The Elusive Roots of Rosin Potatoes

During the decades my hometown of Baxley, Georgia, hosted Tree Fest, men from Akzo Nobel, a chemical manufacturer with a local plant, would gather around a 6-foot-tall pot filled with 200 pounds of rosin. Led by Bo Herndon — a plant supervisor, former police chief, and father to my catechism classmate Heather — the team would bring the rosin to a vigorous simmer over a high-powered propane burner, and then drop in potatoes, 50 or so at a time. After 30 minutes, the potatoes would bob to the surface and Bo and Co. would pluck them out with tongs, wrap the potatoes — perilously sticky with molten rosin — in newspaper, and sell one of America’s great culinary oddities for a buck or two. 

I was oblivious to this culinary display. Tree Fest had other diversions: an early-morning fun run, funnel cake, vendors selling scented candles and Kiss My Grits T-shirts. My sister’s Labrador, Dixie, won the pet costume contest three years in a row. I tapped with a troupe from the Gail Hursey School of Dance, and, one year, as a junior chamber of commerce volunteer, I roamed the fairgrounds dressed as Woody, the festival’s pine tree mascot.

Pines meant something in Appling County. I grew up with slash pines towering over me and wheelbarrows’ worth of pine cones in the yard. The trees would paint our driveway yellow with pollen in spring. Lightning would occasionally strike their crowns, and, with the immediate boom of thunder, every wall and window of our house would rattle. 

My dad, Tom Hatchett, managed timberland for Union Camp and, later on, International Paper. My best friend Lindsay’s dad worked at Rayonier, a plant just east of downtown with stacks of denuded pine trunks piled high in its yard. Pine trees brought our families to this part of rural south Georgia. And I couldn’t wait to leave it. 

Neither could Thurnell Alston, the protagonist in Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene’s nonfiction account of McIntosh County’s late-to-arrive Civil Rights Movement. Along with his father and a pickup truck full of men, Alston rode from the Georgia coast to inland piney woods to clear paths for other turpentine workers and deposit gum collected from the trees into barrels; they toiled from early morning until nightfall for monthlong stretches and slept in windowless shanties on the floor. 

After six years of grueling, low-paid work, Alston literally walked off the job, trekking 60 miles on foot from Baxley to Brunswick. I read Praying for Sheetrock in late 2019 and mentioned Baxley’s cameo to my dad. Sensing a rare connection in our work, he posed a question, some version of which I’ve since asked the living and the dead across 10 states and two countries: What do you know about rosin potatoes?

It’s widely accepted that rosin potatoes hail from the South’s turpentine camps, where workers chipped and slashed and scraped pine trees to collect oleoresin (aka resin or gum), the trees’ natural defense mechanism. When a tree’s bark is breached — by a beetle, fungus, or a woodsman’s hack — it oozes gum, not sap, from the wound. When fossilized, oleoresin transforms into amber. When distilled, it yields turpentine and rosin, whose uses range from paint thinner and Vicks VapoRub to rubber cement and chewing gum, respectively.

The rosin potato origin story goes one of two ways. A hapless worker dropped a potato into hot rosin as it was coming off the still, and when the potato came to the surface, he pulled it out and found a perfectly cooked spud. Alternately, an industrious worker saw in molten rosin an efficient method for making a hot lunch.

Outside the context of the woods, cooking potatoes in rosin is a wholly impractical preparation. 

Rosin is highly flammable, and its fumes are noxious. It requires a dedicated pot and tongs; there’s no easy cleaning of hardened rosin. Oh — and you can’t eat the potato’s skin.

Despite those odds, the technique went mainstream in the 1950s and merited inclusion in James Beard’s 1960 Treasury of Outdoor Cooking and in the 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking. In 1976, rosin potatoes were on the table the night my parents got engaged at Art’s Steakhouse in Gainesville, Florida, and Cracker Barrel served the potatoes from 1983 through 1991.

Rosin potato loyalists say the preparation yields a superior potato with a flaky texture. Just as oleoresin seals a tree’s wounds, rosin traps a potato’s flavor and aroma, according to chef Sean Brock, who included rosin potatoes on the debut menu at Audrey, his fine-dining restaurant in Nashville. “Because none of the potato’s flavor or aroma compounds can escape, you get the most intense potato flavor you’ve ever experienced,” Brock says. “And they’re steaming in their own water, which is why you get a totally unique texture.”

Outside of Audrey, you won’t find rosin potatoes in many restaurants these days. Except in vintage cookbooks, Reddit forums, and a smattering of rural festivals, rosin potatoes all but disappeared from the American culinary canon. 

