Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (16 page)

Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local. I think the same could be said of
barbecue. Every part of the South has its distinctive traditions when it comes
to political pork. In western Kentucky, office seekers flock to the mutton barbecue and burgoo feeds that the Catholic churches hold to raise funds. In
North Carolina, anyone who wants votes around Charlotte knows to work the
crowd at the Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church's annual autumn barbecue,
which has been known to attract 20,000 people. In Tennessee, you wouldn't
think of running for office without strolling through the tipsy multitudes at
the Memphis in May barbecue contest. I saw a photo of Al and Tipper Gore
eating ribs there a few years ago. It wasn't flattering; their teeth are bared like
wolves ripping apart a small mammal. The wise politician probably ought to
spend more time pumping hands than pumping his elbow.

The state that claims the largest political barbecue in history is not, as you
might expect, Texas. It's Oklahoma. When he took office as governor in 1923,
Jack Walton promised Oklahomans an old-fashioned square dance and barbecue the likes of which had never been seen. The menu sounded like the passenger manifest for Noah's Ark: 289 head of cattle, 7o hogs, 36 head of sheep,
2,540 rabbits, 134 possums, 25 squirrels, 2,000 pounds of bison, 1,500 pounds
of reindeer, 15 deer, 1,427 chickens, 210 turkeys, 14 geese, 34 ducks, one antelope, and one five-year-old boy from Tulsa. (I just threw in that last part to see
if you were paying attention.) By the time the festivities wound down, more
than 50,000 citizens had been fed, and the decimated fields and forests around
Oklahoma City were very quiet.

In Georgia, there's one name that's synonymous with politics and barbecue: Talmadge. It started back in the 1920S with Eugene Talmadge, a rural
populist who was Georgia's version of Huey Long, without much of the substance. In barbecue terms, we'd say he was all sauce. Perhaps literally: Talmadge
died of complications from cirrhosis of the liver. Ole Gene, as his followers
knew him, was a colorful stump speaker who'd stand up there snapping his
red suspenders, a flock of hair flying loose, and denounce the city slickers
in the state capitol and "them lyin' Atlanta newspapers" that told on him.
He liked to say that there were only three things that the poor dirt farmers
of Georgia could trust: God almighty, the Sears Roebuck catalog, and Gene
Talmadge.

Talmadge kicked off his first campaign for governor in 1932 with a huge
barbecue that drew io,ooo people to his hometown of McRae, in middle
Georgia. Farmers donated scores of pigs and goats and cows and chickens. A
local man, Norman Graham, known as the Barbecue King, was appointed to
oversee the cooking, which took thirty-six hours to complete. A crowd of
townspeople came out to watch, as if the barbecuing and not the speechmaking were the point of it all. William Anderson, in his biography of Talmadge,
The Wild Man from Sugar Creek, described the scene on the night before as
they fired up the Brunswick stew pots: "Insects swirled and buzzed crazily
into the string of naked light bulbs that wound over the pits giving a hard
brightness to the cooking area." So many bugs flew into the kettles of stew,
"drawn there by its sweet aroma, that no pepper had to be added for flavor."
As one of the men explained, "Bugs was good spice."

This confirms many of our fears about the ingredients of Southern stews.

Talmadge rode his barbecues and conservative populism to multiple terms
as Georgia governor. The Atlanta Constitution's Celestine Sibley, who covered
Talmadge at the end of his life, liked to tell a story about what happened to him during one of his campaign appearances. He was headed to a rally in
south Georgia, "a fish fry, I believe," and asked his driver to pull over at the
next farm so he could borrow the man's outhouse. "Gene goes in there to take
care of business-I'm kind of hoping there was nothing to use but a Sears
Roebuck catalog," and while he's sitting there a black widow spider bites him
on his genitalia. By the time he got to the rally, his undercarriage had swollen
up like a nursing sow and he wasn't able to do much but say hello, goodbye
and get himself to the doctor.

Gene's son, Herman, followed him in the governor's office in the late 1940s
and continued the tradition of Talmadge pork. Actually, it was more Herman's
wife, Betty Talmadge. She started a business curing and selling Talmadge
hams from their plantation in Lovejoy, south of Atlanta. She always claimed
the house was the model for Twelve Oaks in Gone With the Wind. She just
loved having barbecues on the grounds like the one that begins Margaret
Mitchell's novel. Betty published a recipe book called How To Cook a Pig, in
which she reminisces about a big barbecue she threw for the Carters during
the 1976 presidential campaign.

The man who succeeded Herman Talmadge as governor figures in this
survey if only for one folksy comment he made at the end of his career. Marvin Griffin was a small-town newspaperman editor of the Bainbridge PostSearchlight, which has always been my favorite name in all the Georgia press.
Being a newsman, he knew how to craft a quote. Unfortunately, he was also an
awful governor. He spent most of his term in the mid-195os defending segregation and a remarkably corrupt administration. Another newspaper said
that Griffin's philosophy of government could be summed up by saying: "If
you ain't for stealing, you ain't for segregation." It was on Marvin's watch that
Georgia adopted the Rebel state flag that has caused us so much grief.

Georgia governors back then were restricted to one term at a time, so Griffin had to leave office in 1959. When he ran for another term in 1962, he pulled
all the old tricks. He was still as racist as ever, vowing to put Martin Luther
King Jr. "so far back in the jail that you'll have to pump air to him." And, of
course, he used all the old-fashioned campaign tools, including Talmadge-
style barbecues from one end of the state to the other or, as we say in Georgia,
from Tybee Island to Rabun Gap.

