and as we were carving the pork we'd just put in all the pieces we wouldn't be serving and covered it with water and all the same ingredients we'd be putting in the barbecue sauce."

Modern recipes for barbecue hash start with uncooked meat. The trick is in the cooking liquid, which reflects both regional tastes and the cook's preferences. Recipes I browsed included mustard, Worcestershire, Tabasco or chile peppers, ketchup or bottled barbecue sauce, whiskey and bourbon.

Some suggested serving it over rice or grits or as an open-faced sandwich. Some said the hash should be soupy, others that it should be cooked to a pudding-like consistency. I even found a treatise …