Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue

By John Shelton Reed, Dale Volberg Reed and William McKinney

North Carolina is home to the longest continuous barbecue tradition on the North American mainland. Now available for the first time in paperback, Holy Smoke is a passionate exploration of the lore, recipes, traditions, and people who have helped shape North Carolina's signature slow-food dish. A new preface by the authors examines the latest news, good and bad, from the world of Tar Heel barbecue, and their updated guide to relevant writing, films, and websites is an essential. They trace the origins of North Carolina 'cue and the emergence of the heated rivalry between Eastern and Piedmont styles. They provide detailed instructions for cooking barbecue at home, along with recipes for the traditional array of side dishes that should accompany it. The final section of the book presents some of the people who cook barbecue for a living, recording firsthand what experts say about the past and future of North Carolina barbecue.  Filled with historic and contemporary photographs showing centuries of North Carolina's "barbeculture," as the authors call it, Holy Smoke is one of a kind, offering a comprehensive exploration of the Tar Heel barbecue tradition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469629674

John Shelton Reed

John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed live in Chapel Hill, NC. Both are members of the Southern Foodways Alliance. John Shelton Reed is author of Barbecue: A Savor the South Cookbook, and he is co-founder of The Campaign for Real Barbecue (http://www.truecue.org) and one of the moving spirits of the Carolina Barbecue Society.

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

Coming some eight years after Holy Smoke’s original publication, this edition gives us a chance to catch up with the barbecue news from North Carolina. Some of it is disheartening, some encouraging, some just amusing. Let’s start with four items that we would put in sidebars, if prefaces had sidebars.

CONTINUING ANARCHY IN THE MOUNTAINS

We treated barbecue in the North Carolina mountains as merely an aside (pages 39–43), observing that anything goes up yonder, since there’s no real barbecue tradition to keep a lid on things. You’ve also got a lot of tourists and retirees and second-home owners who bring tastes and expectations from all over, have the money and inclination to eat out a lot, and don’t see innovation and experimentation as uncalled for.

Food writer Jonathan Ammons echoed these observations in a 2014 article in Asheville’s Mountain Xpress. He documents the autonomous mountain barbecue scene and a growing belief among its cooks that they’re shaping a third North Carolina barbecue region, distinct from eastern North Carolina and the Piedmont. If that’s what’s happening, though, it will be a region very different from the other two. Embodying a tradition of rejecting tradition, its style will embrace all styles.

Consider, for instance, Asheville’s 12 Bones Smokehouse. They specialize in ribs (and it’s Barack Obama’s favorite eating place in North Carolina, which stands to reason since someone from Chicago should be a rib man), and they smoke a great many other things, including mushrooms, but none of it is North Carolina barbecue as heretofore understood. Co-owner Sabra Kelley observes that to cook Eastern- or Piedmont-style there are definitely some rules that you have to follow, and she says, We would rather be true to ourselves. One result of that is the award-winning blueberry-chipotle sauce we mentioned in the earlier edition.

The side dishes at 12 Bones are also unconventional. It’s cool to see some place that doesn’t just serve potato salad and coleslaw, a competing chef told Ammons. And it can change every day!—unlike down South (by which he seems to mean lowland North Carolina) where people get pissed if they don’t get their hushpuppies.

People like different stuff up here; they don’t want the norm, the owner of Asheville’s Bayou Bar-B-Q told Ammons. His customers want to try something that no one else has had.

This premium on innovation and willingness to cater to all sorts of customers can lead to a sometimes dizzying variety. At last count, Luella’s, also in Asheville, offered eleven sauces, some traditional, some decidedly not—a far cry, Ammons observes, from the Eastern and Piedmont traditions of one true sauce, often chopped in with the meat.

STILL THE THIRD RAIL OF NORTH CAROLINA POLITICS

Barbecue remains a tricky subject for anyone trying to appeal to voters of the Old North State. The stories of Rufus Edmisten and Elizabeth Dole (page 50) illustrate the hazards even natives face. Now two outsiders have learned the hard way to be very careful what you say.

