For some years, I’m now prepared to admit, I somehow labored under the impression that Rocky Mount is the line of demarcation that separates the two principal schools of North Carolina barbecue. Wrong. The line of demarcation is, roughly, Raleigh, sixty miles west. The Research Triangle—the area encompassing Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill—is a sort of demilitarized zone, where someone who’s been concentrating on the barbecue scene, as I was on my most recent visit, half expects to see the distinctive blue helmets of United Nations peacekeepers. Rocky Mount is within the eastern North Carolina sphere of influence, where barbecue means the whole hog, chopped, with a vinegar-based sauce that is flavored with pepper. To the west of the DMZ lies territory controlled by the forces of what is variously called Piedmont- or Western- or Lexington-style barbecue—a version that uses only pork shoulders, chopped (or, sometimes, sliced), with a sauce that is also vinegar-based but has been turned pinkish by the addition of ketchup or tomato sauce. All of that should have been obvious even to somebody who, being from Kansas City, was brought up to assume that barbecue meant ribs or beef brisket, with a thick, tomato-based sauce, and that the presence of chopped-up meat at a barbecue joint would be an indication that a customer of long standing had absent-mindedly shown up without his teeth.
The agent of my enlightenment on this issue was John Shelton Reed, the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, who is one of the preëminent sociologists of the South. John and I got acquainted a decade ago, when the two of us spoke at a Southern Foodways Alliance conference in Oxford, Mississippi—an event that some of us still refer to as the Barbecue Summit. His speech was called “Barbecue Sociology: The Meat of the Matter.” Sociologists of his era often draw conclusions from everyday activities—the words that people in various places use to address their mothers, say, or the difference between the South and other parts of the country when it comes to the practice of cremation vs. burial. John and I both admire the work of the late Wilbur Zelinsky, a cultural geographer, who, in 1951, located the northern boundary of the South by analyzing a horse-mule census in the disputed area. (Where more plows were pulled by mules than by horses the South began.) In his scholarly work and in his writing for the general public, John has had a special interest in barbecue. He said in his summit speech, “I don’t think you can really understand the South if you don’t understand barbecue—as food, process, and event.”
In “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue,” which John wrote with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed, and William McKinney, no less a food authority than the late Craig Claiborne, whose bona fides included having been raised in Mississippi, is quoted as saying that the difference between the two main schools of North Carolina barbecue is “slight and subtle.” An untutored traveller might pass through the state without noticing that difference. Wherever the traveller stopped, chopped pork would be available in a bun that also contained a layer of coleslaw. It would also be available on a plate or, sometimes, in a “tray”—a small, stiff-paper container of the sort that can be seen in supermarket butcher cases wrapped in plastic and holding something like ground meat. The beverage being offered would probably not be beer, as it might be in Texas or Memphis or my home town, but sweet tea, often with the pitcher left on the table, or a bottled soft drink that tastes like a cousin of cherry Coke and is called Cheerwine. The dessert selection would probably include cobblers and banana pudding. In all parts of the state, the hot sauce on the table would be a North Carolina product called, improbably, Texas Pete.
Despite these similarities, a devotee of North Carolina barbecue would say that a traveller who missed the differences from meal to meal was simply not paying attention. In John’s Barbecue Summit speech, he said, “Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.” He sees that as stemming from the “fierce localism” that is a part of Southern culture. During my visit to North Carolina, he showed me a map that he sometimes displays while giving speeches; it depicts “The Balkans of Barbecue.”
The largest areas on the map are, of course, the two principal camps, but the map also shows, coming up from South Carolina, a swath of territory dominated by mustard-based sauce. And it shows a couple of areas that might be called the Barbecue Barrens. Exchanges between the two principal camps can indeed sound a bit like age-old disputes in the Balkans, or like basketball trash talk between a Duke fan and a fan of U.N.C. During a controversy some years ago about whether Lexington, which boasts of having more barbecue purveyors per capita than any other city in America, should have its annual celebration designated the official North Carolina barbecue festival, Dennis Rogers, a newspaper columnist who champions the rival Eastern style, wrote, “People who would put ketchup in the sauce they feed to innocent children are capable of most anything.”
John and I were on the subject of North Carolina-barbecue geography because I’d gone to the state to look into the Campaign for Real Barbecue—an inquiry that would involve some barbecue consumption on both sides of Raleigh. He is one of the founders of the campaign, which was established in 2013 to preserve authentic North Carolina barbecue as a significant element in the culture of the South. John, who grew up in East Tennessee, sees much in that culture that is worth preserving. What he finds himself resisting was expressed succinctly by the late Southern cartoonist Doug Marlette in the days when Atlanta, in its haste to become what its boosters referred to as “The World’s Next Great City,” seemed intent on sanding off all its Southern bumps and edges—not just the ugly residue of legally sanctioned racism. Doug Marlette called it Bubbacide. John seemed to be offering a partial inventory of what could be wiped out in a Bubbacide when he wrote, in a 1991 essay, “We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt ’possum, go to Baptist churches, and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.”
