Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (7 page)

History tells us that the earliest Europeans also held pork in the highest esteem. Posidonius, the Greek who made the first ethnographic study of the
Celts in 70 B.C.E. noted, "When the hindquarters of the boar are served, the
bravest man claimed the finest cut for himself, and if someone else wanted it,
the two contestants stood up and fought to the death." Perhaps those infamous Appalachian families the Hatfields and the McCoys were but replicating
that ancient ritual when they engaged in their infamous feud, a war that had
its roots in the alleged theft of a pig. By the time it was over more than twenty
people had been killed. Contemporary pork-related competitions such as the
Swine Time Festival in Climax, Georgia, the Chitlin' Strut in Salley, South
Carolina, the Big Pig Jig in Vienna, Georgia, and Hillsborough Hog Day in
North Carolina rarely lead to death.

The tens of thousands of fans of the University of Arkansas's football team
may "call the hogs" in unison, and Arkansas may grow more rice and hogs
than Louisiana does, but Louisiana has jambalaya (named for the Provencal
version of paella called jambalaia, from jambon, French for ham) and more
hog-related celebrations than any state in the union. There are Uncle Earl's
Hog Dog Trials (named for three-time governor of Louisiana, Earl Long
[1895-196o]) in Winnfield, the Cracklin' Festival in Port Barre, the Louisiana Swine Festival in Basile, the Cochon de Lait Festival in Mansura, the Festival
de la Viande Boucanee in Ville Platte, the Boudin and Cracklin Festival in
Carencro, and Le Grande Boucherie in St. Martinville ... and that is just the
tip of the sow's curly little tail. According to Tim Page at the LSU Agricultural
Center, Louisianans eat more pork per capita than people in any other state in
the union.

Pork consumption did not come naturally, however, to many of the first
West African slaves who arrived in Louisiana in 1719. Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo
Hall noted in her Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (csu Press, 1992) that by the eighteenth
century c.E. Islam had come to Senegambia, where most of Louisiana's early
slaves came from. "The blacks living on both sides of the Senegal River and in
the lands to the east and south were Muslims," reports Hall. The Mandigas in
particular were noted as "missionaries of Mohammedanism" and were most
certainly not pig-eaters. Conversion to Christianity would have been the necessary first step many Africans had to make before they adopted the European
addiction to salt pork.

According to Sam Hilliard's book, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in
the Old South, 1840-187o, each year between 184o and 186o an average of two
hogs were raised for every man, woman, and child below the Mason-Dixon
Line. According to one study, it was recommended that each field hand be fed
a minimum of between two and five pounds of pork per week. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century and the advent of fences and
roads, many rural South farmers would mark their hogs' ears and let them
roam free to dine on crabs, roots, and acorns. Once a hog was fattened up, the
farmer would track it and chase it home for the slaughter. On most Southern
farms the first cold snap harkened the end of summer vegetables and the annual hog slaughter. Livers, cracklins, and chitterlings (small intestines) were
eaten immediately. (Another favorite post-boucherie supper was brains and
onions along the Cote des Allemands of Louisiana.) Globs of hog fat were
boiled in a gigantic black pot to be rendered into lard. Scraps of meat were
ground up for sausages. Ribs were slowly steamed (as in the method recommended by Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who oversaw the pork
preparation for his boys in gray). Sides of bacon, hog jowls, shoulders, and
hams were cured in salt for weeks. Then they were hung in the smokehouse
along with a variety of sausages, ham hocks, and knuckles to be smoked over
hickory or pecan wood, peanut shells, or corncobs (known as meat cobs).
Some farmers cured their meat with red pepper to prevent infestations of fly
larvae in the era before refrigeration.

While the gourmands in history may debate the merits of butter over olive
oil, most cooks who stooped over Southern hearths employed a cheaper, more
accessible, all-purpose fat. The Spanish had long elevated lard (41 percent saturated fat) to a fat as cherished as olive oil. When I encountered Carl A.
Brasseaux's statement that "butter was practically unknown to the Acadians"
in his book, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in
Louisiana, X765-1803, I initially was skeptical. How could these seventeenthcentury refugees of butter-eating Brittany and Normandy not have butter, especially when they kept cows in Nova Scotia and Louisiana? The answer seems
to be simply that Acadians preferred the taste of pork.

Lard is so vital, in fact, that not one of the people of Acadian ancestry I interviewed could ever even remember eating butter prior to World War II. Even
those who had ice boxes didn't eat much butter. "What would we use butter
for?" reasoned a friend's Cajun, French-speaking great-grandmother from
Villa Platte. "We cooked with bacon fat and lard. We put my fine fig preserves
or cane syrup on our bread!"

"Butter was rare in our house," says Frances Aubert Hebert Richard, daughter of a turn-of-the-century rice farmer in Meaux, Louisiana. "Even though
we had cows, I think churning butter was just too time consuming. Especially
when we didn't have a cool place to keep sweet butter fresh."

"The only thing we used the milk from our Jersey cow for was to make cail-
lie egoute, a type of cream cheese we ate with sugar," says Willie Schutz, past
president of the Acadiana Herb Society and a fifth-generation native of New
Iberia. "Butter was not predominant in our home, though." Her mother, Anna
Mae Darce (b. 1923), grew up on Pebbles Plantation between New Iberia and
Loreauville during the depression. Mother and daughter both follow an old
family tradition and cook with only one cooking oil-hog lard. "When a hog
was butchered in the cold months, the meat was stored in gallon syrup cans,"
recalls Schutz. "The lard was rendered to be used for piecrust and to saute
with."

