Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (13 page)

Smoke billows from a camper trailer parked in a vacant lot on the side of the
road. I have been hearing about this particular trailer and the barbecue brisket
sandwiches that get handed out of its little window for quite some time now.
I park my car, walk up to the window, and stick my head inside. There, I see
William Little, a middle-aged black guy sitting in a plastic lawn chair watching television.

We exchange a few pleasantries, and I ask for a sandwich. Little ambles up
to the front and opens the steel doors of a smoker that has been improbably
welded right into the trailer's frame. When the sweet-smelling smoke abates, I
see foil-wrapped packages and charred hunks of meat waiting to be sliced.
The doors of the smoker open into the camper's kitchen, which has a multi-
compartment sink, counter space, and a refrigerator. The firebox is fed from the outside. The back of the pickup truck that pulls the trailer is loaded with
oak and pecan logs. William Little has been working out of this trailer six days
a week for the last fifteen years.

I first tasted Little's brisket when I begged somebody who was going to
Dickinson to bring me back a sandwich. I had heard he had some of the best
brisket in the Houston area. I wasn't disappointed. The meat was incredibly
smoky and very tender, and the sandwich was loaded with a huge amount of
the meat. Barbecue sauce had been drizzled on the bun, and the whole thing
was topped with raw onions and dill pickles. It was so good, I decided I better
track the man down.

Little usually parks on Highway 3. But some days he goes to events, like the
rodeo in Pasadena. "Did you ever think of entering the Houston Rodeo Cookoff?" I ask.

"Nah, I can't afford it," he scoffs, but he doubts he would win anyway.
"Black people know how to cook brisket, but the rules for judging are not really about how it tastes. It's all about how pretty it looks. I've eaten brisket
cooked by a team that won, and it was nothin' special," Little says as he hands
the coveted sandwich through the tiny window. I eat it over the trunk of my
car.

"That's some smoky brisket!" I mumble with my mouth full.

Black East Texas barbecue joints don't need any help from affirmative action, I reflect as I wipe the sauce off my chin. An unbiased opinion and a map
drawn on a napkin will do just fine.

The role of regional foodways in defining and reflecting regional mores is generally acknowledged by scholars of culture and society, and certainly the popular culture of the contemporary society in the American South is reflected in
its comestible communication. Southerners sometimes joke about their receipt for pureed possum juleps or raise eyebrows when talking about catfish
mousse; however, other regional foods are discussed more reverently, revealing their semiotic role for the society.

Barbecue is serious business in the South. The fervor which characterizes
the membership of the barbecue cult becomes obvious as the field researcher
attempts to define the topic. The scholar will immediately encounter definite
and differing attitudes, depending upon the individual informant, with regard
to the rites and rituals of barbecue. Areas of disagreement include: (i) definition of the South; (2) definition of barbecue; (3) correct spelling of the word;
(4) type of meat; (5) type of cut; (6) ingredients for sauce; (7) type of pit; (8)
type of wood; (9) wet versus dry cooking; (io) the highest shaman; (n) the
preparation ritual; and (12) the design of the temple.

In many respects, barbecue is taken as seriously as religion. In fact, the barbecue cults throughout the region often display a hostility to criticism and an
intolerance to opposing beliefs that have characterized certain religious
groups. Folks in these parts, observed Max Brantley, "don't just eat barbeque.
They spend hours perfecting home recipes; they burn tanks of gasoline
searching for it; they argue about it. Emotions run high. Nothing I've written
stirred more comment, or brought down more abuse, than a series of articles
about barbeque six years ago.... For my opinion, I was branded a socialist by
a Malvern woman-no kidding-and drew letters of criticism from two
states." The analogy between barbecue cults and religious sects becomes even
more clear when one looks beyond the present manifestations of name-brand
religious denominations to try to define the essence of religion. The definition of religion offered by one scholar could be applied as easily to the barbecue
cult as well. Religion, suggested Melford Apiro, is "an institution consisting of
culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings," and it is an attribute of social groups, comprising a component part of
their cultural heritage. These symbolic, but definitely instrumental, activities
constitute, of course, a ritual, or symbolic action system. While some might
challenge the validity of that paradigm, this essay accepts Joseph Pieper's contention that "culture depends for its very existence on leisure," and that one's
leisure activities-whether one chooses to participate in worship of the sacred
or the profane-can tell us much about the cultural assumptions and the cultural heritage of a people.

In trying to define "the South," historians and sociologists have quibbled
with each other and among themselves, but the plurality seem to include the
eleven states of the old Confederacy and sometimes Maryland, Kentucky, and
Oklahoma. barbecue aficionados contend that the true South is coterminous
with real barbecue. One critic advised, "If you don't like barbecue, don't move
to the South; in some sections, you might starve. If you can't find a barbecue
joint in the phone book, you're not in the South." Empirical evidence confirms this hypothesis: the Atlanta directory boasts twenty-eight barbecue locations, while there is not a single entry under barbecue in the twenty-six
pages of restaurant listings in the Boston area Yellow Pages.