His partner in the campaign is a young man named Dan Levine, who (with the occasional help of his friend Jonathan Bloom) runs a blog called BBQJew.com. The blog’s name sums up the dilemma that would face an observant Jew who had a taste for smoky meat but lived in North Carolina, where the single word “barbecue” on a menu is understood to mean barbecued pork. In North Carolina, which is second only to Iowa in pork production, hogs greatly outnumber people. The Nahunta Pork Center, which is roughly between Raleigh and Rocky Mount, claims to have the largest display of pork in the eastern United States, and I’m prepared to accept that claim. On the day that John and Dan and I dropped in to look around, it was displaying, among other porcine edibles, pork ears, pork spleen, pork tongues, pork feet, pork tails, fatback, hock bones, country-cured hams, cracklings, smoked sausages, bacon, cured pork shoulder, smoked picnics and Boston butts (which together make the upper part of a shoulder), cooked pork-chitterling loaf, souse (pork skins, pork ears, pork hearts, etc.), and Tom Thumbs, also known as Dan Doodles, which are the large intestines of pigs stuffed with sausage and smoked. Pork is the only kind of barbecue that the Campaign for Real Barbecue considers “regionally appropriate” for North Carolina. The icon on a sign that identifies a business as a barbecue joint, in the way that a striped pole would indicate a barbershop, is a pig—usually a pig that looks remarkably cheerful considering the fate that has befallen the pigs to be found inside.
Dan seems unfazed by the ubiquitousness of the cheerful pig, perhaps because he has written on BBQJew.com that what Moses was seeking in the Promised Land was not milk and honey but chopped hog and hush puppies. (No specific Biblical passage is cited in support of this interpretation.) I’m not in a position to criticize Dan’s scholarship, since, in dealing with the pork issue in my own speech at the Barbecue Summit, I mentioned, with a similar absence of citations, the Barbecue Easement, promulgated in Missouri by the Joplin rebbe, a renowned Talmudist and pitmaster: any farm animal without scales that is subjected to slow heat from a hardwood fire for more than six hours is kosher.
The name of the Campaign for Real Barbecue was inspired by the Campaign for Real Ale, in the United Kingdom, which was founded to protest the “bland processed beers” that big brewers were passing off on the British public. The Campaign for Real Ale uses fermentation in wooden casks as its main criterion for producing an acceptable brew. The Campaign for Real Barbecue’s main criterion for bestowing its certification on a barbecue joint is that the meat being served has been cooked exclusively from the heat of hardwood coals. A barbecue establishment that cooks with gas or electricity, perhaps adding some wood chips to get a bit of smoky flavor, is likely to be referred to by one of the campaign founders as a gasser—although John concedes that the barbecue produced in hybrid ovens, even if lacking “some of the soul of the operation,” can, on occasion, be better than no barbecue at all. The tone of the campaign is in keeping with the sort of Southern courtesy that could presumably be wiped out, along with possum hunting, in a Bubbacidal episode: the pledge posted on its Web site, TrueCue.org, says, among other things, “I will not eat meat cooked only with gas or electricity and mislabeled ‘barbecue,’ except when courtesy requires it.” In Dan Levine’s view, “There’s a continuum. We’re not fanatics. We just think there’s one right way to do things. Otherwise, it’s just oven-roasted pork.”
The Campaigners recognize that an assessment of what is true to North Carolina culture has to take into account how that culture has evolved. The Research Triangle, in particular, has brought to the state people who are not just from other regions but also from other countries. Dan Levine himself is illustrative of demographic changes. The son of academics from New York, he grew up in North Carolina because his family moved to Chapel Hill when his mother joined U.N.C.’s department of Slavic languages. The population shift toward the Sun Belt has brought to North Carolina and other parts of the South a number of people who learn to love barbecue but do not necessarily have a strong attachment to grits and the Southern Baptist Church. In Greensboro, eighty miles west of the Raleigh demarcation line, where John and I went for lunch the day after I arrived in the state, we drove down a double-lane whose restaurants offered us not only fast-food hamburgers but also burritos and samosas and banh-mi sandwiches and sushi. At the place where we had lunch, Stamey’s, the waitress who came over to say, in a pronounced North Carolina accent, “Y’all ready to order?” was Asian. Chip Stamey, the proprietor, has been hiring Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians since some of them were brought to Greensboro in a church resettlement project after the Vietnam War. “They’re good workers,” he said, when he sat down in our booth to chat. Then he added, with a smile, “And they don’t want to go home for Christmas.”