Michelle Obama was the first to get burned. When she announced in 2011 that the next Democratic National Convention would meet in Charlotte, she spoke of that city’s charm, hospitality, diversity, and, of course, great barbecue. Many Charlotteans were puzzled. A Charlotte Observer headline read, Charlotte = great barbecue? Who knew? Mayor Anthony Foxx said his city has good barbecue, but not great barbecue: I have had great barbecue in Charlotte that’s been brought in on a truck. And the AP quoted a snarky commentator who said: Complete the sentence: As a barbecue town, Charlotte is, one, not what it used to be; two, like Minneapolis for gumbo; three, good enough for Yankees; four, not far from Shelby.

But at least the First Lady meant well. You can’t say that for Rick Perry. Later that year, shortly after the Texas governor announced that he was running for president, the Raleigh News and Observerturned up an injudicious remark he had made when Texas commissioner of agriculture nearly twenty years earlier. (They found the quote on page 58 of this book, but we got it from a 1992 N&O story.) Perry ate some eastern North Carolina barbecue and said he’d had road kill that tasted better. At the time, some of us wondered how he knew what road kill tastes like, but we let it go. When a man wants to be president, though, it’s a different matter. A typical response came from Jeffrey Weeks, in the Charlotte Examiner: Rick Perry is not fit to be president of the United States. In fact he is apparently not fit to be a guest in my house. The furor got national attention, and Perry withdrew from the race three months later.

GOBBLE GOBBLE

You may get the impression that we distrust and usually dislike innovation when it comes to barbecue. You would be correct. But we have found one innovation we don’t object to at all.

David Cecelski of the North Carolina Folklife Institute has noticed a trend down east. He’s beginning to see barbecued turkey everywhere, especially at places run by African Americans—in Dover, for instance, where Lenny and VC’s claims to be King of BBQ Turkey, and in Everetts, where Ben Jones sells take-out from a shed beside his house. The cooks say that they’ve started cooking turkey mostly in response to customers’ concerns about the health problems associated with eastern North Carolina’s traditional high-fat diet, but also because Muslims, Seventh-Day Adventists, and others have religious scruples about eating pork. As Cecelski says, if you use an Eastern-style sauce and chop the meat fine, it looks and tastes remarkably like standard-issue pork barbecue, so it may even deserve the accolade of inversion: that is, to be called not just barbecued turkey but turkey barbecue.

You might ask: Why do we like the idea of barbecued turkey but not that of barbecued tofu? Well, it just feels more right. (Do we contradict ourselves? Very well, then, we contradict ourselves.)

FOREIGN IMPORTS

When Charlotte staged a Blues, Brews, and BBQ Festival in 2008, the Levine Museum of the New South agreed to put on a dinner for several dozen barbecue competition judges, and Tom Hanchett, the museum’s director, had a problem. What do you feed people who will be eating barbecue all the next day?

He solved it brilliantly by ordering take-out from some of the Queen City’s latest newcomers. The judges dined on Cantonese char siu bao (pork tenderloin, slow roasted and sauced, on a soft bun), Vietnamese grilled pork banh mi (a Southeast Asian po’boy with seasoned meat, cilantro, pickled carrots, cucumber, and daikon), Mexican beef barbacòa (the original Spanish word, now applied to meat slow-cooked with steam, luau-style), and Salvadoran pupusas (seasoned pork ground to a paste, refried beans, and pickled cabbage—think coleslaw—on a thick corn tortilla).

We were there for this feast, and we say: Keep your eye on these tasty barbecue-like dishes. In the fullness of time they may influence our native barbecue, and vice versa.

But enough frivolity. It’s time to get serious and to address the, ah, meat of the matter, which is this: Our last chapter struck an elegiac note, with an unreservedly pessimistic view of the future of North Carolina barbecue. Are things still (as a UNC undergraduate once wrote) going to hell in a ham biscuit?