But Griffin's opponent was more savvy. Carl Sanders was a handsome attorney from Augusta who didn't look or sound like the kind of man who
would embarrass Georgia in the nation's eyes. Cufflinks Carl, they called him.
He put his faith in Tv commercials more than barbecues and stump speaking,
and he won the Democratic primary.

Old Marvin seemed to realize that he was a victim of changing times. He
told a reporter that he had been deceived by the size of his campaign crowds,
which were easily larger than Sanders's. That may have meant something in
the old days, but it didn't necessarily matter anymore. Here's the way he put it,
and I love this quote: "Everybody that ate my barbecue I don't believe voted
for me."

In the forty years since that election, the place of barbecue in politics has
evolved considerably. You don't have many pig-pickins on the courthouse
square these days. When politicians do a barbecue nowadays, it's usually a
$500-a-plate fund-raiser where the party faithful can rub elbows with the candidate, or a catered affair to celebrate a triumph, like Newt's ascension as
House speaker. Political barbecues are no longer campaign necessities. Like so
many things in American life, they have become in large part self-conscious
allusions to our shared heritage. Politicians used to believe they could sway
votes with a dram of whiskey or a plate of pork. Now they do it with tax cuts
and state lotteries. The barbecue was cheaper.

But that doesn't mean that this tradition is coming to an end. In fact, today
there's a whole new field of political barbecue: the cook-off circuit. If you've
ever been to Memphis in May or the Big Pig Jig in Georgia or one of the
dozens of other barbecue contests throughout the region, you know that
there's more going on there than a redneck Mardi Gras. These competitions
are as political in their own way as anything the Talmadges ever did. Like the
craftiest lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cooking teams do everything in their power
to influence the judges. And like all but the most honest legislators, the judges
can be influenced. It doesn't take cash under the table; usually a cold beer on
a hot day is enough to grease the wheels of deliberation.

But after the lobbying and after the tasting, in the end it still comes down
to a vote. And it is then that the conscientious judge realizes that Thomas Jefferson, that great American and quasi-vegetarian, was wrong: All ribs are not
created equal.

Of course, one of the great things about this country is a person is free to support the barbecue of his choice. In the spirit of that freedom, I'd like to say, God
bless the pigs; God bless the politicians; and God bless American barbecue.

I've almost never before set out to write specifically about barbecue. I was only
one of a couple of hundred judges at Memphis in May, and that was only
because my sister knew the woman who picked the judges. But in the course
of writing and talking about the South, I seem to have wound up writing
and talking right much about Southern food in general, and smoked meat in
particular.

To put some numbers on it, when my wife Dale and I wrote a book called
iooi Things Everyone Should Know about the South, roughly i percent of the
i,ooi things-eight of them-dealt with barbecue. And the second-mostquoted sentence I've ever written (I'm embarrassed to say that you can find
out these things on the internet: it's like some pathetic day-trader watching his
portfolio)-the second-most-quoted sentence I've ever written is this one,
from a 1988 review of Greg Johnson and Vince Staten's Real Barbecue: "Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or
cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes." (I'll get to the most
quoted sentence I've ever written later.)

I don't think you can really understand the South if you don't understand
barbecue-as food, process, and event. If you look at a map of restaurants affiliated with the National Barbecue Association, most of them are in the
South. Now, of course, many of the best barbecue joints aren't the kind of establishments that would join-or even know about-something called the
National Barbecue Association. Nevertheless, observe where the dots are
concentrated.

For the time being, at least, barbecue is Southern. But, as the map shows, it
has started to metastasize, popping up wherever large numbers of expatriate
Southerners are found-no surprise, because that's who cooks it: Southerners
who took their tastes and their techniques with them during the Great Migration out of the South in the first half of the last century.

Like those migrants, barbecue followed well-established migration paths,
recapitulating in the process some of the internal divisions within the South
that we've been hearing about and that I'll say some more about in a minute.
In Oakland and Los Angeles and East Palo Alto you'll find pork ribs, to be
sure, but also beef brisket and hot links and baloney- naturally, since most
Southerners on the West Coast came from Texas and Oklahoma. Mississippians and West Tennesseans who went to Chicago and Detroit took Memphisstyle barbecue-even "dry ribs"-along. And in the Northeast you'll find the
distinctive barbecues of the Carolinas and Georgia, cooked and seasoned with
techniques that came north on the Chickenbone Special. One of my favorite
Northeastern joints, mostly because of its location, was the late Jake and Earl's
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, run by Chris Schlesinger from Norfolk. Chris
wrote The Thrill of the Grill, a pretty good cookbook (although the title contributes to Yankees' endemic confusion about the difference between grilling
and barbecuing).

To be sure, barbecue, like jazz, has sometimes changed when it left its
Southern birthplace. And, in my opinion, like jazz, not always for the better. A
few years ago I read about a New York restaurant called Carolina that served
mesquite-grilled pork on a bed of lettuce with Dijon mustard. And just last
May Dale and I ate at the Arkansas Barbecue in East London's old Spitalfields
Market. Although the proprietor has changed his name to "Bubba" and actually comes from Maryland, he cooks pretty good pulled pork and brisket. But
he caters to local taste by serving them with mushy peas.