Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (3 page)

If you are privileged to hear this, you will return to Oxford. You will return
thinking you know something about grits, then rethink your knowledge at a
Sunday brunch, after tasting the way Anson Mills and its miller, Glen Roberts,
have restored this dish to its previous glory. You might return confident in the
knowledge that South Carolinians can't make good biscuits, only to have
Charleston chef Louis Osteen make last-minute changes to his menu so as to
effectively rebut an anti-South Carolina biscuits remark he heard during a
lecture. You might return to feel something of that fellowship you used to witness in those impatient moments after church when you were hungry and
young and ready to go but your grandmother insisted on greeting everybody
from the pastor on down as if "time for small talk and socializing" appeared
as an item on the order of worship.

In putting together this anthology, I have sought to evoke the warm fellowship
that glows in the South of the Southern Foodways Symposium. This volume
shares with other anthologies the goal of bestness, the hope that we have
combed the pages of potential inclusions and found those that exemplify the
highest standards of literature and scholarship. But I am also hoping that the
selection of these pieces is a step toward the crafting of a Southern geography
so precise and nuanced as to be beyond the capabilities of any cartographer.
So this anthology is about the South of tradition, in which funerals and food
naturally go together, as in Pat Conroy's "Love, Death, and Macaroni." It is the
South of John Martin Taylor's boiled peanuts, a region that extends up to
Harlem but doesn't include Jim Auchmutey's Atlanta. It is a place where the
celebrated chefs are not always men in toques, but old Southern cooking
women as in Sara Roahen's "What Abby Fisher Knows." It is the South of
women like Ruth Fertel, who parleyed her technique and talent beyond the
kitchen and into broader culinary economy (Randy Fertel's "Power of Memory and Presence"). It is about a place with traditions so old and otherworldly
as to be scarcely recognizable to many of us (Susan Allport, "Women Who Eat
Dirt"). It's also about a new South, leading the nation, as exemplified in Molly
O'Neill's "Viking Invasion."

Barbecue occupies a place in this anthology much like the one it occupies
in the pantheon of American food-large and cherished. We take our subtitle,
"The United States of Barbecue," from Jake Adam York, the poet whose work "To the Unconverted" appears here and whose poems often serve as invocations at SFA events. Like cornbread, barbecue is a food that unifies the vast expanse of the American South, an ever larger portion of the American mainstream. Though the various versions of barbecue differ from each other as
much as cows differ from sheep, or as much as tomatoes differ from mustard
seeds, the common themes of wood and smoke, meat and sauce, family and
fellowship, transcend regional rivalries and recipe differences.

Other foods cover the geographic expanse of this nation, just as barbecue
does. You can find fried chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza from coast
to coast. But none of these foods enjoy the great regional variation that barbecue does. None of them exemplify the competing themes of American unity
and diversity as barbecue does. You don't hear heated arguments about the
fundamental differences between the hamburgers in Albuquerque and those
in Altoona. Hamburgers just ain't that deep. As John Shelton Reed reminds us
in "Barbecue Sociology: The Meat of the Matter," "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."

As the United States has weaned itself from the European culinary orbit in
recent decades, the trained and celebrated chefs at the fancy restaurants have
looked increasingly to the South for domestic inspiration. So barbecue and
barbecue techniques show up on menus in places where real Southern food
has long been alien. And as traditional slow-cooked barbecue becomes more
difficult to find even in its homeland, folks in barbecue country have come to
a greater appreciation of the preciousness of this food.

While books purporting to be about barbecue are popping up on bookstore shelves with increasing regularity, few of them approach the subject with
any appreciation of the seriousness of barbecue history and sociology. While
these books start off from the assumption that barbecue is a saleable subject,
they often fail to recognize the extent to which any serious study of barbecue
must of necessity contain within it a wide range of insights about American
history and culture. So this anthology contains information that, while not
necessarily new, is often overlooked.

If there were any doubts about the formative role barbecue has played in
American history, they are laid to rest in Mary V. Thompson's essay linking
the nation's first president with its preeminent food. Barbacoa, the slowsmoked cow's head delicacy of southern Texas, provides us with some of our
earliest evidence of an American barbecue tradition. In her essay, "The Land
of Barbacoa," Barbara Renaud Gonzalez gives us an update on the dish, informing us of the role such beef still plays in the memory of little girls. Just as the themes of race and religion have been pivotal in the formation of American identity, so have they been pivotal in the formation of barbecue culture.
Even a casual student of barbecue knows that there are racial implications in
any discussion of this food's origins and techniques, but in "Texas Barbecue in
Black and White," Robb Walsh brings into question some of the assumptions
cherished even by barbecue experts. And for those who thought that all adherents to the religion of barbecue were Christian, Marcie Cohen Ferris destroys that tenet in her essay about the Southern Jewish perspective on the
subject.

With "In Xanadu Did Barbecue," a revision of the author's Vassar College
senior thesis, Ripley Golovin Hathaway charts the growth of barbecue's popularity in the American mainstream. But in an 1896 essay in Harpers' Weekly
("The Georgia Barbecue") that her research unearthed, we see that barbecue
has been a topic of interest to the readers of national magazines for more than
a century. And Rufus Jarmon, in his 1954 Saturday Evening Post essay, "Dixie's
Most Disputed Dish," demonstrates that this food was the subject of intense
argument long before Max Brantley's ribs hit the fan in the pages of the
Arkansas Gazette.

This book is but the second in what we, the members of the Southern
Foodways Alliance, fully expect will be a long series of annual anthologies.
Things change. By the time we get to volume io or 20, our people and our
place will be different, changed by the loss of the older generations and the influx of new foreign forces from places like Cambodia and Ethiopia and New
Jersey. There's no way to predict the impact of bagel bakeries and sushi bars on
our traditional diet. So we present this volume to you as a State of the Southern Culinary Union. A snapshot. A reporting on how it is now. We offer it to
you with the full knowledge that, even as you are reading this, our region will
be remaking itself into something we hope and pray will be a more perfect
union, a better reflection of our best selves.

Daddy dreamin"bout it all the time.

When he isn't talkin' 'bout the War and all those dirtyjaps he killed in the
jungle. "Three years ... you know how long that is?"

No, vieja, no quiero arroz! Slanty-eyed.

Daddy won't touch my mother's cilantro rice. "lap-food" Strictly a meat
and potatoes man. Vegetables were a dirty word to him, "are you kidding?"
Slab of lettuce, a thick slice of fresh tomato, hand-picked from the rancho he
worked as a sharecropper in the Texas Panhandle. A cool chunk of one of his
fat cucumbers, maybe, but "don't forget the thousand-island, vieja!" HotDam! Now that was a salad, "told you we know how to eat in Texas!"

My father's family's always been here. "How long?" Ask Daddy, not telling
him about the white kids in first grade who are chasing me, yelling at me to go
back to Mexico. And the crying later. "Forever, I reckon." Daddy's proud that
our people settled Texas in the 1700s, and "then those thieving King Ranch
people stole our land!" After the U.S.-Mexican War, he means. Never talks
about the lynching and the way his grandfather was killed, but my mother says
it's why Daddy's so mean sometimes.