This is the most popular comfort food in SC, National Geographic says. Do you agree?

If you were going to pick a comfort food for South Carolina, what would you pick?

Grandma’s fried chicken?

Aunt Frances ‘ peach ice cream?

That delicious shrimp and grits you had at a cozy coastal restaurant?

National Geographic has selected a comfort food for each state.

Some you could probably guess.

Hot dish in Minnesota, whole hog barbecue with vinegar pepper sauce in North Carolina, barbecue burnt ends in Missouri.

And there are some that may be a bit foreign to our Southern palates like booyah in Wisconsin, a chicken and vegetable stew with Belgian roots; chili with cinnamon rolls in Nebraska that came from of all things school lunches in the 1940s; seafood gumbo with a hard-boiled egg in Louisiana, which is considered the equivalent of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, National Geographic said. (They also said you can put potato salad in the gumbo instead of the egg.)

You’d think South Carolina might have gotten grits, but that went to Georgia or lobster rolls in Maine, which got blueberry pie and Connecticut got the lobster rolls.

​“Comfort foods often come in two varieties: easy to make, and those that evoke feelings of coziness,” Casey Corn, a chef and food anthropologist, told National Geographic. “They can make you feel better because they taste good or provide a sense of nostalgia. This is why they’re deeply personal: representing who you are as an eater, and also reflecting your culinary culture.”

The magazine says South Carolina’s comfort food is mac and cheese.

“It’s very telling that you see mac and cheese on the table at almost every Southern holiday gathering; a true sign of comfort and nostalgia,” Jon Buck, the executive chef at Soby’s in Greenville, told the magazine. “Every family has their own recipe. It transports you back in time to a certain place, with certain people.”

There is no shortage of restaurants where you can get good mac and cheese in South Carolina, according to Yelpers. They say Midwood Smokehouse is the best in Columbia, Scoundrel in Greenville, Sorelle in Charleston, Big Mike’s Soul Food in Myrtle Beach and A Lowcountry Backyard in Hilton Head.

And perhaps to some, a big old family reunion where nobody did a signup sheet and the table was heavy with mac and cheese of every stripe.