The Great American BBQ

Image Gallery Barbecue is a touchy subject all over the country. MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

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According to the archaeological evidence, human beings have been cooking meat over hot coals for half a million years. Before we baked, boiled, fried or broiled, we barbecued.

After 500,000 years, people tend to become set in their ways. Although Americans share a love of good barbecue, they feud over what to cook, how to cook it, how to season it, how (or whether) to sauce it and what to serve with it. The differences from region to region and from cook to cook may be major or minor, but they are always considered vital and worth defending at length. An Arizonian and an Alabamian may think as one about God, sex and the Democratic party; they will disagree about barbecue.

Some differences clearly evolved because of a diversity of available resources. The wood that provides the "proper" smoke flavor generally grows in the surrounding forests; the meat that "belongs" on the grill has probably been the mainstay of local farmers for generations; the "right" sauce varies with regional vegetables and ethnic traditions. But even a cursory survey of American barbecue suggests that other quirks result from nothing more than people's relentless, cantankerous, joyous determination to do things their own way.

The South

"Somebody who thinks barbecue is beef is not a Southerner. (Texans think barbecue is beef.) Somebody who thinks of barbecue in terms of ribs only is not a Southerner, either. (This person is probably from the Midwest and wears rubbers on his or her shoes.) But somebody who knows damn well barbecue is pork and the best way to eat it is sliced or chopped and put inside two pieces of bread is damn well a Southerner."

— Lewis Grizzard

Long before Europeans set foot on the North American continent, southeastern Indians cooked fish and game over hot coals on a frame they constructed of green wood. The early Spanish explorers called the framework barbacoa, which eventually became barbecue.

Blessed with a warm climate that made outdoor gatherings possible for much of the year, the early colonists quickly made barbecues a part of their culture; in the late 1600s, the founding fathers of Virginia felt constrained to pass a law banning the discharge of firearms at barbecues. By the 1700s, barbecues were one of the most common forms of political and social gathering. (It took politicians no time at all to figure out that citizens who declined to show up for rhetoric would turn out for roast pork.) Slaves or servants did much of the hot and heavy work, and when barbecue restaurants sprang up all over the South in the 1920s, most of them were in black communities.

Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee developed what is generally thought of as Southern barbecue—pork cooked in an open pit and flavored with a tomato-based sauce (which provided the model for most commercial brands). At church picnics and family reunions, it's still done the old way. In preparation, a good "pit man" builds a large fire in a 55-gallon drum, usually of hickory, a fine, slow-burning, fragrant-smoking hardwood common across the South. In the absence of hickory, the plentiful Southern oak suffices, perhaps mixed with peach or pecan. While the fire burns down, he digs a hole about two feet deep, and wide and long enough to accommodate the meat. He lays metal rods across the pit at ground level and covers them with heavy wire mesh, leaving some space around the edges. When the fire has burned down, he shovels the hot coals into the pit. Finally, the pork-shoulders or a whole hog—is placed on the rack, covered loosely and cooked slowly. It takes all night—10 to 14 hours—to cook a shoulder correctly, even longer (up to 20 hours) for a whole hog. Since the coals must not flame up and scorch the meat, a separate fire burns to one side, providing a constant supply of coals.

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