Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (17 page)

Anyway, barbecue may someday escape its native Southern matrix and become an all-American institution, as Coca-Cola did a century ago, as NASCAR
and country music and the Southern Baptist Convention may be doing today.
But it hasn't happened yet. Even in the East End of London barbecue still retains its identification with the South. It's still not just a Southern food, but almost the Southern food.

Which makes it odd is that some conspicuous parts of the South are not especially good places to find it. South Louisiana, of course, but that's not what
I'm talking about. I mean towns and cities that have got above their raisin'or, anyway, want to get above it. You may know the country song by Clyde
Egerton that goes "I'm a Quiche Lady in a Barbecue Town." Well, in some
Southern towns there are a lot of quiche ladies-of both sexes, domestic and
imported - so many in some places that they call the shots. What you get then
is a quiche town.

Atlanta is one of them. You can still find good barbecue in Atlanta, but
most of the joints are hidden away-off the beaten track, in obscure and sometimes unsavory neighborhoods. Harold's is one of the best-it's near the
prison. There used to be a pretty good place on Peachtree Street, Wyolene's,
but it closed. Even the Auburn Rib Shack, just down from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, went out of business a while back. It's almost as if downtown Atlanta is ashamed of barbecue-finds it too country, too low-rent.

In fact, it's more polite than accurate to say it's "almost as if they're
ashamed." Damn it, they are ashamed. When the Olympics came to town, the
fellow in charge of arranging to feed the crowds (a friend of mine from North
Carolina) lined up a local African American concessionaire to welcome the
world to Georgia with a wonderful array of Southern food-most definitely
including barbecue. But the Atlanta Olympic Organizing Committee was desperately eager that visitors understand that Atlanta is a cosmopolitan placea "world-class, major-league city," as a welcome sign at the airport once proclaimed. When the committee saw the proposed menu, they vetoed it-and
hired a food-service firm from Buffalo to sell hot dogs and hamburgers.

Which brings me to the most quoted sentence I've ever written: "Every
time I look at Atlanta, I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers
died to prevent."

One of the reasons I like Texans is their attitude toward barbecue. Go to
Dallas: there's Sonny Bryant's smack downtown, not far from Neiman Marcus. Go to Houston: Goode Company's right out in public where people can
find it. These places say: Welcome to Texas. Have some Texas food. We like it,
and you will, too.

Yes, there are Southern cities with barbecue pride.

But the real home of real barbecue is in the small-town South. Not Charlotte, North Carolina, say, but Shelby, an hour west-where Dale and I go for
supper when we're in Charlotte: barbecue as good as we've ever had at either
of two wonderful establishments, Alston Bridge's or Bridge's Barbecue Lodge
(I think the two Bridges are cousins or something).

Seriously, start listing great barbecue towns: Lexington, North Carolina
(where Vince Staten found sixteen joints for 16,ooo people), Goldsboro,
Owensboro, Lockhart.... The only barbecue Mecca with over a ioo,ooo population-the only one over 50,ooo-is Memphis. The South's other cities may
have barbecue, sometimes good barbecue, but it's not a religion. And, in
many of them, the best on offer these days is at branches of barbecue chains. I
don't approve of chain restaurants in general, and I dislike barbecue chains
more than most. It was Rousseau who memorably observed the paradox that
man is born free and is everywhere in chains. Expansion is not good for barbecue joints. That's a rule almost as reliable as Vince Staten's maxim that a place without flies is no good. (You should ask what the flies know that you
don't.) I'm sorry, but Dreamland in Birmingham just isn't as good as Dreamland in Tuscaloosa. If the owner's not around to keep an eye on things, it's a
pretty safe bet that both the food and the, ah, ambience will suffer. And it's especially sad when a chain imports somebody else's traditions to a place that
ought to celebrate its own. I think about this every time I eat Memphis dry ribs
at Corky's in Jackson, or Red, Hot and Blue in Chapel Hill. Which is often. Because when it comes to barbecue the truth is the worst I ever had was good, as
Dave Gardner once observed on another subject. (At least I think he was talking about another subject. Sometimes it's hard to tell with Brother Dave.)

