Barbeque: A Southern Tradition

Excerpts of remarks given at Centre on Jan. 21, 2007

by John Shelton Reed
Illustrations by Phnomphone Sirimongkhon

I don’t think you can really understand the South if you don’t understand barbecue—as food, process, and event. Look at a map of restaurants affiliated with the National Barbecue Association. It shows plainly that, for the time being, at least, barbecue is Southern. Y’all knew that.

But 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 and even their clientele 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 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 Memphis-style barbecue 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 train that was known as the Chickenbone Special.

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. Barbecue still retains its identification with the South. It’s still not just a Southern food, but almost the Southern food.

The real home of real barbecue is in the small-town South: small towns like Wilson or Lexington, N.C. (In Lexington, Vince Staten [co-author of Real Barbeque and former Louisville Courier-Journal writer] found 16 joints for 16,000 people.) They’re places like Lockhart or Luling or Llano, Texas. They’re towns like your own Owensboro. (I was distressed to read that there are now only five barbecue joints in Owensboro. There were 11 in 1960.)

I think places with local barbecue traditions should shun synthetic [chain restaurant] tradition. 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. 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: businessmen and construction workers, farmers and lawyers, cowboys and hippies, black and white and everything in-between and sideways.

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.

So there’s a little sociology. Barbecue both symbolizes and contributes to community. And that’s without even mentioning its noncommercial manifestations—for instance, in matters like fundraising for volunteer fire departments or political rallies.

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 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 ignore Texas beef and Owensboro mutton and go with the pork favored by the Southeastern majority. Do we cook shoulder, ribs, or whole hog? What kind of sauce? Mostly vinegar? Tomato? Mustard? How hot? How sweet? Will we baste or not? Or forget the sauce and go with a dry rub?

Okay, 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). Cole slaw is almost universal, but I’ve seen boiled white potatoes only 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 (but that’s a pretty lame pun).

Speaking of sauces and of competition leads me to the subject of the book we’re writing about North Carolina barbecue. You need to know that there are distinct styles of barbecue east and west of Raleigh, and their partisans despise each other’s version of the holy grub.

You see the problem: how can we persuade our readers that North Carolina has the world’s best barbecue when we can’t even agree among ourselves about what good barbecue is. Let me give you just a sample of the rhetoric. This is from a writer named Carroll Leggett, writing about the barbecue he was raised with: East Carolina-style chopped whole-hog, with a simple vinegar and red pepper sauce. Not surprisingly, he likes it. Now, if Leggett had just extolled his native style of barbecue, no one would have minded. But he went on to deprecate western, “Lexington-style” barbecue. He called it mere “roasted pork shoulders chopped and mixed with a thick tomato sauce that masks the meat’s flavor and textural sameness.” He noted the absence of “ribs, tenderloin, and crispy skin,” and complained about the lack of these “special parts to vie for”—even with its implication that there are other parts.

Well, that put the fat in the fire. Within days of Carroll’s article there was a Web site where Tar Heels could vote their preferences for eastern or western, and I was getting e-mail from friends, acquaintances, and total strangers across the state urging me to vote. (One pointed out that I was allowed to vote once a day and begged me to do so.)

I found it interesting that all these lobbyists apparently just assumed that I, like all reasonable people, shared their preference.

In truth, I like both Tar Heel varieties—to paraphrase Will Rogers, I’ve never met a smoked pig I didn’t like. I’ve never said in public whether I like eastern or western better. State employees are supposed to stay out of politics. Besides, I live in Chapel Hill, right on the border between eastern and western, and, anyway, even after 33 years I’m still a Tennessean, an outlander, so I tend to keep my head down when these intrastate battles flare up.

After many years in Chapel Hill I’ve come to love simple vinegar and red pepper—East Carolina minimalism. It respects the meat.

But here among the mutton-eaters of Kentucky, out of the Carolina cross-fire, I will confess to you that I really do like sweet, red sauce on my barbecue. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising, since East Tennessee, where I’m from, used to be western North Carolina—far western North Carolina.

Let me close by talking about the kind of barbecue I grew up with. Let me talk about a joint in Piney Flats, Tenn., called, simply, “The Ridgewood.”

Now, when you think of those great barbecue towns I mentioned, Piney Flats doesn’t come to mind. In fact, nowhere in East Tennessee comes to mind. But right outside Bluff City, a stone’s throw from Kingsport, where my wife and I grew up, is this modest-looking place that since 1948 has served what People magazine once called the best barbecue in the country—and therefore, obviously, in the world.

Okay (I hear you say), but what does People magazine know about barbecue? Well, try this: Jane and Michael Stern, the authors of Road Food, agree.

Still not impressed? Here’s the clincher: The Ridgewood is the only out-of-state establishment mentioned in a book by Bob Garner called North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time. Given Tar Heels’ largely justifiable chauvinism in these matters, that’s a testimonial indeed—although, to be sure, Bluff City is only some 25 miles from the North Carolina line.

When I was a lad, people drove a long way to eat at The Ridgewood, despite notoriously capricious hours and service that ranged from brusque to surly. That service was almost as legendary as the food.

Dale and I went back there a couple of years ago, and, yes, the place has changed a bit. We were almost disappointed to have a waitress who was downright pleasant. We were also disappointed to find squeeze bottles of sauce on the tables. In the old days, the management had definite ideas about how much sauce to use—a lot. They poured this nectar over the sliced pork before it was served, and you ate what was put before you.

So, the times they are a-changin’, even at The Ridgewood. But so far the barbecue hasn’t—good pork, well smoked, served with a fabulous sauce. Like most sauces west of, roughly, Hickory, N.C., it’s sweet, thick, and red. But the flavor is marvelously complex. Think of it as Overmountain Baroque. It’s a secret formula, of course, but if you’d like the recipe for a pretty good facsimile, I’ve posted it on my Web site—Google it.

I’ll close my talk with this. To the Carroll Leggetts of this world I say only: This is what catsup will taste like in heaven.

Sociologist John Shelton Reed has been studying the South for more than 30 years. He is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and is the author of more than a dozen books. Currently he is writing a book on North Carolina barbeque with his wife, Dale. He returned to Centre during CentreTerm to teach for the third time the class Defining the South as Humana Visiting Professor, and to give a public lecture, from which these remarks are excerpted.

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