Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (28 page)

Inside the machine shop, the smoker begins to take shape. A hulking, 275gallon residential oil tank, stretched out on a support frame, has been cut in
half. A fifty-gallon drum, which will serve as the firebox, has been grafted onto
one end, not exactly with surgical precision.

"It'll work," says Andrew Stoddard, thirty-seven, from behind a welder's
mask, "but it's the ugliest welding job I've ever done."

Leaning against a wooden counter littered with tools, a rusted-out smokestack waits its turn in the operating room while Stoddard points out where the
tuning plates will go. As he draws a chalk line inside the tank to mark the spots
he will solder through next, he explains: "Tuning plates will run the length of
the interior to hold movable slats. These aid in the distribution of heat."

That heat, which Stoddard will maintain at 23o degrees Fahrenheit, will
cook six twenty-pound pork shoulders at Safeway's National Capital Barbecue Battle Saturday and Sunday in downtown Washington. "It's the money,"
he says. "That's why I'm building it myself. To buy the best smoker at the size
I'd need, I would have to spend at least $5,000."

Stoddard, who's been working on the hardware since April, got the tank
from a scrap dealer, the brother of a coworker. The wheels were snatched off a
junked golf-course mower at the country club where he is chief engineer. The
smokestack was plucked from a friend's back yard. Total expenses so far (not
counting the meat): fifty dollars.

That's a frugal turn from Stoddard's early days. Seven years ago, inspired by
a chapter on authentic barbecue in Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby's
The Thrill of the Grill, Stoddard, a Bethesda native, bought his first smoker. "At
the time we were tight," says Stoddard, speaking of his and his wife's finances,
"and it was totally inappropriate to spend $300 [on a smoker]. That didn't go
over well. But the [resulting] barbecue smoothed things over."

Now he's hoping that his smoked pork will have an equally salutary effect
on the judges of this year's competition. The Barbecue Battle, which attracted tens of thousands of people last year, is fought over two days, and, while Stoddard will be competing with smoked lamb on Saturday, it is Sunday that most
excites him. That is the all-pork day, judged by Memphis in May-sanctioned
judges. (Memphis in May, one of the biggest barbecue competitions in the nation, requires its judges to attend several hours of seminars on how to rate
smoked pork and instructs them on the complex scoring it uses to determine
a winner.) At the D.C. competition, three judges visit each of the sites of the
more than forty teams of competitors at twenty-minute intervals during the
course of an assigned hour, while four others judge blindly. (Most competitors are teams, but Stoddard will be accompanied by his wife, Jeanie, working
as the pit boss handling all the details and leaving Stoddard to focus on the
cooking.)

"It's all fun, and everyone is having a great time," says Doug Halo, competition coordinator and two-time Barbecue Battle champion, "but when the
judging starts, it becomes dead serious."

No surprise there: The grand champion walks away with $1,500 and paid
entry in the 2003 Memphis in May contest, where he or she will compete for
the World Championship Pork Barbecue Title.

At t:oo A.M. on a chilly May night, when Jeanie has long since gone to bed,
Stoddard stands watch over forty pounds of pork shoulder. The night is
unseasonably cold, so he leans against the now completed, freshly painted
smoker to stay warm. A table, set up under a tent on the front lawn of his
Bethesda home, is stacked on one end with plates, forks, and napkins. On the
other side, a portable stove keeps last week's defrosted practice pork warm. "I
smoked seventy pounds last weekend," Stoddard says. "I told the Montgomery County Police that I'd be serving it from 3:30 P.M. Saturday until 3:30 P.M.
Sunday. I'll be cooking the whole time."

So far, though, only two of Stoddard's friends have shown up. One is a
vegetarian.

Stoddard's specialty is the pulled pork sandwich. He cooks in the Memphis
style, using indirect heat. The pork is given a dry rub-a complex, and secret,
combination of spices-and left to render its fat and absorb the flavorful hickory and oak smoke. After about twenty hours, the pork is astonishingly tender
and pulls away from the bone like strands of cotton candy. A pink smoke ring
penetrates half an inch into the meat, deepening the flavor.

Though Stoddard turns the pork shoulders only once during cooking, the
day-long vigil is anything but idle. "I set my alarm for an hour," Stoddard says,
referring to his sleep schedule. "You just have to catch an hour when you can."

His eyes can't stray for long from the two thermometers he has embedded
in opposite sides of the upper half of his smoker. Part of his practice routine is
getting to know the idiosyncrasies of his homemade cooker. The transfer of
heat, the setting of the dampers, the position of the tuning plates, the amount
of wood used at a given time: everything has to be precise and in its place. As
the clock passes 2:0o A.M., one of the thermometers shoots up to 30o degrees,
far above the target temperature of 230. The firebox glows too brightlythere's too much wood. Stoddard throws open the top of the smoker to let the
heat out, takes a quick look at the shrinking shoulders (each shoulder will lose
approximately half its weight while cooking) and shrugs. "They're fine," he
says without conviction.

Three weeks, ioo hours of cooking, and more than 16o pounds of pork later,
Stoddard has the smoker under control. One side is twenty degrees hotter
than the other, but he can live with that. "I'm not sure it will ever get tuned
perfectly," Stoddard admits. He might not get the heat adjusted just right, but
he won't risk overcooking the shoulder. A metal probe, inserted in the pork
and connected to a digital thermometer via three feet of wire, measures the internal temperature. When it reaches 195 degrees, Stoddard's pager will sound,
and he'll pull the shoulder off the grill.

