American Barbecue: A Memoir
A walk through time with my country’s cuisine
I’ve been a cook ever since my father said, “If you don’t like it, make your own dinner.” I hadn’t realized that was an option, so I did. Since then, the miles my cooking travelled wildly exceeds my own. While I have never left the contiguous fifty states, my cooking has travelled six continents and countless counties; national dishes and regional cuisines; vegan and carnivorous; from all-natural paleo… to entirely unnatural molecular gastronomy. Now, the road my food travels, as many roads do, heads home. In all my wild exploration, I never had the capacity to make what I understood as my home country’s national dish, American Barbecue
So here we are, in second half of my thirties, and my cooking sets out again... this time with a mortgage in tow, so it’s only travelling as far as the back patio. Hearing it now, the word “homeowner,” has a sweetness to it, like the chime of a brass ring, notably when actualized with its root’s hyphenates like, home-cookin’, down-home, and home-grown. As such, it’s time for me to take on this home-grown, down-home, home-cookin’ called American Barbecue… so what is it? This I can answer! I’ve seen enough foodie TV and read enough snooty foodie magazines to know; grilling isn’t barbecue.
Barbecue specifically is slow cooked with smoke over indirect heat. This has been recited so many times, as the Dothraki of Essos would say, “It is known.”
I need to get a smoker.
I start doing some research and there’s one obvious fact that rises like cream on milk: the topic of American Barbecue is one that’s hotly contested. Barbecue has factionalized into pork vs beef, Texas vs the Carolinas, wet mops vs dry rubs… and polarized nearly every other nuance the topic “smoked meat” has to offer. The polarization goes so far as to claim the other “isn’t barbecue.” Amongst such turmoil, I investigate the history of barbecue and hope to find a common ancestry, as well as common ground for these opposed sects.
So, what can they agree on? For one thing, the brand “Oklahoma Joe’s” makes the highest rated smoker for under $300; it’s called Bronco. Ordered. Also, I’m going to need a friend with some expertise in this topic. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I appreciate long-form answers, technical data, spreadsheets, and analytics; so, of course, I turn to the single most intelligent meat-science artists that I’m aware of… and his name says it all, Meathead Goldwyn. Along with my smoker, I order a copy of Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling, and a digital thermometer, which, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve needed for far too long anyway.
The smoker is here! And so is Meathead! I immediately open my new book; I just gotta have one pearl of wisdom before getting going on this project. Meathead says, “When you cook outdoors, heat is transferred to food in three different ways: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction heat is when your lover’s body is pressed against yours… Convection heat is when your lover blows in your ear… Radiant heat is when you feel the heat of your lover’s body under the covers without touching.” And we’re off to the races.
I set my smoker up. It’s called a “drum style” because it looks like a 50-gallon drum with a hinged top and chimney. In fact, Meathead informs me that in 1957, Popular Mechanics ran plans for making a barbecue from an oil barrel.
With the excitement of ordering the Bronco, I could not decide on what to smoke for the first time, so I bought a pork shoulder, beef brisket, whole chicken, and linked sausages. Looking back at my preliminary research, pork seemed appropriate, but we’ll get to that later. So, I open the wrapped pork, Boston butt, sprinkle the meat with salt, pepper and garlic powder and pop it in the fridge overnight.
Again, in my excitement, I quite literally couldn’t decide what to smoke… what should fuel my fire? So I pop down to the hardware store and pick up lump hardwood charcoal, cherry chunk wood, applewood, mesquite, and hickory. Looking at my assortment of tree parts, Meathead puts it bluntly, “Stop obsessing over which wood to use.” He offers another approach, and a convenient chart; consider the smoke, energy, sparks, and embers of the species. He adds, “Remember, I have judged food and wine around the world, I have won wine tasting championships in contests where I had to identify wines blind, and I would love nothing more than to tell you that a particular wood has ‘nuances of spice with an undertone of mushrooms.’ I just can’t do it. There are too many variables.”