There are probably more barbecue joints than Baptist churches in the
South, but the exact number in existence is unknown, since the census bureau
does not identify restaurants by their specialty fare. One newspaper editor in
Arkansas suggested, "it's safe to say that no incorporated municipality lacks at
least one barbecue man." He conceded, however, "No precise number can be
known. There's no Arkansas Rib and Loin Association with an executive secretary to lobby for exemptions from state health regulations and for tariffs on
imported barbecues."

Field research indicates that the Barbecue South lies between the 3oth and
37th north parallels and between the 77th principal meridian on the east and
U.S. Highway 69 on the west. Some informants will label this heresy, but it appears valid. Parts of Kentucky and Virginia will argue that the 37th parallel is
too far south; however, Kentucky was disqualified because its best "barbecue"
is said to be mutton, and Virginia was eliminated after a Washington-based
Southerner testified that the closest edible barbecue was on the North Carolina line. Texans will complain that the western boundary excludes Dallas and
Houston; however, only northeast Texas qualifies, because the rest of the state
has a strange fascination with beef and mesquite. In Oklahoma, the line is drawn through Muskogee between Slick's, which is included, and My Place,
which is out but has a large flock of devotees. South Florida, the Gulf coast,
and the Atlantic counties of North Carolina will not protest their exclusion,
but a splinter sect in Kansas City will stage a sit-in at Arthur Bryant's.

The repartee involving barbecue goes beyond cartography to include lexicography as well. One reader of a language column recently asked the columnist to settle a domestic argument. "My wife contends that the correct spelling
of a certain process for preparing pork is barbecue, the spelling always used in
your newspaper. It's is her contention that the word is derived from the Spanish word barbacoa, which Spanish explorers of the 166o's got from the Taino
tribe of Haiti, where it meant a framework of sticks on which to roast meat,"
he wrote, "I believe that the correct spelling is barbeque. For one thing, you see
far more signs advertising B-B-Q that B-B-C. For another, since pork is the
only true source of barbeque, and hogs were not native to Haiti, I maintain
that the word comes from the French phrase barbe a queue, meaning beardto-tail, derived from roasting whole pigs." As a final argument, the reader said,
"Stuart Berg Flexner and Noah Webster, both Yankees, seem to agree with
my wife, which is another reason I think I'm right. Yankees don't know any
more about spelling barbeque than they do about how to prepare it." Another
reader wrote in support, "Never mind the etymology, opinion hereabouts is
firm, the final syllable-que represents the swine's tail as in queue (pigtail); a visual onomatopoeia, so to speak."

The columnist, though hedging on the answer, agreed with one point,
that the only real barbecue, or harbeque, is pork. To deny that would be to
sanction what goes on in Texas, and the only people who know less about this
subject than Yankees are Texans." The point made here is that the Southern
barbecue purists insist that both meat and ribs must be pork or the product is
not barbecue. Max Brantley, the leading authority on the subject, has suggested that any charlatan who serves beef ribs rather than pork probably waters the beans as well. Perhaps the best stated formal definition is found in the
"Official Rules and Regulations" of the Memphis in May International Barbecue Cooking Contest, a regional affair held on the banks of the Mississippi
River at the foot of Beale Street: "Barbecue is defined by the sponsors as pork
meat (fresh and uncured) prepared on a wood or charcoal fire, basted or not,
as the cook sees fit, with any non-poisonous substance and sauces as the cook
believes necessary."

Brantley also advances the argument that pork meat alone does not constitute barbecue. In refuting the claim of Arthur Bryant's Barbecue at Eighteenth
and Brooklyn in Kansas City as the King of Ribs, Brantley said, "Dear hearts, smoked meat is not barbecue, unless you're a Texan. Barbecue is sauce, never
mind the dictionary. No matter how long Bryant ages the peppery stuff he
slaps on his meat as an afterthought, it's not fit to baste a Wonder bun at most
Arkansas barbeque shacks." Katherine Zobel, writing in Southern Exposure,
discovered during her research that "like religious tenets, barbecue sauces are
touted as being essential while, at the same time, being unknowable," a belief
supported in practice. J. D. McClard, who "gets up at 4:30 A.M. each day to
cook thirty gallons of [his] mixture down to a thick fifteen gallons," has been
using the same recipe his father acquired in 1928, and the original is kept in a
bank lockbox. Charles Ballard, who learned his trade twenty years ago under
the legendary Elmo Johnson, insists that the sauce is the real secret to success,
adding, "Every barbecue man knows that, and he ain't going to tell you what's
in it.

One food editor, attending a barbecue cook-off with 200 teams, discovered
that "despite their gregarious proclivities, not a one was willing to share a
sauce recipe. The majority said they used secret formulas derived from 'grandmother."' Unlike the truths of revealed religion, the formula for the perfect
barbecue sauce is more akin to a magic spell. As Malinowski observed, "The
spell is that part of magic which is occult, handed over in magical filiation,
known only to the practitioner. To the natives, knowledge of magic means
knowledge of spell, and . . . it will always be found that the ritual centers
around ... the spell. The formula is always the core of the magical performance." In his analysis of the cultural impact of magic, he also provides insight to the function of the high braggadocio associated with the barbecue ritual. Magic, he said, serves "to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith
in the victory of faith over fear," and to express "the greater value for man of
confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over
pessimism." Perhaps the magic of the barbecue ritual is the perfect antidote
for overcoming the pessimism and sense of failure inherent in the burden of
Southern history.