In the summer of 2020, Dad drove to Patterson, Georgia, to pick up 25 pounds of rosin from Diamond G Forest Products, a boutique producer of gum rosin and turpentine. I drove from New York to Baxley. In his garage, with the door rolled open, we fired up a propane cooker, melted rosin, and dropped in potatoes. The fumes coming off the pot were piney and potent, enough to make you dizzy in the heat, so I stood back, bare feet on smooth concrete, watching as a fury of bubbles rose from the swampy liquid. A half-hour into the boil, the potatoes began to emerge one by one. 

But it would take another year for their origins to surface. Turpentiners did not record the grand discovery that is rosin potatoes, or from where, exactly, they hail.

They left that up to me.

In the history of humanity, rosin is a relatively modern product. Before it came tar and pitch, derived from European birch and pine at least 10,000 years ago. Ancient Greeks and Vikings used pine tar to waterproof their ships. In Genesis, God tells Noah, “Make yourself an ark out of resinous wood. Make it of reeds, and caulk it with pitch inside and out.”

By the 17th century, England needed a new source of tar, pitch, and turpentine — a trinity of supplies known as naval stores that would coat, seal, and preserve the Royal Navy’s ropes and ships. The world superpower had produced the stuff on an industrial scale since at least the Middle Ages, but as its forest resources thinned, England turned to Prussia and Sweden, and eventually to the American Colonies, for its naval stores. 

The Carolinas had seemingly endless stretches of longleaf pine and soil ill-suited for cash crops and by 1725 produced a net surplus of tar, pitch, and turpentine. By the mid-19th century, North Carolina’s naval stores industry was booming, with the state boasting nearly 800 stills and operators producing more than $5 million ($185 million today) of gum and turpentine. That wealth and labor, of course, were derived at the expense of enslaved workers, of whom we know little aside from their impact on plantation balance sheets.

Plantations hired out enslaved people to turpentine operations for up to $250 a year at the industry’s height. Swinging giant axes, these men would box 75 to 100 trees a day, or around 10,000 trees each winter, and chip 1,000-2,000 faces a day. (Faces, or catfaces, are the areas from which bark has been hacked off and rosin flows.) They were housed in dirt-floor lean-tos and issued daily rations of salt pork, cornmeal, and, yes, potatoes. One of the few advantages these men had over enslaved plantation farm workers was their ability to supplement their diets with wild foods like fish, turtle, raccoon, and possum.

If these workers ate rosin potatoes, we do not know it. Rosin, at this point, had little commercial value. Rather than paying to ship it, producers let it run off the still onto the land and into waterways. When Frederick Law Olmsted toured North Carolina turpentine operations in the early 1850s, he observed “a congealed pool of rosin, estimated to contain over three thousand barrels,” according to his A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States.

 I looked to historical accounts like Olmsted’s and expected, at any moment, for rosin potatoes to leap off the pages.

In the seminal Tapping the Pines, Robert Outland introduces Sarah Hicks Williams, the wife of a North Carolina turpentiner, whose letters detail meals of cornbread, biscuits, sweet potatoes, peaches, apples, and vinegar-dressed pork barbecue — but no rosin potatoes.

I hoped to find them on plantation menus and checked with folks at the Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina. The 10,000-square-foot home was built by John D. Bellamy, a merchant, farmer, and turpentine operator, who owned 115 enslaved workers, 24 of whom labored at his turpentine camp in Columbus County. The family’s elaborate Christmas menus included duck, roast pig, rutabagas hashed with Irish potatoes, brandy peaches, coconut pie, and syllabub (sweetened curdled milk), but there’s no rosin on the menu, nor records of what Bellamy’s enslaved workers ate at camp. 

“No one was keeping good records,” Outland told me. “It’s hard to write about a life when they were considered unimportant people.”

Outland, who lives in North Carolina, spent the summer of 1996 driving across the southeastern United States, researching the dissertation that would become Tapping the Pines. He combed archives, knocked on doors, and held rosin in his hands for the first time. Nowhere in his fieldwork did he encounter rosin potatoes. 

“There was fire everywhere around backwoods processing facilities. Why not roast potatoes? People really were struggling out there in the woods,” Outland says. “I don’t know who got it in their head, but it seems to be human nature, looking back with rosy glasses at the past. They imagined an old-time turpentine lifestyle and invented a way to celebrate it.”

 • • •

After its mid-19th-century boom, the Tar Heel State (named after a slur associated with turpentine workers) saw its naval stores industry decline rapidly. Between 1840 and 1893, more than 90% of North Carolina’s longleaf pine forest had been boxed, destroyed, and abandoned. In turn, operators moved to the virgin forests of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida. 

But it was south Georgia — in particular, on land between the Savannah and Chattahoochee rivers — that would supplant North Carolina as the nation’s naval stores capital.

