The Great American BBQ

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When pit barbecue moved into restaurants (and into the jurisdiction of health departments), pits were raised to waist level (becoming easier to operate) and built of brick or cinder block (becoming cleaner).

The sauce of the inland South makes use of ingredients that have long been abundant there: tomatoes (in the form of puree, sauce or ketchup), molasses or cane sugar, and hot pepper sauce, with vinegar and mustard for seasoning. It's used primarily as a table sauce. If the meat is basted at all while cooking, it's only during the last 20 or 30 minutes, since the tomatoes and sugar will burn and blacken quickly in the heat.

These days, Alabama barbecue is likely to come with white bread and beer and nothing else. In Tennessee, the meat keeps company with coleslaw moistened with a sweet, mayonnaise-vinegar dressing. In Georgia, the typical accompaniment is Brunswick stew, a hunter's dish that used to be made of wild game and vegetables but is now usually based on chicken and beef (with maybe a squirrel thrown in, if there's one handy).

The Carolinas point up the folly of generalizing about an entire state, much less a region. North Carolina is implacably divided into east and west of Raleigh, the state capital. Eastern barbecue is open-pit whole hog, basted frequently with a sauce that consists entirely of vinegar and hot peppers. The meat is then chopped and served unsauced on a hamburger bun, with vinegary slaw and hush puppies (a carry-over from the seafood dinners of the coast) on the side. West of Raleigh, barbecue is pork shoulder, pulled or chopped, coated with a thin, mild-to-hot sauce that is mostly vinegar and pepper but does contain some tomato. The meat is topped with a slaw made with the same red sauce and served on a white roll.

The differences may seem minuscule to some, but they loom large in the Tar Heel State. A few years ago, a well-meaning couple from "down east" opened a restaurant in the western mountains and began to serve barbecue as they understood it. Most customers came just once. As the business was about to go under, a kindly mountaineer took the couple aside and pointed out that he didn't know what the Sam Hill they were serving but it certainly wasn't barbecue and that was what they advertised wasn't it? Chastened, the proprietors printed a public confession of error in the local paper and promised to serve western barbecue henceforward. Business improved overnight.

South Carolina is even more complicated. For five months, Allie Wall and Ron Layne crisscrossed the state in pursuit of barbecue. After prodigious research (published in Hog Heaven), they identified six geographic districts, with six distinct sauces: mustard, vinegar, tomato, mustard/vinegar, mustard/ ketchup and mustard/vinegar/ketchup. (There may be a seventh. Toward the end, Wall and Layne heard rumors of chili sauce up around Spartanburg, but nerve and energy failed.)

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