Certainly the distressing trends we discussed have continued. Smokeless barbecue cooked entirely with gas or electricity, alien barbecue from other traditions (or none), elevated barbecue with cheffy touches, competition barbecue—all are now more common than when we wrote, and, although all but the first have something to recommend them, there’s no question that they compete with traditional North Carolina barbecue for space in our collective stomach, mind, and heart.

But there’s some good news, too. Let’s take a closer look.

We have no problem with barbecue places that exemplify other traditions, as long as they’re clearly labeled. Durham’s Q Shack, for instance, serves pretty good Texas barbecue, there’s no question where they’re coming from (so to speak), and we happily eat their brisket and sausage. The Dickey’s chain also sells Texas barbecue, though not as good. Similarly, Red Hot & Blue cooks Memphis barbecue, and we’re glad to have a branch nearby when we get a craving for dry ribs. Places like these are no more a threat to the North Carolina barbecue tradition than are places serving sushi, pad thai, or chimichangas. Sometimes you have a hankering for exotic foreign foods and it’s good to have them around.

But there’s a bit more of a problem, to our way of thinking, with chain restaurants like Sonny’s, Jim ’N Nick’s, and City Barbeque, as well as a good many new, independent places that hew to the International House of Barbecue model: pick your meat, pick your sauce; mix and match; the customer is always right. The result is a sort of barbecue Esperanto—barbecue from nowhere, or maybe Missouri—and it encourages the view that a thick, red, sweet sauce is required if a dish is to be called barbecue.

This heresy is abetted by the spread of competition barbecue on television and at a growing number of contests within the state. The major sponsor of these contests is the Kansas City Barbeque Society, and the result is that Kansas City–style barbecue always wins, while vinegar-based sauces like ours lose. (No, Piedmont sauces are not tomato-based. Read this book.) Please note: We actually like Kansas City barbecue—in Kansas City. We even like it in North Carolina when it’s identified as an exotic import. But when it’s presented simply as barbecue—well, wait a damn minute. That word has a different meaning in North Carolina. Let’s keep it that way.

International Houses of Barbecue are usually found in the mountains, where there’s really no indigenous barbecue tradition to suppress it (see above), and in our cities, where newcomers with alien barbecue tastes are likely to congregate. The mountains and the cities are also where you find establishments like one near us whose website begins Hey guys. (Need we say more?) Among the offerings on the menu are Piggy Mac, Bacon Wrapped Brisket Burnt Ends, and Redneck Nachos (Fritos topped with pulled pork, baked beans, blue cheese coleslaw, and sweet hot mustard).

Like many of their customers, places like these are not from around here, but unfortunately others who are undermining the North Carolina Way of Barbecue are home-grown.

In this book we lamented the fact that many old-time North Carolina barbecue places have switched to cooking with only gas or electricity, or have closed and left the field to others who cook that way. We regretted that a chain offering Traditional North Carolina southern-style bar-b-q cooked entirely with electricity was winning Reader’s Choice competitions in the Triangle, while another serving pretty good wood-cooked barbecue had gone out of business. We could hardly bring ourselves to report that Newport’s annual whole-hog barbecue competition was giving points for appearance and not for smoky goodness, which virtually guaranteed that gassers would win. It was also a standing affront to the state motto, Esse quam videre (To be and not to seem).

More vintage wood-cookers have closed since we wrote. Mebane and Asheboro are barbecue deserts now that the A&M Grill and Blue Mist Barbeque have shut down (each after more than sixty years in business). Other places have switched to gas, like Deano’s in Mocksville, whose aging owner could no longer handle the work that wood-cooking requires. Two new places, Ed Mitchell’s Que in Durham and Nelson’s Barbecue in Lumberton, proposed to cook the old way but closed after only a few months. Even in Lexington only four or five of the town’s twenty or so barbecue restaurants still cook with wood, and the owner of a place in Raleigh exaggerated only a little when he told the Food Network proudly (proudly!) that around here we use hickory for canes.

Things have reached the point where we’re grateful to find a place that cooks with a hybrid cooker like a Nunnery Freeman, Southern Pride, or Ole Hickory, because there’s at least a chance that some wood smoke is involved. It’s a sad fact that a great majority of North Carolina barbecue places, including some of the oldest and best known, no longer use wood or charcoal at all, and it’s a sadder fact that we’ve let them get away with it.