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, turpentiners transplanted entire plantation populations to Georgia’s piney woods, and migration continued at an even more rapid pace after the war. Newly emancipated Black workers followed the industry, having few other choices, and by the late 19th century the average Georgia turpentine worker was a “young, single, illiterate, Black man from North Carolina,” Outland wrote in Tapping the Pines. 

Baxley was transformed by turpentine into a rural engine of the South’s economy, and in ways I could not comprehend, turpentine wealth, power, and culture steeped themselves into my upbringing. 

Abandoned turpentine shacks, unpainted and with tin roofs and front porches caving in, dotted county roads. In downtown Baxley, there’s a four-columned white mansion off U.S. 1 with a tennis court in the backyard; it always looked too fancy for the town and was owned by Edgar Dyal, a turpentine magnate. The tracks that slice Baxley in two were part of the Macon and Brunswick Railroad, built to haul naval stores and lumber to the coast. Lewis Parker, Appling County’s sheriff for 20 years, hailed from the Veal family, one of the county’s biggest naval stores producers. And when the last bucket of American pine gum was dipped for commercial use by Major Phillips, he delivered it from Soperton, Georgia, to Baxley for distillation at Akzo Nobel, the last U.S. processor of gum rosin. 

Early in my potato hunt, my dad introduced me to Bill Baker, a retired Akzo Nobel engineer and plant manager. Baker’s grandaddy had timber stands and a fire still out near the Veals’, and though he expected to leave town for good, rosin cemented Baker in place. He started working at Filtered Rosin Products in the mid-’60s and stuck around as the plant was sold to Akzo Nobel in the ’80s and, eventually, to two investment groups. 

“We made products from rosin from living pine trees. There are other rosins made from paper mills, where they grind pulp and extract it with sulphuric acid. That rosin, you don’t want to use for potatoes,” explains Baker, who over the years entertained visiting businesspeople with steak and rosin potato dinners. 

He doesn’t remember where he first learned about the dish, but the story Baker has heard and told for decades rings true: “Turpentine workers would be collecting rosin from the fire still. They’d have hot rosin in barrels, and around noon, they’d throw potatoes in the barrel and let them cook.”

In 1981, the Georgia Museum of Agriculture built a turpentine still complete with an antique copper kettle, and every April, David King, the museum’s superintendent of restoration and maintenance, fires the still. Just off 1-75 in Tifton, the living history museum is one of the few places in the country where you can see pine gum transformed into turpentine and rosin and eat potatoes cooked in hot-off-the-still rosin. 

My dad and I met King, a little sunburned and with graying hair tucked under a camouflage cap, in a giant, shadeless parking lot, and he led us back to the nine-barrel still, encased in red brick and sheltered under a rustic two-story wooden structure. Workers would roll barrels of gum to the top and tip the contents into the still. The steam, containing water and spirits of turpentine, would rise through a pipe and then wind through copper tubing set inside a cypress water tank. Once condensed, the solution would flow into a barrel and turpentine would rise to the top. At the end of distillation, workers opened a chute at the bottom of the still and rosin gushed out through screens and cotton batting and into a trough. Men with long-handled dippers would then transfer the filtered rosin into barrels. 

Standing next to the still — the ground in front of it puddled with semi-firm rosin — was like going to church. It made me want to believe. Just as Baker knows the rosin business, King has mastered the mechanics of 19th-century production, working with old-timers and historians and firing stills five or so times a year. He sent me home with hunks of rosin, new leads to call, and a glimmer of hope that I’d find the potatoes in south Georgia. 

At the end of “A Longleaf Legacy,” a 2018 documentary about the industry, Buster Cole, a still worker and interpreter for the Georgia Museum of Agriculture, extemporaneously calls out varied rosin uses: “gunpowder, glass, fiberglass, acrylics, polyester, chewing gum, costume jewelry, tile, carpet, Elmer’s glue, shellac, shoe polish, soap, sprinkle it on your dance floor to make it slick, they make nine cosmetics out of it and three perfumes out of it. Gymnastics you got a rosin bag, bowling you got a rosin bag, tennis you got a rosin bag. Baseball pitcher, he use a rosin bag, fiddler put rosin on his bow, ballet dancer put it on their shoes. … ”

Having visited the still and watching the video, I hoped Cole would blurt out, “And you can even cook a potato in it.” But he didn’t.

 Folklorist Laurie Sommers founded the South Georgia Folklife Project at Valdosta State University and, with Tim Prizer, interviewed dozens of turpentine workers with multigenerational ties to the industry, such as George “G.W.” Harrington, a man born into the business. Harrington’s father managed 16,000 acres of forest, and his mother helped run the camp commissary. “Mama believed in a hot meal,” he told Sommers in 2004, recalling Friday-night fish fries and the scent of greens, sweet potatoes, and homemade biscuits wafting through the camp.

