The Peach Ice Cream Sandwich of the soul

On cheap food and priceless memories in Augusta, Georgia

Welcome to Flashlight & A Biscuit, my Southern culture/sports/music/food offshoot of my work at Yahoo Sports. Thanks for reading, and if you’re new around here, why not subscribe? It’s free and all.

First off, a monster welcome to all you new subscribers. Substack’s new Notes feature, a social media variant of Twitter, has boosted all our numbers. Maybe you’ll stick around, maybe you’ll run away screaming, but I’m glad you’re here for now either way. Pull up a chair, there’s room.

Today: a story that I didn’t get the chance to tell during my stint at the Masters last week. (Blame the falling trees.)

Back in the 1800s, before interstate highways, before reliable bridges that traversed every river, the best way to cross a waterway was via ferry. Along the Savannah River that borders South Carolina and Georgia, more than 400 ferries shuttled cargo, passengers, livestock … you know, general 19th-century mercantile wheeling and dealing. These ferries were omnipresent and crucial to life on the river, so much so that even to this day, you’ll find streets, schools and neighborhoods with the name “Ferry” attached to them all over the South, the last relics of whichever merchant controlled that slice of the river.

One of the more active and profitable around Augusta, Ga.¹ belonged to a gentleman by the name of John Furey, a local baron who owned multiple Augusta-area businesses and dwellings. Furey bought a ferry in 1816, and the ferry carried his name for decades after his death in 1818.

Typical ferries of the day were about 60 to 70 feet long and eight feet wide, and crews would use a combination of oars, poles and cables strung across the river for navigation. Fees during the 1840s were 75 cents for wagons and four-wheeled carriages, 25 cents for carts, 12 1/2 cents for horses and 2 cents for pedestrians. Cash only, no Venmo.

Now, before this descends any deeper into AP U.S. History territory, here’s the upshot: Furey’s ferry, the operation, became Fury’s Ferry, the road, which runs northward away from Augusta, along the same path ferry travelers and Native Americans traveled for centuries beforehand. The source is long gone, only the name remains … and it’s misspelled.

Leave the Augusta National clubhouse and drive down stately Magnolia Lane. Pass the guards and the White House-level security. (Barriers that rise up out of the ground, that sort of thing.) Pass through the 12-foot-high hedges and turn left out of the club onto Washington Road. Drive past the highway’s-edge Americana like Tiger Woods’ Arby’s and Krispy Kreme — the same Americana that Augusta National is in the process of buying up to remake Washington Road in its own image — and drive a few miles north. Bear right onto Fury’s Ferry Road, continue on a few more miles — if it’s Masters week, floor it, the cops are busy elsewhere — and eventually you will come upon the glory that is Wife Saver.

Roll that name around in your head a bit. Wife Saver. Imagine what Twitter would say about anyone attempting to start a restaurant chain with that sweetly patriarchal and gently patronizing name today. Then eat some of their fried chicken and stop worrying about what Twitter would say about … well, anything.

Wife Saver is an Augusta institution, a series of restaurants dedicated to serving good down-home Southern food in vast and delicious quantities. Fried chicken, pork chops, fried okra, sweet tea, the whole deal.

Oh, and it’s also the source of a 2010s-era beneath-the-radar Masters scandal that ESPN’s Wright Thompson in 2013 dubbed PimentoGate.

Even if you’ve never been within three states of Augusta National, even if you think golf is boring as hell, you know about the pimento cheese sandwiches. Cheese, mayo, pimentos, maybe a secret spice or two, spread between two slices of downy white bread, priced at $1.50, they’re the trademark foodstuff of the Masters. They’re also a symbol of some substantial controversy among longtime Masters aficionados.

For decades, an Aiken, S.C. fellow named Nick Rangos made the pimento cheese used in the sandwiches. Around 20 years ago, Augusta National decided to begin using Wife Saver for its pimento cheese needs. Since 1985, Wife Saver had been making the club’s chicken sandwiches, a spicy peppery concoction that blended perfectly with the white bread of the bun. (The club’s original chicken sandwiches were bone-in chicken on bread, and the rumor was that the club’s green jackets were tired of patrons slinging gnawed chicken bones all over their beautiful course. Which is understandable.)

Only Rangos refused to divulge his pimento cheese secrets, so Wife Saver owner Ted Godfrey — in an act of intensive dedication worthy of an FBI cold-crime investigation — reverse-engineered a near-perfect approximation of the original pimento cheese recipe. And for a time, all was well.

But then, in 2012, then-Masters chairman Billy Payne decided to bring all Masters food production in-house, and that was that for Wife Saver and the pimento cheese recipe. The powers-that-be at Augusta National asked for the recipe, and Godfrey reportedly offered it for the price of two badges. But the National declined, and so the exact recipe remained a secret.

Not that lacking the original recipe has hindered Augusta National in any way. The Masters is ever-growing, one of the world’s marquee sporting events, at the very top of millions of sports fans’ bucket lists. For one week every spring, tens of thousands of fans line up to spend $1.50 on a pimento cheese sandwich … and a hundred or a thousand times that amount at the gift shop.