Anyway, I think places with local barbecue traditions should shun synthetic tradition, even if it comes from Memphis and tastes pretty good. When
I have a choice I prefer the local product, ideally served up in a cinder-block
building with a dancing pig sign out front. One reason I prefer it has nothing
to do with the food; it has to do with community cohesion.

Go into one of these joints in or near a small Southern town and you're
quite likely to find that it has brought all sorts of unlikely people together, just
about everyone except quiche ladies: businessmen and construction workers,
farmers and lawyers, cowboys and hippies, black and white and everything inbetween and sideways, Protestants and Catholics. Even Jews. Some of you may
know the Old Smokehouse Barbecue, in Anniston, run by Gershon Weinberg.
You've heard the phrase "Root, hog"-well, this is sort of "Kashrut hog."

I once suggested half-seriously that if the South needs a new flag-as it
surely does-we could do worse than to use a dancing pig with a knife and
fork. You want to talk about heritage, not hate.... That represents a heritage
we all share and can take pride in. Barbecue both symbolizes and contributes
to community. And that's without even mentioning its noncommercial manifestations-for instance, in matters like fund-raising for volunteer fire departments. But there's another side to this coin. It's often the case, and it is in
this one, too, that community is reinforced by emphasizing differences from
and with outsiders.

There's no denying that barbecue can be divisive. Drive a hundred miles
and the barbecue does change. The only constant is slow-cooking with smoke
(and, yes, I know some places cook with gas only and call their product "barbecue," but I don't).

Suppose we go with the Southeastern majority and cook pork. Will it be
shoulder, ribs, or whole hog? What kind of sauce-mostly vinegar, tomato, or
mustard? How hot? How sweet? Will we baste or not? Or forget the sauce and
go with a dry rub?

o K. The meat is done. What are the divinely ordained side dishes? Carolina
hush puppies? Alabama white bread? Arkansas tamales? (Check out McClard's in Hot Springs.) Coleslaw is almost universal, but I've only seen boiled
white potatoes in eastern North Carolina; rice only in South Carolina;
jalapenos only in Texas and Oklahoma. The questions of what to cook, how to
cook it, and what to serve with it are not resolved by the individual whim or
creativity of the cook. Like Byzantine icon painters, barbecue cooks differ in
technique and in skill, but they are working in traditions that pretty much tell
them what to produce.

And those traditions reflect and reinforce the fierce localism that has always been a Southern characteristic, the "sense of place" that literary folk
claim to find in Southern fiction, the devotion to states' rights and local autonomy that was an established characteristic of Southern politics long before
it became a major headache for the Confederate States of America.

As I wrote once, barbecue is not like grits-in more ways than the obvious.
Grits (if you'll excuse the image) glue the South together. Barbecue, on the
other hand-well, you could say it pits community against community. This
rivalry, this competitive aspect of barbecue, has been institutionalized in the
formal contests that seem to have become a permanent feature of the Southern landscape. Last time I looked, something called the Sanctioned Barbecue
Contest Network sponsored some thirty major contests a year, and the schedules in a fat newspaper called National Barbecue News suggest that there are
enough minor-league contests to keep you busy most weekends if you're inclined that way, and some folks are.

One of the biggest and best-known of these competitions is at Memphis in
May, where I got to be a judge a few years ago.

Memphis in May offers not just great barbecue but a complete barbecul-
tural experience, including Elvis impersonators, vendors of plastic pig snouts,
campaigning politicians, and evangelists distributing leaflets on "What to Do
in Case You Miss the Rapture." Not a street mime in sight. Saturday night
entertainment is provided by folks like the Reverend Billy C. Wirtz, boogiewoogie piano player and composer of such songs as "Mennonite Surf Party,"
"Stick Out Your Can ('Cause Here Comes the Garbage Man)," and "Your
Greens Give Me the Blues."