In the meantime, he sips his beer and stands by calmly. He's relaxed, in
control, and under few illusions about his chances. "Zero. Honestly, zero," he
says without hesitation. "If I finish better than dead last, I'll be happy." He
pauses, rethinks, smiles. "I think I have a chance-my pork's pretty good."

I eased my car into the parking lot of the new Border's bookstore in Louisville
and was readying to go inside for a book signing when I noticed a giant new
structure hulking over the Border's parking lot. "Smokey Bones BBQ Sports
Bar," read the sign, the first time I'd ever seen "BBQ" and "Sports Bar" in the
same sentence. The sign wasn't crooked. There were no misspellings. There
wasn't even a wood pile to be seen anywhere. For all the world this looked like
the outside of an Outback or a Ryan's Steakhouse. But it said "BBQ" on the
sign.

They're at it again, I thought. The franchisers.

It's been fifteen years since Greg Johnson and I published Real Barbecue,
our ode to the slowest of the slow foods, in which we had the audacity to try
and pick the top ioo barbecue joints in America. At that time there were hundreds of handbooks for those seeking out the great French restaurants of
America but no glove-box guide to great barbecue.

There was a reason for that, a couple of reasons as a matter of fact. One was
that barbecue was still referred to in the pages of the New York Times and other
influential journals as "Southern barbecue," as if it were a regional delicacy
found only in that eccentric part of the country below Baltimore on the map.
And the other was that no one thought there was a market for such a guide.
On the later point they were right. Real Barbecue was a poor seller, despite flattering reviews. Even Vogue lifted a delicate pinky and called it the most delightful food book of the year.

Our publisher, Harper & Row, gave the book every shot. They printed up
20,000 copies, a healthy first printing (and, as it turned out, last printing). Ten
books later I still can't read a royalty statement, so I don't know how many
copies Real Barbecue ended up selling. My guess is fewer than 8,000 went out
the door. No major remaindering company stepped forward to snap up the
unsold copies so Harper & Row pulped them and dumped them into the
river. I bought 300 copies at a buck apiece.

A year after its 1988 publication Real Barbecue was history. I moved on to
write Unauthorized America: A Travel Guide to the Places the Chamber of
Commerce Won't Tell You About, a book that landed me a guest spot on David
Letterman's old NBC show. Greg returned to his normal life as features editor
of the Louisville Courier Journal. He's still there. I'm still writing books.

Every couple of years I'll get a frantic phone call from a book editor somewhere who has just heard about this "wonderful barbecue guide" and is interested in publishing an update. I ship off one of my remainder copies and never
hear from the excited editor again. I think it may just be a ruse to get a free
copy, since the book has acquired something of a cult status among serious
chowhounds.

The ruse is over. My box of 300 is now down to two. The next editor is
going to pay market price, which is $125 in the used book stores.

When I contemplate an update-and I contemplate it often-I think about
how much has changed in the barbecue world in the last fifteen years, but how
much remains the same. The Smokey Bones's and Famous Dave's and Red,
Hot and Blues continue to try and tame barbecue, homogenize a food that
prospers because of its many peculiarities and regional differences. Shiny advances in technology, like the Trager cookers that burn wood pellets, tempt
those who'd like to dream that barbecue could be set-it-and-forget-it.

But the future of the un-fast food will remain in the hands of the rugged
individualists who hand-letter their signs and spot-solder their homemade
pits. It's still the people's food. There's more talk about barbecue today than
there was fifteen years ago. I think that fully 1o percent of the population now
knows that barbecue and Sloppy Joes are not one and the same. But I don't
think consumption is up. I see too many shuttered BBQ joints to think that
barbecue is flourishing. It's still a specialized taste, an acquired taste, although
it is acquired very easily if you live in the neighborhood of a first-class joint.

That's where the action was, is, and will continue to be: in the joints. And
for whatever else they want to be, Smokey Bones and company don't want to
be known as a joint. Can't take grandma and the kids to a joint. And that's not
good for the bottom line.

In Louisville, where Greg and I both reside, there has been a barbecue
restaurant explosion in the last fifteen years. There was only one good place in
town when we wrote Real Barbecue. Now there are a half-dozen, all of them
owned and operated by guys who do it for the love of 'cue. None of them is
driving a Mercedes.

Now these 'cue stalwarts have been joined by a couple of well-financed
franchise boys, Smokey Bones and Famous Dave's. Red, Hot and Blue was well-financed too, and it's gone from Louisville after a short run. Even a town
with no real barbecue tradition, like Louisville, can tell the difference between
a barbecue restaurant and a barbecue-themed restaurant. Even McDonald's
has tried to muscle in on the barbecue action with something called a McRib,
which rears its ugly head every spring at selected Micky D's. God forbid your
Mickey D's is selected. I remember the first time I ate one of these preformed
meat-like products. I bought a second and took it to Greg. He examined it,
took a bite, rolled it around on his palate, then passed judgment. "If pork is
the `other white meat,' then this is another white meat."

Still, despite their earnest efforts, it's a safe bet that barbecue won't ever be
left to the multinationals like McDonald's. It's too much of an individualist's
cuisine, fueled by hard work and seasoned with the hope that keeps bubbling
up like all those secret sauces.