The Cure for Allan Benton’s Blues

It’s easy to miss the small lackluster cinderblock building on Highway 411 in Madisonville, Tenn., that houses what are arguably the best country hams around. Even the big red metal arrow emblazoned with the words “Country Ham,” fails to indicate that this is the place from which more than 40 chefs at some of Manhattan’s finest restaurants and the Biltmore Estate, Grove Park Inn, and Blackberry Farm order their ham and bacon products. Upon closer inspection, visitors can make out the words “Benton’s Country Ham—We cure ’em” in none-too-big lettering painted on the side of the innocuous tan building, though those words have led to write ups in Gourmet, Saveur and Southern Living. However, just one waft of the powerful smell of hickory smoke and pork provides olfactory confirmation that Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams is indeed the place that ham lovers seek. 

Roots and Perseverance

Allan Benton had a hardscrabble, self-sufficient, Appalachian upbringing in Scott County, Va., just over the state line from Kingsport, Tenn. 

“I’m just an ol’ hillbilly,” says Benton. “I was born so far back up in the hills you had to look straight up to see daylight. We got our water from the springhouse. We had outdoor toilets. It was just a subsistence living. We raised everything we ate. ”

Living with and eating from the land gave Benton the foundation for his calling in life, though it took him awhile to heed that call. Benton got his undergrad degree at University of Tennessee Knoxville and then earned a master’s in psychology from Middle Tennessee University. Just about as soon as he began working as a high school counselor he knew he’d made a mistake. His paycheck and advancement prospects gave him the blues, and soon he began looking around for an altogether different line of work.

It just so happened that a local Madisonville man, Albert Hicks, had decided he was going to shut down his tiny ham-curing operation where area farmers had brought their slaughtered hogs for decades. Benton heard about Hicks’ decision and approached the man about taking over the business. 

In 1973, Hicks agreed to lease Benton the small barn in which the curing business was located behind his house and teach Benton all he knew about ham curing. Of course, because of his good country upbringing in Virginia, Benton already knew a thing or two about turning butchered hogs into tasty slabs of meat; however, he also wrote to university professors all over the Southeast to get their suggestions on curing meat and running a business.

Though Benton says he got great advice and help from Hicks and the university professors on various aspects of the ham curing business, he looked back to his youth for his curing recipe—salt, brown sugar, black and red pepper. Within five years, Benton moved the operation to its present location and built a 5,000-square-foot facility on Highway 411, but it took a long while to make the business successful.

“The first 20 years I was in business I would literally lay awake at night wondering how much longer I could make this thing hold together,” recalls Benton. “I thought we were going to starve to death. Even the next seven or eight years were pretty lean.” 

Benton never put much stock in advertising. There was never any catalog, no publicist, not even so much as a brochure to highlight his products. He was always one to believe that business is based on personal relationships. That strong inclination toward face-to-face contact and handshakes, coupled with a lack of investment funds in the early years, meant that Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams was dependent upon word of mouth. 

Then one mouth in particular changed everything.

No Longer a Secret

Word of mouth hadn’t been bad to Benton, who by 1991 had been doing business with Chef Bob Carter at Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tenn., for years. When Carter left Blackberry Farm to start Peninsula Grill in Charleston, S.C., the resort hired a new chef named John Fleer. Benton admits that since he no longer personally delivered his products, he didn’t really realize the grandeur and status of the 4,200-acre luxury resort (reportedly an Oprah favorite). 

Chef Fleer decided he liked Benton’s products so much he wanted to feature them prominently on the resort’s dining menu along with the Benton name. Benton said OK, though he was perplexed that anyone would want to do such a thing and had no idea what impact that would have on him and his business. 

Fleer, who in 2007 left Blackberry Farm, influenced some of the best chefs at some of the finest restaurants all over the nation, and Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams was catapulted to a whole new level.

“John singlehandedly started putting out the word about my products to the chefs who would visit Blackberry Farm,” Benton said. “That’s when my phone started ringing. I couldn’t begin to repay John and the Beall family for what they’ve done for us. It’s been an incredible relationship. I don’t think I would be in business today, literally, were it not for that relationship with Blackberry Farm.” 

As a side note, Fleer—a North Carolina native—has since partnered with Sally Eason, owner of Sunburst Trout Farm in Canton, N.C., whom Fleer met while working at Blackberry Farm. The two have opened a restaurant in Cashiers, N.C., where Benton’s ham and Eason’s trout are often served. 