According to Harrington, a typical day’s menu in the 1940s and ’50s consisted of grits, fried eggs, bacon, and oatmeal for breakfast; dinner (aka lunch) meant “something that would stick with you” like fried chicken, rice, speckled butter beans, cornbread, corn, okra, new potatoes, sliced tomatoes, biscuits, and some kind of dessert; for supper, the family ate leftovers or country sausage.

Most workers’ lunches were more humble affairs, according to Sommers, like cornbread or canned salmon with rice and beans, carried in cane syrup cans and hung from trees.

“There is no way something as unusual and fascinating as rosin potato would be something that flew under the radar and was forgotten,” says Prizer, who went on to write his master’s thesis on nostalgia and memory in the waning days of the industry.

But none of Sommers’ or Prizer’s subjects mentioned the potatoes. They’re similarly omitted from Carroll Butler’s Treasures of the Longleaf Pines, notable for being the only scholarly book on the industry produced by a former turpentiner, and Pete Gerrell’s The Illustrated History of the Naval Stores (Turpentine) Industry. 

Both works are a feast of food details. Butler describes lunches of hoe cakes and doobie (a savory cobbler relative), as well as workers hunting for rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, and gopher tortoise. He also describes backwoods booze, including “alcohol strained from Sterno and then mixed with sugar water and spirits of niter [ethyl nitrite].” Gerrell shares recipes for cottage beer, pigs feet, and Spanish moss jelly. “You know that times are bad when there is nothing left to eat but Spanish moss seasoned with fish bladder,” he wrote. 

Gerrell and Butler are both deceased, as are all but one or two of the folks interviewed by Sommers and Prizer. But as a daughter of one of the last important turpentine cities, I hoped I might find living workers — and rosin potato camp stories — in Baxley. 

James Copeland tapped trees in Appling Country until 1960, and his family line extends back to North Carolina. His father farmed tobacco and cotton and collected gum on his own land, in addition to working faces for another operator. “There was a man he worked for, probably 25 or 35 years. My grandfather worked for that man’s daddy doing turpentine. The first work I did, as far back as I can remember, was farm work and turpentine,” Copeland says.

Copeland is married to Pearl Copeland, who was raised on the Veals’ turpentine farm and whose brother and father worked in the business. Pearl is an accomplished country cook. She was making a jelly cake the last time we spoke and promised a feast of fried chicken, lima beans, cornbread, blackberry pie, peach pie, and pear pie the next time I come home. 

The Copelands had never heard of rosin potatoes.

Pearl recalls folks cooking sweet potatoes under a pile of sand with a fire built on top. James took cold potatoes into the forest and field, but more often lunch was a biscuit sandwich with bacon, peanut butter and homemade jelly, or a smear of preserved pear, packed in a syrup can. 

“You didn’t heat no food up. Whatever you left home with, by the time you eat it, it’s cold,” he says. “When you ate, there wasn’t nothing like … take an hour for lunch.”

They were incredulous that the technique would even work. “I don’t know nobody in Appling County who could tell you about that,” Pearl told me. “That somebody who was telling you the way they did it, they were saying something that was untrue.”

• • •

The Copelands’ experience working family land and trees represents the zenith of the industry for Black workers, who sold gum to central distilleries as supplemental income. But before Civil Rights legislation passed in the 1960s, the Jim Crow South held a significant number of Black turpentine workers in bondage through debt peonage, most often by forcing them to buy marked-up goods at camp commissaries. Though the practice was illegal at the federal level, Southern states enacted laws that forbade workers from leaving jobs while indebted to their bosses.

The industry also leased convicts — a majority being Black men — from the state. Though it had been outlawed elsewhere, Georgia and Florida practiced convict leasing until 1908 and 1923, respectively. 

Though Prizer found relationships between some owners and Black workers were warm, respectful, and often nuanced, anyone poking through turpentine’s past will find, in abundance, brutality, kidnapping, coercion, paternalism, and searing racism.

The more I poked and dug and read, I could not understand why a Black worker in the Jim Crow South would cook his lunch in rosin, a commodity product whose value was determined by its clarity. Were workers really dropping dirty potatoes into rosin that had been distilled and filtered through cotton batting and screens? It sounded like a punishable offense.

• • •

By this point, I had grown mighty suspicious — like, rosin-potatogate conspiracy theory suspicious. With no collective memory — written, recorded, or alive — of rosin potatoes in turpentine camps, I turned my attention away from workers and toward the industry, the bigwigs, moneymakers, and political influencers who might have something to gain from rosin potatoes. 

