As the restaurant owners and other employees left for the night, Phillip Schenck set a fire. Smoke from burning cardboard stung the eyes, and flames twitched at doors propped open to encourage a draft. The heat grew fierce. Schenck took a last look at his handiwork and walked out into the empty parking lot for a cigarette. Just as he has five nights a week for the last 15 years.
Schenck is no arsonist. He’s the pitmaster, pit man, the man who cooks the meat at Bridges Barbecue Lodge in Shelby. His cardboard blaze, fueled by boxes that held last night’s pork shoulders, is preliminary: Before he can start cooking, he has to incinerate the remnants of skin and pork stuck to the grates inside the steel-doored pits. And as the night progressed, the smell of burning paper gave way to wood smoke and roasting meat, but the heat and the haze, and the sweet relief of stepping out into a cool Carolina evening, remained. “It’s no hard job,”Schenck said, wiping a trickle of sweat just before it fell from his nose. “It’s just a hot and dirty job.”Barbecue, as a business and a hobby, may be going strong, especially in the Carolinas, where no church fair or political rally is complete without it. But in these modern times, men like Schenck, men willing to spend their nights shoveling red-hot hickory and oak coals in a pithouse full of smoke, are few and far between.
Lots of Carolina restaurants have switched to gas and electric cookers without losing customers or reputations. And it is true that ‘cue around here depends on wood for its heat more than its smoke: Slow roasting, not simply the low-temperature smoking of some other U.S. barbecue hotspots, is the object.
But no one disputes that wood gives barbecue a special flavor. “Outside brown,”that caramelized part of the meat closest to the fire, sells first and fastest, restaurateurs say, and a sliver sampled at Lexington Barbecue, another wood-fired mecca, delivers a smokiness that lingers through a swig of sweet iced tea. Even proponents of gas or electricity will put a little hickory into their cookers as the meat approaches the finish line.
Historically, the job of cooking meat over wood coals “has kind of been regarded as stoop labor,”said Bob Garner, a TV reporter, barbecue judge and the author of “North Carolina Barbecue, Flavored by Time.”That view is outdated and shortsighted, Garner argues. Restaurants whose fortunes depend on wood-fired barbecue might assure their futures by paying some young man $40,000 a year to learn the job from the few remaining masters.
Schenck, however, is self-taught. “You don’t learn it just like that,” he said. “I learned it my own self.
“When I first started, I used to lift the lid all the time. Now I can tell (how the pork is cooking) just by the smoke coming out.” Too much smoke means too much fire, and he monitors the chimney’s output from the seat of his battered pickup.
It’s precisely that iffyness that drives consistency-oriented businesses to gas or electricity. Gary Ritchie makes no apologies for the 14 stainless-steel electric cookers in his well-scrubbed white cinderblock, Gary’s Bar-B-Cue, in China Grove, N.C. “I love the old way, but I’d hate to go back to it,” he said. Before he gave up wood in 1981, 11 years after opening, “I’d come home and look like I was a fireman on a train.
Now his workers set a thermostat, close the lids and come back in time to slip a hickory stick onto a hot electric element that trickles smoke for the last three hours of cooking. A swabbing of thick sauce late in the process gives a mahogany glaze. The top and bottom heat eliminates the need for turning. A tender roast every time is the advantage, Ritchie said.
And what about the barbecue? It was absolutely tender, moist, lean and free of any bits that fought back. Whatever smokiness it might have had was masked by a vinegar-and-pepper sauce that is mixed into the meat as it is dished up. A little more sauce on top (shake the bottle hard to get the spices off the bottom), a forkful of slaw (apple cider vinegar and tomato puree, no mayo, in the dressing) and a bite of crunchy, oniony, deep-fried hush puppy set up such a bundle of complementary textures, temperatures and flavors as to keep a diner fully interested. Maybe it wasn’t cooked over wood, but it was good.
Gary’s Bar-B-Cue is an exception in western North Carolina, where customers are more likely to still expect wood cooking, Garner said. Elsewhere in North Carolina, Garner notes in his book, “sauce has replaced pit cooking as the defining factor, the key ingredient in barbecue.”