Outsiders are starting to notice, and our state’s long-standing reputation for barbecue excellence has begun to suffer. Lolis Eric Elie, the author of Smokestack Lightning, observed recently and rightly that there are far more gas and electric pits [in the Carolinas] than in other parts of barbecue country, and added, That’s a disturbing trend that needs to be reversed, while Bob Kantor, late proprietor of Memphis Minnie’s in San Francisco, said, I’m puzzled and deeply concerned at what appears to be a trend in North Carolina towards substituting gas and electric for wood, and speculated that some North Carolinians … take their barbecue for granted.

But there are bright spots. Traditional North Carolina barbecue is now getting some serious respect—at least outside North Carolina. Since we interviewed Sam Jones and Ed Mitchell for this book, both men have begun cooking Eastern-style whole-hog at the annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party for thousands of appreciative New Yorkers (125,000, when we were there in 2010). Chapel Hill’s Keith Allen, also interviewed in this book, is just one of several old-school barbecue cooks who have been the subjects of documentary films and television programs. And the competition barbecue question is being addressed by an outfit called the Carolina Barbecue League, set up to sponsor competitions where whole hogs are cooked over wood.

Moreover, it seems that 100 percent wood-cooking barbecue places are not quite as rare as we thought they were. Until recently, most people with an opinion, including us, would have told you that there were only twenty-five or thirty such places left in the state. In 2013, however, two barbecue lovers (one a co-author of this book) founded the Campaign for Real Barbecue (TrueCue.org) to identify, honor, and encourage wood-cooking barbecue places, and the campaign has found and certified maybe twice that number. Many are long-established places we had just overlooked, but others are new ones that do it the old way, like the Morristown BBQ Pit (in Allensville, confusingly) and Sam Jones BBQ in Greenville. And—here’s a really encouraging story—when Speedy Lohr’s opened in an old place south of Lexington where the previous owners had switched to gas but left the pits in place, Randy Lohr went back to wood.

True, some new wood-cookers depart from tradition by using rotisseries, cooking meats in addition to pork, or serving odd side dishes, but places like The Pit (Raleigh and Durham), the Hillsborough Barbecue Company, and Midwood Smokehouse in Charlotte take the trouble to cook hogmeat with wood and offer the option of properly indigenous sauces. They’re cooking the real North Carolina deal for sure, and we’re happy to eat good barbecue like theirs, no matter what else is on the menu. And even some of the barbecue legends we interviewed in this book are branching out—Doug Cook cooks brisket, Keith Allen cooks ribs, and Sam Jones’s new place serves ribs and craft beer—but these are merely concessions to the changing market: Our heritage is safe in their hands.

Meanwhile, up the culinary pecking order a bit, some chefs with impressive chops are taking up the tradition. If we were writing this book today, we would certainly interview Matt Register, a young guy who serves utterly traditional whole-hog barbecue with innovative sides at Southern Smoke BBQ in Garland (around the corner from the Brooks Brothers outlet).

We’d also want to interview Wyatt Dickson, an itinerant whole-hog caterer who has settled down to cook at a place in Durham called Picnic, in partnership with the former executive chef at Durham’s Piedmont restaurant (his Chapel Hill fraternity brother) and the farmer who provides the pasture-raised heritage pigs. Dickson is refreshingly fundamentalist—so hard-core that he refuses to chop his barbecue and will only pull it—and some old-timers say his barbecue has the flavors and textures they remember from their childhoods.

Then there’s Elliott Moss, who pit-cooks whole hogs, Eastern-style, at Asheville’s Buxton Hall, an old skating rink turned into a restaurant. Moss is a James Beard Award nominee who has brought a really artisanal, traditional approach to barbecue cooking, at least according to his partner, Meherwan Irani (also a Beard Award nominee). Yes, Eastern-style barbecue isn’t native to the mountains, but we argue in this book that nothing is, so it’s not crowding out a local tradition.