At the University of Florida’s Smathers Libraries, I hunched over volumes of Naval Stores Review, following two-plus decades of industry exploits. Published weekly from 1890 to 1953 (and later monthly and bimonthly), the Review provides a play-by-play of the industry’s swings, technological advances, best practices, politics, labor woes, and evolving culture. Its pages instructed producers how to convert from harmful box cutting to installing metal gutters and ceramic Herty cups, a method that prolonged trees’ viability and allowed the once mobile industry to put down roots. It documented the move from backwoods distilling to central stills in towns like Baxley, the rise of acid sprays to increase gum production, and every possible use for turpentine and rosin — from soap production in Peru to home insulation, cough syrup, and a depilatory for pigs. 

The Naval Stores Review also chronicled the American Turpentine Farmers Association, or AT-FA, formed in 1936 and led by Judge Harley Langdale, a powerful naval stores producer and politician from Valdosta, Georgia. 

 AT-FA loomed large over the industry’s fading years. Members funded successful national ad campaigns and an effort to get gum turpentine onto retail shelves. The organization supported research and lobbied to classify turpentiners as agricultural workers, exempting producers from minimum wage laws and Social Security taxes. AT-FA administered a federal loan program that sought to limit naval stores production and stabilize market prices. They also threw one helluva party.

Each April, more than a thousand producers and their families would gather in Valdosta for the annual AT-FA Convention. Langdale would rally turpentiners behind the cause of the moment and conjure the industry’s demise if action was not taken, and then get voted in as president for another term.

“The gum industry faces able, aggressive, and intelligent competition from many new spirits companies. This competition must be met by the gum industry or the industry will be swallowed up by it,” he told attendees in 1947.

They’d host a stag-night fish fry for the men, along with a beauty contest in which women dressed in longleaf pine needle bikinis. The weekend would conclude with a picnic featuring 700 barbecued chickens (and ham in later years), peas, grits, potato salad, beer, and Coca-Cola. In 1949, they switched up the menu and harvested Florida sabal palms to make swamp cabbage. 

Had the rosin potato existed in naval stores culture, it should’ve been at that barbecue. Just as Langdale wrapped his arm around each Miss Spirits of Turpentine, he would have been pulling a potato out of the rosin pot for a photo op. Rosin potatoes were also absent from Swainsboro’s Pine Tree Festival, from industry conferences, and from field trips to the Naval Stores Research Station in Olustee, Florida, a hub of scientific advancement for the industry.

Starting with the year 1933, I flipped page by page, year by year, through The Naval Stores Review, expecting to meet the potato at any moment. And there was nothing — until June 1956.

 The year before, N.J. “Jack” Stallworth, whose brother was an AT-FA director, had demonstrated rosin baked potatoes at the Alabama State Fair. Stallworth served the potatoes in his Mobile, Alabama, restaurant, Stafills, and advertised direct-to-consumer rosin in pamphlets, as well as in Gourmet, Living, and House Beautiful. Naval Stores Review did not credit Stallworth or anyone in particular with the invention, but noted, “Rosin baked potatoes is not an entirely new idea, having been initiated some two years ago.” 

In other words, folks in the industry had not eaten rosin potatoes, a “Southern delicacy” as they called them, until 1954. They didn’t associate the newfangled technique with turpentine camp culture, nor did they know when or where the potatoes had been invented. 

Rosin potatoes first appeared in print in April 1939 in a syndicated dispatch from Damon Runyon, a journalist best known for writing Guys and Dolls. “We recently came across a brand new way of cooking white potatoes. You boil them in resin — the same kind of resin that violinists rub on their bowstrings and also the very same kind of resin prizefighters shuffle the soles of their shoes in,” wrote Runyon, attributing the dish to Black Caesar’s Forge, a restaurant in Miami. “The Dade County folks love to introduce their Yankee friends to the ceremony.” 

Later that year, Charles H. Baker, a Florida-born bon vivant and writer, published The Gentleman's Companion: Exotic Cookery Book, a collection of recipes of “manly dishes for men” according to The Miami Herald. In it, he shared a recipe for “Rosin Potatoes in the Manner of J. Marquette Phillips as Done at Black Caesar’s Forge for Various Friends & Guests, at Various Times.” Those guests, according to Baker, included senators, poet Robert Frost, and actor Errol Flynn.

Black Caesar’s Forge opened in 1938, 15 miles south of downtown Miami in Palmetto Bay. Named for a legendary pirate rumored to have buried treasure on the Miami coast, the restaurant’s sunken dining room was carved into coral rock and lined with wine bins. In the early years, guests brought their own steaks, salad fixings, and potatoes, which Phillips charged a fee to grill, toss with a house vinaigrette, and drop in a rosin pot, respectively. “The problem in World War II was you couldn’t get steak,” says David Phillips, J. Marquette’s grandson. “These were people with connections.”