Plenty to argue about
Wood versus not-wood is only the latest debate in the Carolina barbecue club. There is no shortage of firm opinions on hush puppies, slaw and especially sauce. But Carolinians speak with one voice when bemoaning the misuse of a practically proprietary term.
“We were out in Utah, in Salt Lake City, and we were invited to a barbecue,” said Sylvia Ritchie, who keeps the books at husband Gary’s restaurant. “And we thought, Oh, good.’ Turned out they meant hot dogs and hamburgers.” Her voice was equal parts disappointment and pity.
If the rest of America wants to “cook out” or “grill,” that’s fine with Carolinians. Just don’t call it barbecue.
The Carolinas have severe standards for barbecue, though that doesn’t keep North and South, east and west from arguing over them. Whole hog or hams or shoulders? Does ketchup or mustard defile the purity of a sauce? Do you chop by hand before serving or let a machine do it? And does the skin go in?
It is safe to say, if it is safe to say anything at all on the subject, that barbecue in these states is chopped pork, not dry-rubbed ribs, not smoked beef brisket. Oh, some places will sell you a half-chicken, and Rick Monk of Lexington Barbecue is proud of his smoked turkey breast. Gary Ritchie makes a mean footlong chili dog (though it does have coleslaw on it) and it would be quicker to list what isn’t on the Piggie Park menu in West Columbia, S.C., than to wade through the beans, rice, burgers, etc. But a person could never open a restaurant with the word “barbecue” on the sign without a bunch of slow-cooked hog parts on the premises.
“You have to understand that (barbecue) is really a throwback to an earlier era,” Garner said. “It grew out of our agrarian, communal existence.”
In the days when the tobacco crop in eastern North Carolina was still handpicked, for example, the big post-harvest dinner was a pit-roasted pig. “That’s how you celebrated.”
And in this wooded, rolling landscape, pigs and hardwood were at hand. Residents like Dan Huntley, a barbecue judge and a columnist for the York, S.C., edition of the Charlotte Observer, still favor “the funkiness” of small-scale, even back-yard barbecue over the sanitized consistency of “store-bought.” But “store-bought” is OK with Huntley if a place cooks over wood-and cooks well-and if it has stayed small enough to resist the lure of becoming a chain.
Small is a relative term, naturally. Lexington Barbecue sells 1,000 meals a day to people who have 20 minutes to eat lunch, said Rick Monk, son of founder Wayne Monk. Which illustrates a point about barbecue: It’s fast food, even if it does take all night to cook. At Bridges, the number of remaining shoulders is tracked on a board; when the count reaches zero, they close, regardless of the posted hours. There’s no whipping up one last batch to mollify out-of-towners who show up at the end of a busy Saturday. The hard work and high-speed coordination of their staffs preserve the success of such places.
Hotbed of barbecue
The angry red contents of its firebox, and what they can do to a chunk of pork, has made Lexington Barbecue a destination. Not the sole destination thereabouts, though. The town of Lexington is one of the state’s barbecue epicenters; the figure of “17 barbecue places for 17,000 people” comes up a lot.
At 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, Rick Monk prepared to show off some shoulders that had been cooking since 6:30 a.m. “You don’t mind a little smoke, do you?” He looked genuinely concerned.
And for a moment after he opened the pit door, smoke was all there was to see, as if he were walking into a burning building. A whiff of charred hickory blew by. Then the smoke drifted away and exposed what looked like sheets of cardboard. It was cardboard. This turned out to be a widespread trick of the trade.
“It keeps the ashes off, and helps hold in the heat,” Monk said. Underneath lay ungainly lumps that looked unlikely to waken an obsession. But they threw off a reddish-brown glow and an outdoorsy, caramelized aroma that goes right to that primitive part of the human brain where the dinner gong is stored.