The contest takes place in a park right on the banks of the Mississippi, and
you can smell the hickory smoke a half-mile away. My year, there were 18o-
odd teams-some odder than others. One contestant called himself "M. C.
Hamhock" and performed a rap number that went

(A couple of weeks ago in San Antonio I saw a sign that went that one better.
It said "You don't need no teeth to eat Bob's meat.")

In Memphis, the teams compete not just for the best barbecue, but for the
best "area." Some mom-and-pop operations make do with folding lawn chairs
and funeral home tents, but other teams erect booths, pavilions, kiosks, huts,
gazebos, and God knows what all else, some of them two- and three-story
structures with lattice-work, decks, statuary, and hanging plants. Each team
has a name, and many have mottoes such as "Hogs smell better barbecued,"
and "We serve no swine before it's time." Portable generators power everything from electric fans to fountains and neon signs, and over their constant
drone mighty sound systems pump out music-mostly country, Cajun, or
rap, but when I was there I also heard the Village People's "YMCA."

I saw smokers ranging from backyard Weber pots to an eighteen-wheelerpulled behemoth billed as the world's largest portable barbecue cooker,
but most were roughly coffin-sized, some obviously off-the-rack, but others
homemade from fifty-five gallon drums and stovepipe. And everywhere you
looked you saw the pig-totem of the People of the Swine.

Now, for years I kept a mental log of barbecue joint signs. I'd seen pigs reclining, running, and dancing; pigs with bibs, with knives and forks, with
crowns and scepters. I'd seen pigs as beauty contest winners, pigs in Confederate uniforms, and pigs in cowboy hats (one with a banjo). I'd seen Mr. and
Mrs. Pig dressed for a night on the town, and Mr. and Mrs. Pig as American
Gothic.

But I had never seen pigs like I saw in Memphis. Pigs in chefs' hats and volunteer firemen's helmets. A pig in a Memphis State football uniform triumphant over some University of Tennessee pigs. A pig in a Superman suit
rising from the flames. There was a pig reclining in a skillet; another on a grill,
drinking beer. Two pigs basting a little gnomish person on a spit. Lots of pigs
drinking beer and a whole trainload of partying pigs on the T-shirts of a team
called the Rowdy Southern Swine from Kossuth, Mississippi. It's a hard call,
but my favorite was probably some pigs with wings and halos, from a team
called Hog Heaven.

For some reason, Italy was being honored by the festival that year, so a
number of teams struck what they took to be Italian notes (although if any actual Italians were present to receive this hands-across-the-sea homage I didn't
run into them). Some booths were decorated with hanging bunches of plastic grapes or simulated marble columns, and there were almost as many Italian
flags as Confederate ones. T-shirts said "Ciao Down." And of course the pig
signs got into the act. Pigs ate pizza. Pigs wore handlebar mustaches. Pigs reclined in gondolas. Pigs stomped grapes. Pigs posed in gladiator gear and
togas and Mafia outfits.

Among the humans, some men wore overalls, Western clothes, or biker
gear, but since it was well over ninety degrees in the shade, most wore shorts
and T-shirts, revealing all too plainly what beer and barbecue can do to the
male physique. Female attire ran to halter tops and cutoffs. The cutoffs had
often been decorated with stickers lovingly applied to passing butts by freelance inspectors in pig noses. The stickers said things like "HOT," "Can't Touch
This," "Roman Hands," and "USDA Choice."

Professor that I am, I couldn't help but think of a grim "feminist-vegetarian"
monograph I'd run across called The Sexual Politics of Meat. If its poor author
had come to Memphis with me, she'd probably have been carried off gibbering. As a matter of fact, pig people seem to be politically incorrect on just
about every score. I once saw a column in the National Barbecue News urging
compassion for victims of HIV-high intake of vegetables.

Memphis in May teams also competed on "showmanship," based on musical routines with barbecue and Italian themes. "White boys can't dance" was
my sister's summary of one of these efforts, but I reminded her that black ones
probably couldn't either after drinking as much beer as some of these guys
had. Shoot, they were doing pretty well to stand.