Which brings us around to the Peach Ice Cream sandwich. Whatever behind-the-scenes tussles went on with the chicken sandwich and the pimento cheese sandwich in years past, the Peach Ice Cream sandwich — introduced at Augusta National a few years back — was an instant hit. Sweet peach ice cream between two soft sugar cookies … come on, you can just taste it now, can’t you?

When the Peach Ice Cream sandwich didn’t show up in 2022, the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Beaton performed his own investigation (yes, we often investigate foods at the Masters, it’s a beat all its own) and found mysterious hints of severed vendor relationships and “supply chain issues.” Augusta National declined all comment.

Naturally, when rumors surfaced earlier this year that the Peach Ice Cream sandwich would not return for 2023, teeth were gnashed and wailing commenced. But over at Wife Saver, Philip Dukes, son of the Fury’s Ferry franchise owner, hit upon a brainstorm.

“I thought if they weren’t going to do it this year, it might be something good for us to do,” he told me last week over a genuine Wife Saver pimento cheese sandwich. Turnabout is fair play, after all. “So I put it on Facebook … ”

The result: a hyper-viral post that put Wife Saver in the headlines for all the right reasons. As it turned out, the Peach Ice Cream sandwich did indeed return to the Masters, but that didn’t hinder Wife Saver’s sales one bit. Philip made nearly 5,000 ice cream sandwiches, and sold out of every single one within days, long before Masters Sunday. The experiment was an unqualified (and exhausting) success.

Maybe people love the authenticity of Wife Saver. Maybe they appreciate the little guy getting even a tiny win. And maybe they just like a tasty dessert. Whichever, it all works.

The Wife Saver version of the Peach Ice Cream sandwich is damn delicious, by the way.

There’s a whole lot of trepidation, both inside the clubhouse and among longtime Masters observers, that the Masters is slowly but inexorably changing into something far different from its origins. (Yes, there were plenty of “traditions” at Augusta National that deserved to be kicked to the curb of Washington Road, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.) I went deep on this idea here after Gary Player, the ever-talkative and mercurial golf legend, offhandedly threw out a gem of a quote the Thursday morning at the Masters: “Change is the price of survival.”²

The fear among traditionalists is that the tournament is becoming an Experience, a place where the focus is on the have’s and the have-more’s, where even those lucky enough to get onto the grounds for a day find themselves divided by class. It’s the One More Door theory — no matter how far you rise in American life, there’s always one more door that you’re not allowed through, and so we all live in a persistent state of envy and discontent.

Which is a shame, because the South in the springtime is one of the finest locales on planet Earth, even if you’re not in Augusta, Georgia the first week in April. A warm breeze after a cool morning, the scent of azalea and magnolia and honeysuckle in the air, the sound of pine needles rustling high above … it’s all pretty much perfect. Add in the taste of a peach ice cream sandwich, and friend, you’re in my idea of heaven. (A cold beer in a plastic cup is a nice touch, too, but not at exactly the same time.)

Augusta National will thrive in the years to come. A Golf Digest investigation published this year in March documented some of the plans and possibilities for the Masters of the future, everything from the construction of a second course to the creation of an entire exit off Interstate 20 solely for Masters patrons. The scope and cost of some of these expenses is mind-boggling, but so too is the revenue and wealth behind those hedges at Augusta National. It’ll be fascinating to see what the future holds for that little club.

But just as much, it’ll be fun (and necessary) to keep connected to the Wife Savers of the world, working on a smaller, more human scale. They may not tell you their secrets, but they’ll gladly share them. Just line up early; the tastiest stuff sells out early.

Thanks for reading, y’all, and be well. See you back here next week.

—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia

---

This is issue #100 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you’re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits:

• Tiger Woods once ate at an Augusta Arby’s for a whole week

• Nutria: Delicious? Nope. Cute? Nope. Good pets? Apparently!

• The joy and terror of the Savannah St. Patrick’s Day parade

• Take a wild guess which state has a gun-shaped pool

• What does “Flashlight & A Biscuit” mean, anyway?

Keep in touch with me via email right here. And load up a to-go box before you leave:

• The F&AB Spotify playlist

• The F&AB bookstore

• The F&AB Books, Beer & Barbecue map

If you dig this newsletter, share it with your friends. Invite others to the party, everyone’s welcome.

1. Yes, this is the second straight issue on Augusta and the Masters. I generally try to spread things out a bit more, geographically and thematically speaking, week to week, but sometimes timeliness takes precedence. It’s like a peach ice cream sandwich; you don’t leave certain stories out on the counter for too long or trouble results.

2. Behind-the-scenes bit: every so often, you know when a quote is a home run. As soon as Player said that, I and the two other writers next to me immediately wrote it down, circled it, starred it, underlined it, and drew arrows pointing to it. And Player said it with a shrug, maybe (probably) not even realizing he’d just uttered one of the most truthful lines ever said at the Masters.