Another interesting story is that of Starr Teel, who wood-cooks shoulders, among other things, at Flat Rock’s Hubba Hubba Smokehouse. Teel is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, and two graduates of the Culinary Institute of America handle Hubba Hubba’s side dishes and desserts. This is not your father’s barbecue.

In our last chapter we made fun of barbecue places with wine lists, valet parking, and chefs instead of cooks, but we’ve become more tolerant. Our new broad-mindedness may be put to the test by dishes like the barbecued tempeh, country-fried tofu, and Sprouts-N-Shrooms at a place called The Pig, but that’s Chapel Hill for you. The Pig also uses a hybrid smoker to cook whole-hog barbecue, and if you know what you’re doing you can construct a fine barbecue plate there. It will be more expensive than one from an old-school place, but meat from antibiotic & hormone-free, pasture-raised piggies [that] bring regional flavors & local ingredients to the party in your tummy doesn’t come cheap.

For better or worse, the future of North Carolina barbecue may be in the hands of people who use source as a verb. Places like theirs may be the first stirrings of the sort of craft barbecue renaissance that has caused excitement in Austin, Texas, lately, and on balance that would be a welcome development.

Yes, something will be lost. In the past barbecue has brought all sorts of people together. Lawyers and construction workers, cops and college students, cowboys and hippies, preachers and sinners, black and white (since desegregation)—all could savor a $3.50 barbecue sandwich at Wilber’s or Stamey’s. We hope some old-timey places like that will still be around for our grandchildren and for North Carolinians who can’t or won’t spring for a $12.00 version, even one made with locally sourced pasture-raised heritage pork. But if that’s the kind of sandwich it takes to introduce a new generation and newcomers to the wonders of our state dish—well, bring it on.

John Shelton Reed, Dale Volberg Reed, and William McKinney

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

To Begin With …

Does the world really need another barbecue book? Well, maybe not, but we needed to write one. And if you’re holding this book in your hands, you can see that it’s at least a little different from the (literally) hundreds of others on the virtual shelf. For starters, we’re focusing on North Carolina barbecue. You can count the good books on that subject on the fingers of one hand—not as many as you’d expect, given the subject’s importance. We’re obviously in the debt of the folks who’ve already written about it, but our book is meant to supplement theirs, not replace them.

We want to say up front what this book is not. It isn’t a guidebook (although it will become clear what some of our favorite places are). For that, look at the section called To Learn More … and check those other books or one of the several websites devoted to Tar Heel ’cue—where, by the way, you’ll discover that even experts’ opinions differ widely. Nor, alas, is this a compilation of secret recipes from great North Carolina barbecue places. Although a few folks were gracious enough to share their recipes with us and we’ve passed those on, for the most part secrets remain secrets. We tried.

What you have here is an exploration of the Tar Heel barbecue tradition. It comes in three parts. First, we’ll look at where North Carolina barbecue came from, how it has changed (not much), and the part it has played in the life of the Old North State. We’ll look at the emergence of the Eastern-Piedmont split and how that gave birth to a rivalry that’s right up there with the one between UNC and Duke. We’ll examine barbecue’s evolution from a food cooked mostly for special occasions to something served at stands, in joints, and eventually in proper barbecue restaurants. Then we’ll tell you how to cook it yourself, and, while we’re at it, we’ll examine the history and nature of the limited array of side dishes traditionally served in North Carolina barbecue restaurants and give you some recipes for those. We’ll talk with some of the people who cook barbecue for a living, who have some interesting things to say about the past and future of North Carolina barbecue. Finally, we’ll discuss why North Carolina barbecue may be an endangered cuisine, why that matters, and what to do about it.

Can We Get a Witness?

Jane and Michael Stern: Of the several states that claim to be America’s barbecue capital, North Carolina is the most convincing.

Charles Kuralt: I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas…. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it’s really good pork barbecue you’re looking for, to North Carolina.

Rick Bragg: This barbecue is as different from the tomato, mustard or molasses-basted meat of the lower South as white whisky is from hot chocolate. It has a zing, a whang and a fo-dee-doe-doe.