Lump charcoal will supply consistent heat for slow cooking and, checking the chart, chunks of cherry wood will provide a medium smoke at medium energy with few sparks and excellent embers. I get fuel basket set. As I light the fire, I start to find what I’m looking for: a type of connectedness.
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Shortly thereafter he discovered… Barbecue. On one of the Dominican Islands, that Columbus would name Hispaniola, native Taino and Carib people had discovered a slow cooking method for iguana that used smoke and indirect heat. Upon their return to Spain, the Spaniards designated this form of cooking barbacoa. The specific etymology behind this word, “barbacoa,” goes unknown, but speculation and debate ranges from it being a word of Haitian decent, to a play on the French words, “barbe a queue,” meaning, “beard to tail,” (a point to which the Oxford English dictionary has designated as, “absurd conjecture,”). An even more nefarious etymological suggestion proposes that the root “barbe” of the word “barbarian” is behind the naming; giving the Old World what they expected explorers to find in the New World, barbarisms. Cooking iguana over green wood would certainly constitute that from the framework of a 15th century explorer.
Before leaving the Caribbean, the Spanish took with them the barbacoa technique and left behind them some pigs. Heading north with the Spanish, barbacoa made its way up to the Carolinas where it found a stronghold that would last centuries. Descendants of the pigs left by Spanish settlers still roam wild on the islands off the eastern seaboard, including varieties such as the Ossabaw, which remain prized barbecue hogs to this day. So that brings it around; I’m sold on pork barbecue, North Carolina style, tart and peppery how I like it, and it’s ready to hit the pit.
As the charcoal burns and the Bronco warms, Meathead takes a little wind out of my sails, offering an interesting perspective on what is probably the hottest issue in American Barbecue;
“To this day, students of history in the Carolinas insist that barbecue can only be pork, which is some sort of subtle white supremacy at work, ascribing too much influence to the Spanish and American cultures. Remember, original barbacoa was fish, lizards, alligator, and other game cooked by native Americans.”
Oof, okay, still going with pork, but there’s obviously more to this than I thought.
I remove the pork shoulder from the fridge and seasoned it with ground chile pepper and brown sugar for the bark (which is the super-desirable crispy outer skin of the barbecue). Meathead advises smoking the meat while it’s cold, unlike the traditional advice for steak which says to allow the meat to come up to room temperature first. What’s the theory there?
“Thermophoresis,” Meathead says, “is a force that moves particles from a warm to a cold surface.” Smoke particles cling to the cold surface of the meat, creating a rich flavor. I put the pork shoulder in the smoker and feel immediately pride, like I’m a part of the history of my country. Pork barbecue was the first hybrid cuisine of the old and new worlds; beloved by both, its trail is one that now defines the southern states in America.
Between 1539 and 1540, Spanish explorer Hernando Desoto led his crew of 650 men, as well as 223 horses, 300 pigs, and nearly 50 years of Spanish barbacoa experience, on an over-land expedition beginning in Florida and circuitously travelling through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Among the many tribes Desoto encountered was the Chickasaw nation, who, when they experienced pork barbacoa for the first time, loved it… so much so that conflict eventually arose over the delicious, non-native Spanish pigs.
One evening, three Chickasaw tribesmen were removing some of the pigs for barbecue from their namesake village of Chicasa where they were allowing the Spaniards to stay over the winter. In response to what the Spaniards saw as theft by the Chickasaw, they killed two of the natives and chopped off the hands of the third, sending him back to his chief as a warning. The Chickasaw, who in their entire history were never defeated in military engagement, would have the final say against their cruel guests, attacking and burning down the Spanish encampment, killing twelve Spaniards, dozens of horses, and hundreds of pigs... incidentally, some of the pigs escaped to become the iconic Arkansas razorback hog.
Desoto’s expedition fled west, discovering (for Europeans) and crossing the Mississippi River, which they named the Rio Grande. They continued through Arkansas, Texas, and back down the Mississippi River through Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico. This expedition, which cost Desoto his life due to illness back up in Arkansas, seeded America’s south with the knowledge and single ingredient, hogs, for pork barbacoa, effectually establishing what is now known as America’s Barbecue Belt.