Phillips had moved from Detroit to Miami in 1925 at the height of a south Florida real estate boom. The place was warm, notoriously wet despite Prohibition, and accessible by rail line, and wealthy snowbirds built mansions and flocked to newly minted hotels on South Beach. Phillips established himself as a furniture importer and decorative iron worker, and you can still see his handiwork at mansions built by Harvey S. Firestone and William K. Vanderbilt II. 

Phillips’ business survived a series of devastating hurricanes and the 1929 stock market crash, and he built a South Beach home with a storefront and studio — and likely a speakeasy. After Prohibition’s repeal, and with the support of wealthy patrons, Phillips transformed the space into The Forge Club, a nightclub, casino, and steakhouse decorated with intricate iron grilles and palm trees. He sold the club in 1942, and it operated as The Forge, an iconic Miami steakhouse, until closing in 2019.

By the time Black Caesar’s Forge came around, Phillips had considerable social capital, and his potatoes were a local hit. Miamians added rosin potato hearths to their outdoor terraces. Snowbirds transported the potatoes back to their home states. Francis Kinney and Alberta Paskvan both served as World War II pilots, and, in the years after the war, met and married in Miami, where they frequented Black Caesar’s Forge. After moving to Michigan and, later, Montana, they continued to cook rosin potatoes over a wood fire in the backyard, and often for a crowd of bewildered neighbors. “For my whole life, they were part of our family’s cuisine,” says their son Will Kinney, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Buffalo and avid rosin potato maker. (Kinney cooks his potatoes for 20 additional minutes after they rise to the surface of the pot, for optimal texture.)

Rosin potatoes’ popularity surged as families like the Kinneys moved to the suburbs and America’s backyard barbecue culture took root. Hamilton and Abercrombie & Fitch, among other manufacturers, started selling rosin potato kits complete with a pot, an aluminum stand, and rosin.

With wartime rations lifted and celebrations in order, steakhouses flourished, and plenty of them added rosin potatoes to their menus. My grandparents ate them in Palm Beach in the ’50s, when rosin potatoes had gourmet connotations. At a 1953 gathering of Les Amis d’Escoffier, “a band of real gourmets” ate rosin potatoes alongside bouillon, clams casino, oysters Rockefeller, caviar, crawfish quenelles, wild mallard, and Champagne. 

There was no turpentine camp narrative at this point. Just as AT-FA promoted the newness and novelty of the preparation, so did the national press. But that started to change as rosin potatoes established themselves in the South and in turpentine strongholds. Soon they were on menus at the Mayflower Hotel in Jacksonville; Heritage Inn in Columbia, South Carolina; the Pirates’ House in Savannah; and Coyner’s in Macon, Georgia. Rosin potatoes were also a specialty of notoriously racist Aunt Fanny’s Cabin in Smyrna, Georgia. By the ’70s, the rosin potato myth had cemented and Planters Back Porch Seafood Restaurant in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, told the tall tale on its menu:

“Many years ago a worker in a turpentine plant dropped a raw potato into an iron vat of bubbling hot rosin. The potato sank out of sight … but some 20 minutes later suddenly reappeared floating on the surface of the heavy rosin. The worker took a large ladle and scooped the potato out of the rosin and after curiosity got the better of him, he cut the potato open and proceeded to enjoy the most delicious potato ever before baked. Word of this culinary find circulated throughout the pine belt of the South and soon practically every plantation in the land had its own rosin pot out back for cooking the famous ‘rosin-taters.’”

The rosin potato had outgrown Black Caesar’s Forge and taken on a whole new identity, but Phillips had already moved on. He sold the restaurant in 1946 and settled in Cuba, where he ran a 35,000-acre fruit, mining, and timber plantation. Fidel Castro’s government seized the land in 1960, and Phillips died six years later. 

Phillips never claimed to have invented the potato. He told friends and reporters he had seen it elsewhere but never revealed his source. There’s a chance he witnessed the potato cookery in central or northern Florida, where his wife Edna Valentine Paul’s family operated a lumber business. But there’s not a lick of proof rosin potatoes existed in the deep woods, and if they did, I can’t believe J. Marquette Phillips was the sole person to have brought them to the public’s attention. 

On the contrary, I think he was concealing the potato’s backstory.

Outside the industry, resin and pitch — the latter made by cooking down oleoresin until thick and sticky — often are used interchangeably. At a certain point last summer, and on a desperate whim, I typed “pitch potatoes” into a newspaper archive. The first dozen or so hits were commodity lists; pitch and potatoes follow each other alphabetically. But then I found exactly what I was looking for: rosin potatoes’ predecessor boiling in the pots of Cincinnati’s pre-Prohibition German-American breweries.

By the mid-19th century, Cincinnati was home to a thriving beer industry whose German brewers were no strangers to pitch. In his 1829 The Art of Brewing, writer David Booth details the distinctly German practice of lining barrels with pitch to prevent contamination, leakage, and the transference of wood’s flavor and color into beer.