Chip was wearing a Stamey’s T-shirt that said on the back “85 years and still smokin’.” Stamey’s has deep North Carolina roots. Chip’s grandfather Warner started his career in the courthouse-square tents that barbecue men began working out of between World Wars whenever court was in session in Lexington—thus beginning what social scientists might call the Piedmont Deviation. In order to confirm that the ketchup in Piedmont-style sauce (or dip, as sauce is called locally) can be traced to the taste for sweet-and-sour among Germans who migrated from Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, Dale Reed did genealogical research to demonstrate that the names of the courthouse-square pioneers, including the Stameys, were either German names or corruptions of what had been German names; the Reeds used a map depicting the distribution of religious denominations to show that Lutherans were concentrated in counties that became the heart of Western barbecue. That all strikes me as barbecue sociology in the spirit of Zelinsky’s horse-mule census.
We were joined for lunch by my cousin Keith Cushman, who has taught in the English department of U.N.C.-Greensboro since before the first Chinese restaurant came to town. Apparently not finding my explanation of the Barbecue Easement up to his standards of scholarship, Keith avoids pork. When he ordered chicken, Chip Stamey seemed to be trying to suppress a grimace. Chip explained the presence of chicken on the menu as “just an accommodation.” It’s listed as “chicken with barbecue sauce” rather than as “barbecued chicken,” he said, because chicken actually done in the pits with the pork shoulders would dry out before it got brought over from the smokehouse. John agrees that cooking chicken over the coals would usually be “a waste of good smoke,” and he also agrees that, in an increasingly competitive market, some accommodations may have to be made. Even the Skylight Inn, a legendary Eastern-style place in Ayden that is so traditionalist that its motto is “If it’s not cooked with wood it’s not Bar-B-Q,” now serves chicken. John remains calm when he sees beef brisket on a North Carolina barbecue menu, as long as the menu also includes meat that is regionally appropriate.
Stamey’s definitely observes traditional cooking methods. Its meat is cooked with hardwood coals only, in a smokehouse so redolent of pork shoulders on their way to being barbecue that I can imagine some entrepreneurial Stamey in future generations figuring out how to market the smell. Just inside the entrance to the restaurant, there is a framed letter of certification from the Campaign for Real Barbecue. On the same wall are pictures of Stamey forebears plying their trade in early times in Lexington’s courthouse square. John and Dale and Dan and I visited that courthouse square a couple of days later, after having a few lunches of Piedmont barbecue in certified places like Cook’s and the Lexington Barbecue. A grocery store near the square, Conrad & Hinkle, still has an inventory that resembles what it might have had when some of its customers were the Piedmont-style barbecue pioneers working out of tents. Dan Levine bought some pimento cheese and two jars each of pickled eggs, pickled okra, and pickled green tomatoes. John and Dale took home pimento cheese, a jar of scuppernong jelly, and a jar of sorghum.
Anyone who had any doubts that what Dan calls the right way is also the hard way would lose them in a visit to a smokehouse. The pitmaster arrives at three or four in the morning to start up the pasteboard boxes normally used as kindling. (More pasteboard boxes, flattened out, cover the meat, in order to keep the heat on and the ashes off.) He has to feed wood into the firebox continually. He has to shovel burning coals out of the firebox and spread them under racks of pork every fifteen or twenty minutes. This goes on for about ten hours. “It ain’t too awfully bad,” Brandon Cook, of Cook’s Barbecue, in Lexington, said of the routine, as we watched him arrange coals under some pork shoulders. To me, it looked bad enough to make me wonder why so many barbecue people, including Cook, choose to join the family business. Watching your father or your grandfather tend a pit for a number of years seems like something that would inspire you to go into, say, insurance sales.
There are other complications for those who do it the hard way. They have to maintain a reliable wood supply, which can be difficult; they sometimes have to hassle with local environmental authorities. At this point, only fifty or sixty barbecue places in the state have been certified by the campaign as cooking exclusively with wood. That’s more than John and Dan expected to find, but it still accounts for what they estimate is only about ten per cent of the barbecue purveyors in North Carolina. And the trend isn’t moving in their direction. They regularly hear of barbecue joints, particularly in the eastern part of the state, yielding to the temptation to switch to the easy (and cheaper) way. John and Dan do not have a powerful citizens’ movement behind them. Unlike the Campaign for Real Ale, which claims something like a hundred and sixty-five thousand dues-paying members, the Campaign for True Barbecue makes do with a list of patrons (mostly prominent chefs or writers with an interest in barbecue), a list of people who have taken the pledge, and a few volunteer inspectors. John and Dan understand that they’re fighting a rear-guard action.