So that’s it then, right? American Barbecue is pork, slow cooked with smoke over indirect heat. Barbecue “purists” would argue, yes: that’s it. Meaning, the smoked beef brisket you get in Texas is not American barbecue. No one would argue that Texas is not American, so how can the intersectionality between food, culture and tradition, the foodways born in America, fall outside the realm of American Barbecue? Meathead has a couple thoughts on this, starting with my initial premise; barbecue is slow cooked with smoke over indirect heat.
“The word barbacoa was brought to Europe by Spanish explorers and it first appeared in print in Spain in the 1526. Even though the word originally meant a structure, not the food or the method, it expanded to include both in Europe... As the word expanded barbecue came to mean (1) food cooked by a barbecue method, (2) a cooking device, (3) an event at which barbecue is cooked, and (4) a flavor that is similar to sweet ketchup-based barbecue sauce.
“There are many legitimate definitions, including verbs, nouns, and adjectives. There is even a legal definition. One definition just will not do the job. When you cut through the haze, ultimately, it is smoke that differentiates barbecue from other types of cooking. The fact is that there are many forms of barbecue around the world and it is the presence of smoke that unifies them all.”
My Bronco’s chimney wafts thin blue chugs into the sky as the rendering fat methodically drips and sizzles on the cherry embers. What Meathead says jives with everything that I felt when I set out on this what-is-barbecue expedition. While there may be a decisive line that pork barbecue cut through the southern states, this is just one branch of the barbecue family tree.
Meathead corrals the barbecue purist (“revisionist” as he calls it) definitions under an umbrella term of, “Barbecue”; the “genus” to the “species” of “Southern Barbecue” (of the barbecue purist and revisionist definitions), as well as grilling… and char-broiling, Indian tandoori, asado and churrasco, Mexican barbacoa, Thai satay, spit-roasting and rotisserie campfire cooking, and an hilarious Bubba-Gump Shrimp metaphor’s worth of others, including shrimp-on-the-barbie.
The Spanish adapted a New World technique for cooking one thing and used it to cook another. Both natives and immigrants owned the technique and ingredients in a way that made barbecue American. For example, British immigrants brought their love of tart flavors and vinegar as well as their tradition for basting meats. Combining the technique of slow-cooking whole hog with smoke with these British foodways, North Carolina barbecue was born. In South Carolina on the other hand, the dominant migrant culture was German and French; combining the same whole hog technique as North Carolina with the mustard-loving tastes of these groups, and classic South Carolina barbecue happened. And let’s not forget that African slaves were the first American pitmasters, whose taste and expertise shaped the flavor of Southern Barbecue as a whole. Despite these disparate, non-native, non-Spanish populations’ takes pork barbecue, both Carolinas’ styles are universally considered American barbecue.
The temperature alarm beeps on my American barbecue, it’s gone over 260 degrees at the grate, so I close the intake a little. For the first time since closing it, I lift the lid to check the pork shoulder. A small plume of smoke rushes away, and the sound of embers crackle like sand on glass. The sugars have caramelized and clung to the meat, the beginning of that bark that’s so important. I’ve made pork countless times, and already this is unlike anything I’ve previously done. To enhance the bark and add some moisture, I take a page from modern pitmasters’ book-of-tricks and spritz the meat with apple cider vinegar in a spray bottle. The hiss of the cider vinegar and aroma that rises as the liquid hits the hot pit is mouthwatering. The temperature levels back off at about 240 degrees once the lid is closed again, as the bonus hit of oxygen excited the charcoal and now the chimney happily begins the chug that sweet barbecue smoke again.
Pork barbecue, like, mine may have been the first iteration of what purists believe is American barbecue, but it is certainly not the only. Again, a subtle racism rears its head when it comes to what is American. While pigs came with the Spaniards one their first trip to the New World and on subsequent exploration expeditions, such as Desoto’s, the utilization of hogs was only due to their relative ease of transport and keeping.
