Quick Bites: Rise & Shine

There’s buttered toast, hot biscuits, or even homemade waffles. But what about cheesecake? Ice cream? Puff pastry? Tangy Parmesan?

When you have a product so flavorful, so balanced, so fine, does it really matter its complement? Try the back of a spoon—it’s supremely good on its own.

Paula Kavolus and her friend Jill Bondura, both cooks and kitchen experimenters, decided in 2004 to venture into the food business after they discovered a demand for Paula’s secret family recipe for peach preserves. Their preserve-loving friends, husbands, and sons (nine between the two) prompted the women to christen their venture 9 Sons Rising and grow into a full-blown, quality-controlled operation.

Though that may sound far from Mom’s kitchen, consider this: Each batch of 9 Sons Rising preserves in strawberry, blueberry, and—the “star” fruit—peach, are perhaps the best on the shelf. They have the following few ingredients: fruit, sugar, spices, and lemon peel (yes, lemon peel, a counter to the preserves’ sweetness, that tempers and enhances at the same time). They are cooked in old, Southern fashion: low and slow. No pectin. No preservatives. Straight from the 150-year-old Greenville kitchen of the Kavolus family.

The fruit is Carolina-grown (hello, peach season!), and small batches of preserves are made at a family-owned facility in Beaufort. (Is it even necessary to go on about the company’s homemade gourmet biscuits and dessert toppings?) And the answer to perhaps the most important question—where to find them—is delightfully satisfying: right here. In Greenville, Whole Foods Market stocks the good stuff, as well as the New York Butcher Shoppe on Augusta Street and Woodruff Road. But 9 Sons Rising products can be found at nine other New York Butcher Shoppe stores throughout South Carolina and Georgia. You can also have them delivered to your door via www.southernfoodsathome.com.

Years worth of preservation have paid off in these special preserves: homemade, down home.