So why fight it? I asked John one day. “Nostalgia, partly,” he said. In his darker moments, he sees his beloved barbecue joints being replaced by the soulless outposts of some franchise operation he calls the International House of Barbecue, which uses “barbecue” to mean meat with bottled barbecue sauce on it—your choice of meat, your choice of sauce. Just as the Campaign for Real Ale believes in “well run pubs as the centres of community life,” John Reed believes that the traditional barbecue joint is a place in the South where people from all walks of life and all races, from the sheriffs’ deputies to the construction workers to the town bankers, gather to eat the local specialty at a price just about anybody can afford. (A barbecue sandwich at Stamey’s goes for three dollars and twenty-five cents.) A passage in “Holy Smoke” says, “North Carolina barbecue is an edible embodiment of Tradition. For many of us, barbecue symbolizes Home and People.” John’s approach strikes me as a culinary version of what the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable was getting at in a 1968 quote that I ran across in the Times: “What preservation is really all about is the retention and active relationship of buildings of the past to the community’s functioning present.” When, after our first lunch of the day, in the eastern part of the state, we left B’s Barbecue, in Greenville—a small cinder-block building with a cheerful-pig sign and a smokehouse out back and, at eleven-twenty in the morning, a long line that seemed to include both blue-collar workers and staff from the nearby medical school—John said, “That’s the kind of place I like. That’s the kind of atmosphere I like. That’s the kind of food I like.”
Allen & Son, just north of Chapel Hill, is not far from where Dan Levine grew up. When he returned home on college vacations, Dan used to make a beeline for Allen’s in order to repair a serious barbecue deprivation. He remains a fan. Keith Allen chops his own wood and tends his own pit, positioning the coals so that their contact with drippings from the meat will produce precisely the smoky flavor he’s looking for. “I’m trying to get the taste,” he told us. “Everybody else is just trying to get done.” Particularly at lunchtime, Allen’s draws the sort of crowd John Reed finds comforting—blue-collar workers mixed with U.N.C. faculty and students. Safely in the DMZ, Allen uses what he wants from both directions, cooking shoulders with Eastern-style sauce. There are those in the state who believe that the barbecue fancy should, following Keith Allen’s example, forget about the regional rivalry and concentrate on promoting North Carolina barbecue as a whole. When a newspaper reporter put that proposition before Jerry Bledsoe, a writer who takes the Piedmont side during exchanges of volleys between the camps, he said, “I’m totally opposed. The feud is as good as the food.”
Whether or not there is ever a cessation of hostilities, North Carolina is not immune to national food trends. A couple of the places we visited informed customers that their barbecue was made from locally raised pigs that are hormone- and antibiotic-free. In the Research Triangle, it’s possible to eat barbecue in a restaurant that wouldn’t seem out of place in Tribeca. One evening, John and Dale and I drove to Durham to eat at The Pit, which, in a building that has the look of an old warehouse, seems to be an effort to do authentic barbecue in a trendy setting. It was filled with a young crowd—drawn partly, I assumed, from nearby Duke University. On one of the brick walls, there was an artfully arranged display of cleavers. Another wall was lined with what looked like enlargements of some nineteenth-century illustrations of pigs. The menu had barbecue in both the Eastern and the Lexington styles, along with typical barbecue sides, like slaw and collard greens. But it also had Jowl Bacon Bruschetta and Barbecue Nachos and Fried North Carolina Catfish and Barbecued Tofu. The Pit has a wine list. It has valet parking, although John did not avail himself of that service. Since it cooks its barbecue exclusively with wood—its former pitmaster was Ed Mitchell, one of the legends of North Carolina barbecue—The Pit is certified by the Campaign for Real Barbecue.
I got the impression that John has made his peace with the fact that, in present-day North Carolina, the places that he and Dan revere are not likely to be widely replicated and may not remain completely unchanged. At lunch in Greensboro, Chip Stamey told us that his college-age son has his own ideas about how he might operate the family business if he becomes its fourth-generation proprietor, and I assume, simply from the son’s age, that the changes he has in mind are likely to be more in the direction of The Pit than of B’s Barbecue. As we walked from The Pit to the car, John, reflecting on the experience, said, “If this is what it takes to introduce barbecue to the next generation, so be it.” He is, after all, no fanatic. “Things change,” he’d said to me when we discussed the possibility of barbecue creeping upmarket. “On the other hand, a wine list is wrong.” ♦