Just several months after returning from his first voyage, in 1493 Columbus sailed for America again, this time with seventeen ships and twelve hundred crewmen, but this time, the Spaniards were coming to stay, so they brought their primary livestock. Meathead tells it like this:
“On his second voyage he [Columbus] is believed to have stopped in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and picked up 20 to 30 cattle, mostly pregnant females descended from Portuguese and Spanish stock brought there a few decades earlier. Within three weeks they were grazing contentedly on the lush greenery of Hispaniola and within a few years conquistadors brought them to Mexico where vaqueros, Mexican predecessors of cowboys, drove them north to Texas.”
Before arriving in America, barbacoa picked up a few tricks. Incorporating Spanish cattle with the indigenous barbacoa and Mexican technique, which involved heavily spicing the meat with mole (the first barbecue sauce), the seeds for Texan barbecue were sown, but there would be over two more centuries before it is realized.
Eventually, German immigrants would flock to the Republic of Texas after the 1842 foundation of the Adelsverein, or The Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas (Verein zum Schutze Deutscher Einwanderer). In Texas, German immigrants did not have pigs, they had a mixed breed of eastern cows and descendants of the original Spanish cattle, a variety named Texas Longhorns. They also had the techniques used in Carolina by their countrymen barbecuing pork with mustard. Combining this with the now indigenous barbacoa technique, and Texas style barbecue was born.
Again, the alarm beeps on my thermometer. The cherry chunk caught fire and spiked the temperature, white smoke replacing the blue. It’s as good a time as any to spritz the pork again, plus, I realize I haven’t temped the meat at all yet. I open the lid and release some heat, then hit the meat with the spray bottle. The thick smoke stings my eyes, but again, the aroma of the sizzling cider vinegar is so enticing, it makes my salivary glands ache! Pulling my brand-new thermometer probe from the cover, I stick it into the meat; it slips in with little resistance, but only registers 155 degrees.
“The Stall. The Zone. The Plateau. It has many names, and it has freaked out many a backyard pitmaster,” says Meathead, “I know because they email me right in the middle of their cook. Panicky.”
Quoting Dr. Greg Blonder, Meathead explains, “‘As the temperature of cold meat rises, the evaporation rate increases until the cooling effect balances the heat input. Then it stalls, until the last drop of available moisture on the surface is gone.’ This process also explains the formation of bark, the dried jerky-like crispy surface imbued with spices that barbecue lovers crave.”
Closing the lid on my Bronco drum, the heat-proof flexible gasket settles over the braided metal wire connecting the grate probe to the magnetic mounting, and my thoughts wander. Pork, slow cooked with smoke over indirect heat; this is that, but as I reset the temperature probe alarm it is clear: this is much more as well.
Back inside the barbecue belt, travelling north along the Mississippi river, barbecue reached the port city of Memphis, Tennessee. As a major trading hub in early America, it was here that sweet imports, like molasses, first entered the scene; and it was with these ingredients that Memphis barbecue staked its claim. Then, in 1907, like Desoto had over 350 years earlier, barbecue crossed the Mississippi once more; this time with Black restaurateur and pitmaster Henry Perry, to Kansas City. When Perry, a Memphis-area native, swapped the sweet Memphis sauce for a “harsh, peppery sauce,” and adopted the Texans’ beef… Kansas City style became the fourth major style of American barbecue.
Like all culture in America, in barbecue exist completely underrepresented and highly regional styles and variations. Just north of the porcine barbecue belt, Kentucky claims smoked mutton barbeque, and in the far-flung Pacific Northwest, the Tillicum people smoke fish on what looks like a micro version of the Argentinean asado cross (used for suspending entire cows above fire). The “four styles of American barbecue” are just the primarily represented groups amongst competition barbecue. With the exclusion of others from competition, their removal from popular culture follows.