Really Southern Ham

The folks at Southern Foodways Alliance have also been influential in spreading the word about Benton’s. SFA is an eminent foodie group associated with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford that “documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.” Here’s how Benton says he got involved with the SFA:

The SFA director is John T. Edge. John T. called me, oh, it’s been eight or nine years ago now I guess, and invited me to come down there. He told me a little about the organization and invited me down. Told me they were gonna have a country ham tastin’ and he would like to see me participate. I told him that sounded like fun, that I supported what his organization was doin’, and I’d like to come. He said, ‘Well, it’s in October,’ and I said, ‘Wait. If it’s in October, I can’t come.’ I said, ‘I’m too busy. I just can’t get loose. October’s my second best month.’ 

He said he wanted to feed about 400 people. I said, ‘I’ll tell ya what I’ll do. I’ll furnish the hams.’ He said, ‘Enough to feed 400?’ I said, ‘I’ll send ya 20 or 25 hams. Won’t cost ya a thing. I’d like to help. It sounds like something I’d support.’ He said, ‘No, I want you to come.’ I said, ‘I just can’t come.’ 

Well, he called me back the next day. He told me, he said, ‘I thought about this all night.’ He said, ‘You just don’t know what you’re sayin’ no to. You simply have to come down here.’ He told me, said there was goin’ to be chefs from all over the country, newspaper people, magazines. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d still be glad to send it down there.’ He said, ‘No, I want you to come.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll just come.’ 

What I didn’t know until later when he called me again a few weeks before I was to come down there was that he wanted me to cook and serve my ham to these chefs myself. I said, ‘Mr. Edge, I can’t do that. I’m not a cook or a chef. I’m just a hillbilly sellin’ bacon. You’ve got the wrong guy.’ He said, ‘No, no. I want you to prepare it.’ I said, ‘You’re not hearin’ what I’m sayin’. If that’s what you want you’re gonna have to find somebody else ’cause I can’t do that.’ He said, ‘No, I’ve already got it on the agenda and I’ve already told these people you’re going to do this.’ He said, ‘Don’t you fix it at your own house?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, how do you prepare it at home?’ I said, ‘We use it sliced really thin like the prosciutto. We just throw it in the pan and fry it like hillbillies.’ He said, ‘Well, you want to try to feed these people down here that way?’ I said, ‘John T, if you want me to feed them that’s the only way I know how to fix it.’ He said, ‘Well, I want you to do it.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll do it if that’s what you want me to do.’

Benton and his wife Sharon headed down to Oxford. Benton felt sick worrying about the fact he’d agreed to serve his ham at the Folkways event. He just knew the sophisticated chefs were not going to react well to him and his “hillbilly-style” ham. Once there, Benton fried up his ham in thick slabs as well as sliced thin prosciutto-style, and that was all it took. Chefs came up all night introducing him or herself and wanting to buy Benton’s products.

“Those chefs flipped out over that stuff and now that accounts for so much of our sales,” Benton said. “Plus, they like that smoked bacon. All of that has lit our world up.”

In 2007, the SFA presented Benton with the Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award, which “goes to an individual whom all thinking eaters should know, the sort of person who has made an indelible mark upon our cuisine and our culture, the sort of person who has set regional standards and catalyzed national dialogues.” The award is named for the great Southern chef from Mississippi who honored the regional cuisine from its beautiful, unadorned beginnings to its role as quintessential society food. 

Benton also was named to SFA’s Fellowship of Southern Farmers, Artisans, and Chefs, which fosters camaraderie and mentorship, honoring the bounty of the South and the hands that grow, nurture and interpret its harvest.

“Allan is one of America’s great artisans,” said SFA Director John T. Edge. “He’s a master of the smokehouse, and a gentleman of the first order.”

The Secret of Success

Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams has no real secrets. Benton buys butchered heritage hogs, mostly from Georgia, Alabama and Virginia, some from the Midwest. Southern heritage hogs are old breeds typically descended from hearty Spanish hogs, rather than the British breeds historically associated with Northern states. Like their ancestors, the 21st century variety Benton uses has been grain fed in the pasture and raised without antibiotics. 

