Excerpts from Holy Smoke

From The Lore: What is North Carolina Barbecue?

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.

In the unlikely event that someone from out of state has read this far in a book with this title, we say: Hold your fire. We actually like most of these dishes—even Sloppy Joes, once in a while. And it’s a free country. We won’t say that nobody else cooks “real barbecue.” It’s just that they don’t cook North Carolina barbecue. That is, their barbecue isn’t perfect.

From The Lore: Eastern-style Evolves

As Raleigh journalist Jonathan Daniels wrote in 1941, “Barbecue, which in North Carolina contends with the hamburger and the hot dog at roadside eating stands, is pig roasted, preferably over a pit full of coals, and basted with a peppery sauce while it roasts.”

In this insistence, as we’ve seen, modern North Carolina fundamentalists have Samuel Johnson and most dictionary writers before Noah Webster on their side. But why this single-minded devotion to the swine? Ask a Tar Heel barbecue partisan, and you’ll probably be told simply that it tastes better, maybe even that the Lord meant for it to be that way. (And never mind Leviticus: As Hillsborough writer Hal Crowther observes, “The Lord wouldn’t have made the meat so sweet and the swine so fine if he hadn’t wanted us to enjoy them.”)

North Carolinians have had a thing for pigs since before there was a North Carolina. A pamphlet of 1666 designed to attract pork-loving British immigrants claimed that hogs in the Carolinas “find so much Mast and other Food in the Woods, that they want no other care than a Swine-herd to keep them from running wild.” This may have overstated things a bit (not unusual for a real-estate promoter), but it seems to have done the job. When the Virginia aristocrat William Byrd II of Westover visited our parts sixty years later, he found North Carolina populated by a “porcivorous” people whose “only business . . . is raising of hogs, which is managed with the least trouble, and affords the diet they are most fond of.” Byrd went on at some length about “the foul and pernicious effects of eating swine’s flesh in a hot country.” Eating so much pork, he wrote, made North Carolinians “extremely hoggish in their Temper, & many of them seem to Grunt rather than Speak in their ordinary conversation.” Mr. Byrd doesn’t seem to have enjoyed his visit.

At any rate, with hogs cheap, plentiful, not hard to raise, selfbasting, and easier than cattle to cook without dismembering, it’s no wonder that pork became the preferred meat not just in North Carolina but across the South, right up to where East Texas gives way to cowboy country. Not to say that folks didn’t like beef when it was available, but day in, day out, pork—in many forms—was the table meat of the South. Each year between 1840 and 1860, two hogs were raised in the Southern states for every human being who lived there. For really special occasions like political rallies and community celebrations, with hundreds of people in attendance, an ox might be roasted. But for most barbecues, Southerners were content to take an ordinary porker (or part of one—we’ll get to that) and do something extraordinary with it.

There are still more hogs than people in North Carolina: our state is second only to Iowa in hog production (and number one in hog waste problems, but that’s another story). And the taste for pork persists—when it comes to barbecue, it’s not just a taste but a dogma.

The Lexington Heresy and the German Factor

About the time of World War I, however, a new and competing version of barbecue emerged in the hills of the Piedmont. When early barbecue entrepreneurs in the East started selling barbecue by the sandwich or the plate, they were working in an established tradition, purveying the same peppery-vinegary whole-hog pulled pork that people had already been eating at community and family barbecues. But the first barbecue stands in Lexington and Salisbury were cooking just parts of the hog—loins, hams, and especially shoulders. And they served their barbecue in slices, as well as chopped or pulled. In an even more radical departure from tradition, they were lacing the classic vinegar-and-pepper sauce with tomato ketchup.

Although these innovations had precedents in domestic cookery, they were something new in the North Carolina barbecue world, and they were viewed by many Easterners with much the same enthusiasm that the medieval Catholic Church had for the Protestant Reformation. North Carolinians have been arguing about this ever since.