Cary Methodist church marks 100 years of serving food at the NC State Fair

The N.C. State Fair is full of traditions, but few are as enduring as the food served by the Cary First United Methodist Church.

The church set up its first food booth at the fair in 1916, making it the oldest vendor on the fairgrounds. The profits that first year, $13.32, were used to carpet a room in the church on Academy Street.

Today, church volunteers serve a full breakfast menu in the morning, followed by pulled pork barbecue, hamburgers, hotdogs and brunswick stew until closing time. But the big draw is the buttermilk biscuits, sold all day with country ham or sausage. The banner on the front of the church’s space on Restaurant Row, across from Dorton Arena, proclaims it “Home of the Original Country Ham Biscuit.”

“They fly out of the door just as fast as we can make them,” says Mike Bailey of Holly Springs, a volunteer manager at the restaurant.

Vendors have been selling food at the fair since at least the 1880s, said Paul Blankinship, the fair historian. At his exhibit on Heritage Circle, Blankinship has two photos from the 1884 fair showing signs for oysters, lager beer and “ice cream today.”

When the Cary Methodist church arrived in 1916, the fairgrounds were across Hillsborough Street from N.C. State, where the Raleigh Rose Garden and Little Theatre are now. Fair exhibits were in permanent buildings, but the vendors operated out of tents that came and went with the fair, Blankinship said.

While church records reveal the proceeds from the 1916 fair down to the penny, there’s no record of what the church served that year, or for years to come. While everyone seems to assume the menu included ham biscuits, church historian Bob Warner isn’t so sure. He thinks they were introduced in the 1950s, when the minister’s wife said she knew of someone who could provide some good country hams.

In any event, the Methodists of Cary will put their biscuits up against any at the fair. There’s no shortage of kitchens, both charitable and for profit, who claim to have the best biscuits, among them the Pittsboro Kiwanis Club (“World’s Greatest Ham Biscuits), Hunnicutt’s (“Home of Memaw’s famous buttermilk biscuits”) and, next door to the Methodist church, the Apex Lions Club (“Home of the BIG Biscuit”).

The biscuit recipe at First United Methodist is no secret: Just Snowflake self-rising flour, buttermilk and white, creamy lard.

“They’re not out of a can, and people appreciate that,” said Pat Whitt, a volunteer from White Plains United Methodist Church in Cary, a spinoff church that helps run the fair restaurant.

Whitt had her hands covered in biscuit dough Sunday afternoon, putting in the second of five shifts she’ll pull during the fair. On Friday morning, she made more than 600 biscuits, before she stopped counting. It’s strenuous work, she says, standing in one place for hours, kneading dough.

“Your hands get cramps,” she said.

It takes about 35 volunteers per shift to prepare the food, fill carry-out orders and wait tables. There are three shifts a day, except on the shortened first Thursday and on Sundays, when the restaurant doesn’t open until noon, after services are over.

The two churches can expect to make about $50,000 in profit from the fair restaurant. While the Methodist church used fair income for its own needs in the early years, the proceeds now go to various missions and charitable organizations, whose names are listed on the wall.

“It changes from year to year,” said Warner, the church historian. “But it’s always something beyond us. It’s not us.”

There have been other changes over the years. For decades, women of the church made pies at home to sell at the fair, but now the food must be prepared in a commercial kitchen. And while the church used to buy 300 to 350 bone-in hams that the men would then de-bone and slice, it now buys pre-sliced ham, from Goodnight Brothers in Boone.

And a few years ago, the church added all-beef hotdogs to the menu, in addition to the Jesse Jones Southern Style dogs made of pork and chicken. The all-beef dogs didn’t sell and were taken off the menu, Bailey said.

“People weren’t interested in being health conscious at the fair,” he said.

This story was originally published October 19, 2015 at 5:26 PM with the headline "Cary Methodist church marks 100 years of serving food at the NC State Fair."