Benton’s uses a traditional dry-curing method. Some 400 to 600 heritage hog hams are trucked in every week and rubbed down with salt, brown sugar and sodium nitrate. Those destined to age for a year or more have black and red pepper in the cure mix, which are ingredients from Benton’s family recipe. All the hams are left in the cooler for about two weeks and then cured again. The hams stay in the cooler for two months at 38 to 40 degrees, then moved into another cooler and kept at 45 degrees for about two more months and finally hung by hooks on wooden racks at ambient temperature (75 degrees or above) for at least 35 days but as long as two years. 

Bacon bellies undergo the same process but are cured only once, without pepper, and for a shorter time span. They are in the first cooler for about 10 days, the second cooler for another 10 days, and then hung out for another 10 days. 

Benton smokes his pork in a small woodstove smokehouse back behind the Benton’s building. Hickory is the predominant smoking wood, with a little applewood thrown in.  Some folks actually prefer it unsmoked so Benton makes that available as well. 

Benton, like his ham, is aging quite well. The energetic sexagenarian still works 60 to 65 hours, six or seven days a week. There was a time when working those kind of long hours was a necessity. Now, thanks to a few good people working with him, he does it just because he loves his work.

Benton’s longest serving employee is Arthur Atkins. Atkins has worked for Benton for 37 years, ever since Benton took over the business back in the ’70s. Atkins is 75 now and usually can be found cutting meats for walk-in customers and ringing up their purchases at the small metal-topped sales counter. He says with a straight face but a tell-tale gleam in his eye that he’s given Benton his “20-year notice” so Benton could find someone to replace him. Atkins says he’ll be at Benton’s “until the funeral home comes to get me.”

Benton speaks highly of Atkins and of Randy Watson. Watson has been with the operation for a dozen years. Benton says Watson would be considered his master distiller if he were in the whiskey business, a reference to Watson’s expert handling of the curing process. 

Solid business success has finally made it to Benton’s doorway. He says he sold more ham and bacon last year than ever, 45 percent more than the year before. He figures his operation ships 6,000 to 7,000 pounds a week in bacon and 7,000 to 8,000 pounds of ham weekly. Those aren’t big numbers for some corporate conglomerate food processor but for a tiny little operation that doesn’t bother with advertising, those are some impressive sums. 

Benton’s little ham shop puts out some ham and bacon that’s big on flavor. And Benton himself, though small in stature, has a big heart that he puts into his work and his dealings with people. These two qualities have made it possible for Benton to make a name for himself not only among the ranks of sophisticated chefs but in many a local kitchen as well.

What bacon is supposed to taste like

My first taste of a Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams product was at Tellico Grains Bakery in Tellico Plains, Tenn. Allan Benton had suggested that he and I have lunch together, and so we met up at the sandwhich shop in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains near the western edge of the Cherokee National Forest. 

Bakery owners Stuart and Anissa Shull have carefully remodeled an old downtown building that housed the Tellico Bank and Trust 103 years ago. The bakery’s pantry is the original bank vault, complete with heavy steel door featuring an old-fashioned cylindrical vault door handle. A wood-fired brick oven is used for all bakery goods.  

Tellico Grains Bakery currently has two special sandwiches featuring Benton’s smoked bacon. One is the BBLT, a new take on the old bacon, lettuce and tomato classic, this one on herb flatbread. The extra “B” references Benton. I opted for the Waucheesi Club, featuring smoked ham, roasted turkey, Benton’s smoked bacon, cheese and various tasty accoutrements on sourdough. I wanted to see if Benton’s bacon would stand out against the substantial flavors of the other ingredients in this smorgasbord on bread. 

It’s just as well the smoked ham in the Waucheesi Club wasn’t Benton’s because the thick-cut Benton’s bacon alone was as much pure pork flavor as any mere mortal dare taste at one time. Even in a sandwich with two other meats, cheese and all the rest, the Benton’s smoked bacon was pleasantly dominating. To say it was delicious would be an understatement.  The piquant saltiness, the satisfying smokiness, the delectable chewiness—it was all one could ever want bacon to be. It was what those thin strips of so-called bacon at the grocery store only aspired to be. One normally thinks of bacon as playing a supporting role in a meat packed and mustard laden sandwich; however, here it was the other way around. 

While I sat there at Tellico Grains Bakery in gastronomically induced bliss, I contentedly chewed and wished I didn’t have to swallow just so I could keep squeezing all the bacony goodness out with my teeth. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever be satisfied eating plain store-bought bacon again. 

Nah. Probably not.