Craig Claiborne: The flavor that lengthy smoking over hickory and oak coals gives the pork is delicious. The tender texture of the chopped pork is another plus and the sauce, with its acid taste, provides an ideal complement.

Steve Stephens: The ’cue I found [in North Carolina] was like the crack cocaine of pork: succulent, tender, savory and almost impossible to leave unconsumed.

While we’re introducing things, let’s introduce ourselves. John and Dale Reed grew up across the mountains in Tennessee but have lived in Chapel Hill since 1969. John taught for thirty-one years at UNC and Dale taught piano privately. Both are members of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and together they edited Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing. John has been a judge at the Memphis-in-May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest and gave the 1995 Kemp Plummer Battle Lecture to UNC’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies on the subject Science Lies When It Says Hogmeat’s Got Little Bugs in It (honest). He’s not a pitmaster, but he was the Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in 1996–97.

William McKinney was raised in South Carolina, where his mother fed him barbecue sandwiches for lunch. He came to Chapel Hill in 1999 as a callow seventeen-year-old freshman and soon thereafter founded UNC’s Carolina Bar-B-Q Society (CBs), devoted to celebrating and eating you-know-what. (The first guest speaker at a CBs event was John Shelton Reed.) William now lives and works in northern Virginia, where ice tea and a mediocre barbecue plate will set you back ten bucks. This is his first book, but John and Dale’s previous collaborations include writing 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South and editing Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing.

You might ask—you should—where two Tennesseans and a South Carolinian get the nerve to write a book about North Carolina barbecue. Well, North Carolinians grow up taking their great native dish for granted. We didn’t. We’re converts, and like many converts, we can be more Catholic than the Pope. As our title suggests, for example, we’re fairly fundamentalist about cooking with wood—more so than many leading purveyors of North Carolina barbecue these days. The distinguished historian Robert Conquest once remarked that everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands, and the more we’ve learned about this subject, the more we insist on barbecue cooked the old way. We will allow that, if you’re hungry enough and can’t find the real thing, pork cooked with gas or electricity, if it’s done well, might—just might—be worth eating. But it’s not worth writing a book about.

We also hope our origins—and the fact that our time in North Carolina has been spent pretty much on the fault line—give us some perspective on the Eastern-Piedmont fight. It’s sort of like being a University of Kentucky graduate during the ACC tournament: you can appreciate some very fine basketball without taking sides (except that not many UK fans acknowledge that ACC basket-ball is superior).

If that’s not enough to establish our credibility, read on. If you finish our book and still don’t think we know what we’re talking about—well, that’s the way conversations about North Carolina barbecue usually seem to end.

The Lore

Catching curb at the Silver Moon Barbecue

What Is North Carolina Barbecue?

When we told people we were writing this book, they immediately started asking questions. Had we heard that ——’s was closing after fifty years? Had we figured out the secret ingredient in ——’s sauce? Did we have a good Brunswick stew recipe? Where did we stand on the tomato question? And, always, did we know the best barbecue place in the state (which just happened to be in their hometown)? Californian Miles Efron has observed that when North Carolinians discuss barbecue, they are prone to swoon. Even the most urbane among them wax[es] ecstatic when given a forum for extolling smoked meat. People who have lived in New York [drawl] like Daughters of the Confederacy about sweet tea ’n slaw. When the food writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel attended a conference in Charlotte, she told her readers, People here are passionate about their barbecue, not unlike Wisconsinites debating the best way to cook a brat. We wouldn’t put it quite that way, but the point is that Tar Heels care about ’cue.

One friend from down east has gone so far as to claim that barbecue is the great sacrament of our people. No transubstantiation required. It are what it are. His religious language is apt, and not unusual. In this matter the Tar Heel State just offers a double-distilled version of a more general Southern trait. As William Schmidt explained it for readers of the New York Times, in the South barbecue is not just a food, it is a cultural ritual, practiced with a kind of religious fervor among various barbecue sects, each of whom believes their particular concoction of smoke and sauce and spices is the only true way to culinary salvation. Food writer John Egerton reached for the same analogy: There are more barbecue factions and smoked-meat sects around here, each with its own hair-splitting distinctions, than there are denominations in the far-flung Judeo-Christian establishment.