The 1850s and ’60s also coincided with the rise of pale lagers, a style of beer invented just a few years earlier at Pilsner Urquell in the Czech Republic. Lager means “storeroom” in German, and requires brewing and conditioning at cold temperatures. Modern light lagers are brewed year-round and age in refrigerated storage tanks, typically for 10 days to a month, but before commercial refrigeration, Cincinnati breweries made lager in the winter months, placed the barrels in deep cellars, dropped in ice harvested from frozen lakes and rivers, added straw or sawdust for insulation, and sealed it all with pitch. That way, crisp, fresh lagers flowed all summer long.

“Breweries were going through radical changes in the lager era,” says Mike Morgan, a Cincinnati beer historian and author of Over-the-Rhine: When Beer Was King. “You have to have these big lagering cellars. So brewing goes from something you can start on a small scale to digging a four-story hole and building over the top of it this brewery that would cost tens of millions of dollars today. Capital gets shifted, the spaces are a lot larger, and brewers are more concerned with politics.”

It’s in this environment that pitch potatoes, cooked in the same manner as rosin potatoes, have their moment in Cincinnati. The oldest reference I’ve found to pitch potatoes is from 1892 at a lunch hosted at a social club associated with the Christian Moerlein Brewing Co. According to a note in The Cincinnati Enquirer, “John Moerlein gave a ‘pitch’ potato lunch at the Elm Street Club rooms yesterday afternoon to a party of friends. It was quite a novel affair, and was heartily enjoyed.” 

The Enquirer’s casual mention of the dish, with no elaboration on the cooking method, suggests readers were already familiar with the potatoes, and Morgan believes they could date back as far as the 1870s. But it was at late-19th-century beefsteak dinners — a raucous style of dining and political campaigning that originated in New York City — that pitch potatoes flourished. To court votes and favors, raise campaign funds, and reward political donors, boosters and clubs would throw hours-long, all-you-can-eat steak dinners. In Cincinnati, breweries often played host, hanging chandeliers, setting up white-linened tables, and letting amber fluid flow freely, according to Morgan. 

While bread was the carbohydrate of choice in New York, Cincinnati embraced the pitch potato. In addition to the John Kauffman Brewing Company, where “steaks were broiled over the coke fires in the malt dryers, and were served with ‘pitch’ potatoes and other vegetables,” the potatoes were a fixture at the Bellevue, Mohawk, Windisch-Muhlhauser, Lackman, Buckeye, Jackson, Wiedmann’s, and Bruckmann breweries.

Beefsteak dinners didn’t have an exclusive hold on pitch potatoes. They were served in the city’s beer gardens. In its 1904/1905 Sigma Chi Quarterly, frat boys visiting Chester Park, an amusement complex, recorded “an open-air dinner, spread upon the longest tables I have ever seen — one hundred yards if an inch: a dinner consisting of potatoes cooked in tar and served in round balls of paper, and many other strange and awful edibles and things.”

Turn-of-the-century Cincinnati was also a major hub for conferences and conventions, of which pitch potatoes were a feature. At the 1898 gathering of the Master Horseshoers’ National Protective Association, 350 members, representing 130 cities, ate a pitch potato supper. The Iron and Steel Workers’ Convention of 1906 featured a beefsteak and pitch potato dinner, as did a 1909 gathering of 2,000 Knights of Pythias, a post-Civil War fraternal organization. In 1913, the National Association of Trunk Manufacturers ate pitch potatoes at Wiedmann’s. In 1910, the Cincinnati Elks chapter threw a “beefsteak and pitch potato feast” for Elks en route to a convention in Detroit.

The preparation also emerged in cities like Buffalo and Pittsburgh. But almost as suddenly as pitch potatoes rose from the newspaper archives, they vanished again.

• • •

When World War I broke out in 1914, so did anti-German hysteria. Ohio, once a bilingual state, declared English its official language and banned German language classes in schools before eighth grade. German street names changed. The press renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” and hamburger “liberty steak.” The Espionage Act of 1917 explicitly outlawed interfering with military operations and recruitment and essentially outlawed anything un-American, aka German.

“That was the death blow,” Morgan says. Cincinnati’s German clubs, almost infinite in number, disbanded. Prohibition finished the job. Shifting to near-beer production, Bruckmann Brewery was the only Cincinnati brewery that operated from 1920 to 1933, and only six breweries reopened after states repealed the 18th Amendment. Pitch potatoes did not survive the upheaval.

By the time rosin potatoes made a national splash in the 1950s, most — but not all — Cincinnatians had forgotten pitch potatoes. I found one article, from 1955, in which a Cincinnati journalist connects zeitgeist-y rosin potatoes with “brewery days when kegs were lined with rosin,” and at least one enterprising Cincinnati family continued to make the potatoes at home. 