At this point the pit man has done all he can, and the pressure is on whoever is cutting the meat. Down at Bridges, that responsibility falls to Namon Carlton. Waitresses with orders to fill wait as he dismantles the shoulder. The skin comes off like a shell; it sells in a hurry to customers who then deep-fry it at home. Carlton cuts away the fat and gristle and the “hard brown,” then piles up the “soft brown” and the inside meat that falls from the bone. Depending on the orders, he will slice the chunks or chop them with a cleaver and an easy, loose-wristed motion. His efforts are whisked out the order window and packed, cheek by jowl with coleslaw, into sandwiches or gray cardboard “trays.”
That’s how things are done in the Piedmont, just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Go farther east, Garner says, into the coastal plains, and tomato fades from the sauce and the whole hog reigns. Drive south on Interstate 77 a hundred miles or so, until you start seeing billboards for Maurice’s Gourmet Barbecue, and the definition of barbecue changes again.
Piggie Park, not hog heaven
Occupying one corner of an awkward, busy intersection in West Columbia, S.C., the original Piggie Park looks like a leftover from that time, maybe the ’50s, when eating while seated behind the steering wheel was a novelty instead of a nuisance. The corrugated metal canopies in the parking lot still shelter rows of menu-decked loudspeakers, and a few customers-an old couple in a new Cadillac, a dutiful out-of-towner in a rented Buick-still push the button and say something like, “I’ll have the Little Pig dinner and a small iced tea.” Everybody else has gone inside but left his car under the tin, giving the lot an air of desolation.
That gloom dispersed when the friendly carhop delivered the tray. True, hooking the tray on the car door is no longer an option; the tray is basic brown, flexible plastic. And the grub comes in a foam container, presentation not being a barbecue priority anywhere. But even with the lid closed, the aroma is of mustard, which more than anything else defines South Carolina’s leanings.
The aroma also prepares the diner for a seriously ocher color palette. Mustard sauce is mixed into lean, shredded pork, giving it a wet, almost pre-chewed consistency. The hush puppies are a crunchy dark brown. Occupying the largest section of the foam container is barbecue hash: a yellow slurry of shredded pork jowls, mustard sauce and minced bell peppers, potatoes and onions ladled over rice. Think of it as South Carolina curry. The barbecue itself has a two-part effect: a mighty mustardy punch followed by a smoky, porky aftertaste. The first bite is almost too much, but then the fork keeps going back for more.
Piggie Park magnate Maurice Bessinger has come to represent South Carolina barbecue by virtue of having seven Columbia-area restaurants, a line of frozen foods, mail-order ‘cue (he’ll FedEx you a ready-to-pick pig) and a Web site (www.mauricesbbq.com). But the fresh pork hams are still cooked over hickory coals (not in a mere pit, but in a “USDA-inspected barbecue plant” next to the original Piggie Park, says executive vice president Chris Ray.)
Bessinger has explained his dedication to wood by saying all Old Testament sacrifices were prepared over wood fires, and God was the first barbecue expert. Which would seem to trump the more prosaic attribution to Caribbean Indians, wild pigs and grates woven out of saplings.
The final chapter?
That barbecue as a diet mainstay might just be under siege is evident in Piggie Park pamphlets promoting on the one hand the healthfulness of its pork and, on the other, the “best hamburger in town.” Even though roast pork isn’t any worse for your heart than a deep-fried chicken sandwich, it’s no bowl of oatmeal.
So maybe Carolina barbecue restaurants won’t multiply madly in coming years. The food is still unlikely to disappear. “I don’t think it will ever die,” Garner said, citing the boom in home cookers, books, contests and festivals.
But there is more to the defense of barbecue than a bunch of contest addicts towing $5,000 custom smokers behind their Land Cruisers.
“As people see more and more of their culture slipping away, they’re anxious to hold on to what they can,” Garner said. “Especially something as delicious as barbecue.”
Mustard barbecue sauce
This is a hallmark of much South Carolina barbecue. Mix 1 cup each yellow prepared mustard and water, 1/2 cup each brown sugar, Dijon mustard and cider vinegar, 2 teaspoons salt or to taste, and 1 teaspoon each ground red pepper, paprika and dried thyme in medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Heat to boil. Simmer, stirring frequently, 3 minutes. Remove from heat; cool to room temperature. (Adapted from a recipe by David Koelling, chef at Biloxi Grill in Wauconda.)