Perhaps especially in North Carolina, barbecue is not a subject for the conflict-averse. Raleigh News and Observer sage Dennis Rogers observes that barbecue is a subject of intense interest and loyalties in North Carolina[,] a subject about which everyone thinks they’re right and that everyone else wouldn’t know a decent plate of ’cue from a cue ball. Food writer James Villas says that growing up in Charlotte he learned never to air a preference on the complex and heated topic for fear of alienating family and losing friends.

NASCAR driver David Pearson used to stop by for a plate at Alston Bridges Barbecue in Shelby. He parked his helicopter in a lot nearby.

Barbecue is a taste of the South. It’s a noun, a verb, and an entire religion served on a bun…. Roll up your sleeves, grab a pile of paper napkins, and wait for manna from Heaven. (Michael Lee West)

Barbecue Matters

According to mapanything.net, North Carolina leads the nation in the percentage of Yellow Page listings that include the word barbecue.

Eight of the nine North Carolina restaurants listed in the 1992 edition of Jane and Michael Stern’s Road Food were barbecue places.

Geographer Tom Ross wrote the restaurant guide in Fodor’s North Carolina. Six barbecue places are included in the Coastal Plain section alone. Barbecue is the ethnic food of most native North Carolinians, he explains.

On its Charlotte-to-London flights, Piedmont Airlines (1948–1989, RIP) used to offer barbecue, hushpuppies, and slaw from Rogers Barbecue in Charlotte—and an in-flight magazine with a column by a Methodist bishop.

Between September 1932 and September 1977, the Burlington Daily Times News referred to barbecue (with various spellings) at least 3,561 times.

Tar Heels are entitled to strong opinions. Georgian Jim Auchmutey, co-author of The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook, notes that the family tree of barbecue has spread all over the country, [but] its deepest tap root is in North Carolina. The Old North State is to American barbecue something like what New Orleans is to jazz. True, like jazz, barbecue has spread far and wide; by the mid-twentieth century, it could be found even in places like Kansas City, and now it’s popping up from Boston to San Francisco. Also like jazz, it has changed as it moved, and not always for the better—in the case of barbecue, not even usually, if you ask us: in the immortal words of Dobie Gray, Other guys imitate us, but the original is still the greatest.

So what is North Carolina barbecue? It’s not just whatever is served in North Carolina and called barbecue. Let’s start with a definition, keeping in mind that there is perhaps a little room for argument here and there and that there are exceptions to any rule. (This is the South, after all.) The definition comes in three parts. We are talking about meat

1. that has been barbecued—that is, cooked for a long time at a low temperature with heat and smoke from a fire of hardwood and/or hardwood coals;

2. that meat being pork—whole hog, shoulder, or (occasionally) ham—

3. sometimes basted and always served with a thin sauce or dip that is at most only a slight variation on a traditional recipe including vinegar, red pepper, and maybe (or maybe not) tomato.

Yes, there’s more to be said about each of these, but let’s not start arguing just yet. Got it? Pork, wood-cooked in a leisurely way, served with a traditional, vinegar-based sauce.

In most places outside North Carolina, either these components never came together, or the combination has fallen apart. Some South Carolinians hold a version of the true faith, but others have fallen into the mustard heresy. Mayonnaise cultists can be found in Alabama. Beef-eating Texans and mutton-fed Kentuckians have likewise gone astray. As for cooking techniques—well, outside the South, folks notoriously confuse barbecuing with grilling, and even speak of stove-top barbecue. That way lies the Sloppy Joe.

I Saw the Light: A Texan Goes to Stamey’s

Cookbook writer and chef Gwen Ashley Walters testifies in the North Carolina Literary Review:

I ordered the chopped barbecue plate. When it arrived, I gasped, What happened to my food? Did somebody already chew this for me?