Dr. Gabou Mendy is a Louisiana physician who was born and raised in
Gambia in West Africa says, "The reason why foods made with rice, chicken,
black-eyed peas and okra taste so different in Africa than they do in Louisiana
is the fats which they are prepared with. In West Africa we traditionally cook
with palm oil because it is the most available." Palm oil (51 percent saturated
fat) is by all accounts the very soul of fat in the diets of many postcolonial cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.

Palm oil, unlike okra, rice, and West African one-pot cooking techniques,
did not, however, leave its mark on Southern cuisine. To discover what our gumbos and jambalaya could have tasted like had palm oil been consumed in
Louisiana, we must travel to Brazil, where it remains a sensory cornerstone.
Gastro-ethnographically speaking, we know that palm oil came to the New
World with the West African slaves transported by the Portuguese to Brazil,
where the palms they transplanted took root to create a cuisine similar in
taste, look, and pungency to their homeland foods. It is West African palm oil,
known in Portuguese as Dende, that adds a potent red-yellow color and robustness to many Brazilian foods. With little oinkers gleefully languishing in
the Gulf South's muddy environs, lard and its more flavorful smoky sister,
bacon grease (40 percent saturated fat), provided the earthy punch closer in
taste to palm oil than either butter or olive oil.

As the rural poor in the South relied on pork to sustain them, affluent
urbanites sought gentrification through culinary Americanization. In 1877,
Godey's Lady's Book advised readers that pork and ham were difficult to digest
and unwholesome. As the Midwestern beef-and-potato diet become identified with post-industrial revolution American wholesomeness, pork fell
from favor. Even Lafcadio Hearn's 1885 La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of
Culinary Recipes reflects the trend toward nice, plain dishes. His book is filled
with recipes for veal, calf head, stewed kidneys, and mutton. Pork is hardly
mentioned.

While the consumption of pork from the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth century may have been dictated by one's social status, it was the dependence upon pork that saved the South's gastronomic bacon from the mire
of bland middle-Americanization. As Steve Juneau, the founder of the Jambalaya Festival in Gonzales, Louisiana, points out, "I don't recall ever tasting
jambalaya or gumbo made with beef. Even during really hard times people
may make their jambalaya out of lima beans and coon, [but] they'll stick in
some government surplus bologna just to get that pork taste in there." Necessity and innovation wed to transform the French boudin (blood sausage) into
Louisiana boudin, which is actually more like jambalaya finger food.

The consumption of this much pork fat may condemn Southerners to early
graves, but we push back from the banquet of life with a grateful smile on our
lips. In the rest of the country pork may he considered "the other white meat,"
but down here pork rules.

Editor's note: This essay originally appeared in Harper's Weekly, October 24, 1896.

When Julian Ralph found "the best cook in the West" in New Orleans he had
not made the acquaintance of the Sheriff of Wilkes County, Georgia. He did
not, therefore, know of the succulent mysteries of that most popular of Southern institutions, a Georgia barbecue. The barbecue is one of the institutions of
the South. To have known it means happiness; not to have known it means
that a link in the chain of life has been lost.

The Sheriff of Wilkes is the patron saint of barbecue as it is known in Georgia. Just what are the duties of the Sheriff of that grand old county, which
knew the Toombs, the Crawfords, Alexander Stephens, and others of the famous families as her own, might to the outsider seem a little indistinct, for the
principal function of the Sheriff of Wilkes under the present regime-and
that regime dates back almost to that time when the memory of man runneth
not to the contrary-consists in the creation of a dish that brings joy to the
heart of the Georgian and his brother, whether born under sunny Southern
skies or the more frigid zones of North-land.

The word "dish" is used in a metaphorical sense. The barbecue gets its
name from the method of cooking the meats that form its principal substance. It is a pagan feast. Its home is in the woods, by some clear running
brook, and when found upon its native hearth such modern conveniences as
knives and forks, tables and chairs, are not known. One of the exposition
spots that the Northerners are sure to seek out is the shed near the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, over which this same Sheriff of Wilkes presides, and where, at all hours of the day, the good cheer which is so closely
connected with his name is dispensed. The shed is rather a rough place, for the
barbecue with the modern conveniences and the delicacies of Delmonico's
would lose its flavor. The chinaware is the old ironstone variety, known principally for its thickness. You get knives and forks, it is true, and paper napkins, but the table at which you sit is innocent of linen. You order a dinner. There is
brought before you a half-dozen kinds of meats, steaming hot, the aroma of
which is most pleasing to the appetite if you have one to start on; and if you
have none, it is sure to create one for you. Then there is a mysterious dish
which the Sheriff calls stew, and pickles and bread and butter and a cup of
not-too-good coffee are furnished "on the side." The stew is a concoction of
many vegetables, and, for some reason not altogether clear even to its maker,
bears the mysterious name of Brunswick. It is a necessary adjunct to the dinner, and when it is made sufficiently hot by a sufficient quantity of pungent
peppers, it is indeed a rare appetizer.