Lexington-style `dip’
A thin sauce like this is often served on the side in western North Carolina restaurants. Mix 3 cups cider vinegar with 2/3 cup brown or white sugar, 1/2 cup ketchup, 2 tablespoons hot pepper sauce, 2 teaspoons Kitchen Bouquet, and 1 teaspoon each salt, ground black pepper, Worcestershire sauce and onion powder in large, non-reactive saucepan.
Stir over medium heat until sugar melts, about 8 minutes. Let stand several hours. Store in tightly sealed container. Makes about 4 1/2 cups. (Adapted from “North Carolina Barbecue.”)
Do-it-yourself barbecue
Just in time for the 4th of July, here is the kettle grill method adapted from one in Bob Garner’s “North Carolina Barbecue.”
If you want to eat at 6 p.m., start by 9 a.m. To feed six, you’ll need about 6 pounds of meat, plus 10 pounds good briquettes, hickory chunks (not chips), a second grill or container in which to light additional charcoal as cooking progresses, a small shovel or scoop to move briquettes, and heavy-duty rubber gloves.
CAROLINA PORK BARBECUE
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 8 hours
Yield: 6 servings
1 fresh shoulder picnic ham or Boston butt, 6 to 7 pounds
Salt
Barbecue sauce of choice, see recipes
Coleslaw, optional
Warm sandwich buns
1. Salt the exposed meat side and let the shoulder stand 30 minutes while you ready the fire. Light 5 pounds of briquettes in a grill. When they are covered in ash, move all but 6 or 7 into 2 piles on the very sides of the kettle. Arrange remaining briquettes in a circle. Gently place 2 hickory chunks on each pile.
2. Replace grate and set the shoulder directly over the circle of coals, meat side down. (Fat under the skin will melt and baste the meat.) Cover grill and leave vent open.
3. Light a second batch of a dozen briquettes in your auxiliary grill so they’ll be ready in 30 or 45 minutes. Then add six to each existing pile in the kettle grill. (If you position the grate on a Weber kettle just right, you can place briquettes through spaces under the wire handles without having to remove the grate.) Top the briquettes with fresh hickory chunks. Continue adding 6 fully lighted briquettes from the auxiliary grill and 2 hickory chunks to each side of the grill every 30 to 45 minutes. Don’t add any to the circle directly under the meat; the side heat is enough. Don’t lift the lid between additions or you’ll lose too much heat.
4. After about 6 hours, turn the meat skin side down. You can cut down the addition of briquettes to four or five per side if the meat is browning too much, but it’s important to add coals and wood to keep up the temperature.
5. Cook 2 more hours until exposed meat is a deep reddish brown. Put on your rubber gloves and give the meat a good squeeze; it should give beneath your fingers. Move the shoulder to a board or pan. A gentle tug should free the skin in one piece. Use a knife to scrape or cut away any fat from the meat. The remaining lean meat should be tender enough to be easily pulled from the bones.
6. Pile the meat on a board and chop it to the consistency you like. Splash it with the sauce of your choice and serve on buns. Topped with coleslaw, naturally.
Other Southeastern specialties Virginia ham, pilau, she-crab soup, peach pie, biscuits, peanut soup, Lady Baltimore cake, fried green tomatoes, hoppin’ John, Southern fried chicken, sweet potato pie, benne wafers, corn bread, cheese grits
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As we continue our journey through America’s regional specialties, we welcome readers’ comments and suggestions. Write to us (Good Eating, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611) or post your messages to our special Web site: www.chicago.tribune.com/go/eat
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SERIES SCHEDULE
Gulf: Key lime pie
Southeast: Carolina barbecue
UPCOMING
Mid-Atlantic: Shoofly pie
Texas and the Southwest: Indian fry bread (and) Chicken-fried steak
Gulf: Oyster poor-boys
Midwest and central: Persimmon pudding
New England: Clam chowder
Mountain and Pacific: Planked salmon (and) Cobb salad
