Barbecue as an Event, Region by Region

Barbecue in the United States is a Southern inheritance, and John Egerton in Southern Food treats it as the region's oldest communal meal: pork cooked slowly over wood coals, long associated with the hog, which ran half-wild through the Southern woods and fed a population that had little else to slaughter in quantity. The practice drew on Native American cooking over fire and on the skills of enslaved Africans, who tended the pits, a labour that Egerton and the other authorities on the Southern table acknowledge. From the Tidewater and the Carolinas it spread west with settlement, taking on the character of each place it reached.

As an event, barbecue is defined less by a recipe than by an occasion: a day given over to the fire, a gathering of the community around it, and a meal eaten outdoors or at long tables in a hall. Egerton describes the whole hog, split and cooked for many hours over hardwood coals, as the centrepiece of political rallies, church homecomings, family reunions and county celebrations. The cook who sits up through the night with the pit is a figure of standing, and the pit itself, a trench or a brick enclosure, is the dish's true instrument. The meal fixes a community's sense of itself as surely as any feast day. The regions divide chiefly by the animal, the cut and the sauce. In the Carolinas the pork is the tradition, the whole hog in the eastern part, dressed with a thin sauce of vinegar and pepper, while farther west and into the Piedmont the shoulder is favoured and tomato enters the sauce. In Tennessee, and Memphis above all, the ribs and the pork shoulder are served either dry, rubbed with spice, or sauced, and the shoulder is pulled and set on bread or beside slaw. Kentucky has its own habit of barbecued mutton, particularly in the western part of the state, which Egerton records as a local curiosity of long standing. Texas stands apart, with beef as the central meat, and brisket cooked slowly in smoke until the exterior is dark and the interior tender. The tradition there owes a good deal to the meat markets and the German and Czech settlers, and it is served simply, with bread, pickles and onions rather than with a heavy sauce. Across the South the accompaniments are part of the event: slaw, beans, potato salad, white bread, and sweet tea, each varying by county and by family, and each understood by those who grew up with it as the correct one. What holds the regions together is the method, long cooking at low heat over wood, which turns tough cuts into tender meat and demands that the cook give the day to it. The fire, the hours and the company are the substance of the dish, and a barbecue cooked in haste in a kitchen is another thing altogether. For the cook, the lessons are those of control: the steadiness of the coals, the patience with the meat, and the judgement of when it is done by touch and sight rather than by the clock.

The flavour of barbecue is the flavour of wood smoke meeting rendered fat, with hickory and oak the common Southern woods, and the character of the meat rests on a dark outer bark against a tender, moist interior. The sauces mark the regions: sharp vinegar and pepper in eastern Carolina, tomato and sweetness in the west and in Memphis, and in Texas often little more than salt, pepper and smoke. Served with the cool crispness of slaw, the soft sweetness of white bread and the sharpness of pickle, the rich meat is kept in balance across a long meal.