David Hackman, whose father, Arnold, was head brewer at Hudepohl Brewing Company, remembers eating the potatoes, along with steak and corn on the cob, as far back as 1947. He and his father built a brick structure in the backyard so they could melt pitch in a kettle over wood. Hackman eventually upgraded to propane, which provided a heat so intense it scarred a nearby magnolia tree. Still, something got lost in translation. Hackman cooks his potatoes in petroleum-based pitch, a substance that scares away skeptical friends and children. “This is my tar thing,” says Hackman, insisting, “the worst thing to happen is you get black shit between your teeth.” 

Hackman, who’s now 84, can claim something that no one else his age in the turpentine belt can: he grew up with pitch potatoes and can trace the dish’s provenance. At least up to a point. 

Pitch potatoes were bobbing around so many Cincinnati breweries, it’s not clear where they originated. There’s a single blog post on the internet linking the potatoes back to Germany, but it’s a fuzzy connection at best. 

I sent queries to a German-American beer scholar, a German food historian, and the Berlin-based Society for the History of Brewing, a collective of more than 300 members who research and publish German beer histories and maintain an archive and library. None had ever come across pitch potatoes in their research, nor had a beer museum in Thuringia, a region once known for producing exceptional brewers pitch. 

There’s perhaps one clue in a 1912 article in Tägliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt. Though the article is written in old German, the words “pitch potatoes” appear in English, as if there’s no direct translation. The piece concerns the visit of Gustav Stresemann from Dresden to Cincinnati. Stresemann would go on to serve as Germany’s chancellor and win the Nobel Peace Prize, but at the time he served as executive director of Germany’s Federation of Industrialists. The son of a beer distributor, Stresemann, who wrote his Ph.D. on beer bottling, wanted to visit a brewery while he was in town, and Windisch-Muhlhauser extended an invitation. 

“Yet this was on such short notice that they could not offer pitch potatoes and steak but only bread, sausage, and ham, along with beer. They thought pitch potatoes were a delicious thing they should serve this grand dignitary,” explained Jana Weiss, a beer historian at the University of Münster, who translated the article for me. “They would almost surely have used a German term if there was one.” 

 • • •

I doubt I’ll ever know for sure, but I believe pitch potatoes originated in Cincinnati breweries, where pitch was abundant and brewers found creative ways to cook with what they had on-site. At some point, J. Marquette Phillips came in contact with the dish, perhaps while traveling through Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, serving with Cincinnati men during World War I, or hobnobbing with Cincinnati snowbirds in Miami. But because his rosin potatoes debuted during World War II, Phillips chose not to disclose their German origins.

There’s the possibility of parallel development, sure — the idea that the potato could have arisen independently in Cincinnati and the South. But I don’t buy it. We know what turpentiners ate. It was recorded and passed down over centuries, and their foodways are alive today in homes like the Copelands’. What’s quite clear is that while the early naval stores industry greedily consumed longleaf pines, German-American breweries were buying Southern-made pitch, feasting on potatoes cooked in it, and sharing it broadly with the public.

The rosin potato is weird. It’s wild. It’s captivating. It’s also a pain in the ass. At both points in history when the rosin (née pitch) potato emerges, it hitches onto bigger cultural phenomena and explodes in popularity, only to recede into obscurity. German-Americans had more potent traditions and symbols. They gave us Budweiser! Phillips thought of himself on a grand scale; after he was ejected from Cuba, he sent a letter to President Kennedy asking to be installed as an ambassador to a small Central or South American nation. Rosin potatoes were a mere side note in a colorful life.

Rosin potatoes never merited serious thought in the South precisely because they did not matter in the culture. They had little commercial value to the AT-FA crowd. Akzo Nobel sold 20,000 pounds of rosin a month to Cracker Barrel, according to Baker, but shipped out millions of pounds more of its rosin-based products to other buyers. Only when the naval stores industry cratered and its real traditions — the songs, camps, catfaces, and stills of the piney woods — started to disappear did folks latch onto rosin potatoes.

Caroline Hatchett is a freelance writer and senior editor at Plate, a restaurant industry magazine. She lives in New York City but was born and raised in Baxley, Georgia, and graduated from Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, CNN, Wine Enthusiast, Robb Report, and Eater, among other publications. She also serves on the board of Restaurant Workers' Community Foundation, a workers' advocacy nonprofit.

Rinne Allen is a documentary photographer living in her hometown of Athens, Georgia, who documents process as a way to visually demonstrate the effort that goes into creating things. Rinne spends most of her days collaborating with farmers, chefs, artisans, designers, and researchers to document their work and the process that goes into making it, with the hope that those who view her pictures will learn something about the environment and culture of the American South.

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