This removal is not unintentional, and it strikes a nerve with my companion. Into his thirteenth or so tirade on the “flaws in the revisionist logic,” Meathead calls it like this, “And before I rest my case, let’s look at the priesthood of the revisionists, tens of thousands of Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS) members. KCBS members are quick to draw the line between barbecue and grilling. But reality is right before their sensitive noses… Not only are the revisionist efforts flawed, they are downright inhospitable, even snobbish.”
Ouch. My original American Barbecue, which was already starting to feel slightly less authentic with probes and sprays, was now feeling like… well, sort of like I bought into a lie. Checking the temp of my pork, and checking my own preconceptions, the meat is hot and so am I… Meathead says it’s ready, 203 degrees, the perfect time to remove it from the smoker. A little, “carryover cooking,” while the pork rests, will continue to increase the internal temperature a few degrees, allowing the now-soft connective tissues in the meat to continue to liquefy, creating the perfectly unctuous final product.
I head to the fridge while this meat magic happens, a little grumpier than expected; I need to gather a few more things before eating. Opening the door, I’m glad I have a beef brisket in there. I sigh and grab a bottle of my own blend of vinegar and peppers, it’s my favorite North Carolina style barbecue sauce and the best I’ve had, the perfect compliment to my first American Barbecue… or my first revisionist-inspired barbecue. I grab a bag of white bread from the pantry, Wonder brand, American AF. And that’s all you need, pork, sauce, and bread. Down the hatch. I sigh again and bring my lament to Meathead.
“The US is full of barbecue deniers and snobs,” Meathead says. “They love to say ‘This is real traditional barbecue and that is not’ or ‘That’s not barbecue, that’s grilling.’ What they mean is ‘this is the way I do it and if you don’t do it my way, you’re not doing barbecue.’ They draw lines in the ashes. Alas, they are ignorant of the history of barbecue, the way the word began and how it is used around the nation and the world, or culinary arts.” He continues, “Contrary to mythology, barbecue was not an American invention. Barbecue is older than homo sapiens and anthropologists even think that it was mastery of fire that permanently altered our evolutionary path and it is this primeval link that makes us still love cooking over flame.” He adds, “Around one million years ago Homo erectus, the hominid just before Neanderthal man, first tasted cooked meat.” Whoa. Okay. That’s a whole different angle. I set to work pulling the pork and try to unravel this whole thing.
The shoulder blade bone slides out of the Boston butt with no resistance, as the major muscle groups pull apart… like Spaniards in the New World discovered a cooking technique that, when applied to the pork they brought with them for the journey, made something delicious. The larger muscle groups pull apart easily as well, long strands of pork muscle beautifully separate. I taste the glorious product. Meathead nails it when he says, “The taste unadorned and unadulterated, hot from the smoker, is unmatched in the culinary world. It is the quintessence of porkdom.” Then, I douse the meat with my tart North Carolina vinegar and pepper barbecue sauce, just like these strands of pork that run from the Caribbean up to the Carolinas, from Florida’s panhandle to Louisiana’s and nine states in between. Closer to the edge however, the bark that pitmasters crave, was a little bitter. For those whose history is rooted in the superiority of their European tastes as translated through the technique of African slaves, claiming their historical dominance as authority on what is American, seems about par for course.
Though now mixing the pulled pork, the crispy bark, and the succulent strands of meat, the entirely of the experience takes hold. I place a handful of my North Carolina barbecue on piece of white bread, add an extra squirt of barbecue love on top, and go sit down.
When tracing one’s lineage to the east coast, the east coast becomes one’s home team; same goes for a family line that travels Mexico to Texas, from Memphis to KC. Rivalry rooted in love for local foodstuff is something I understand, but I don’t trace my lineage from any of the above; the topic of American Barbecue for me is one of national pride. I give my barbecue plate a look and take a bite. I’ve made good pulled pork before. I’ve eaten great pulled pork before. But this is next level. It is this taste in its entirety, tender and fatty and tart and just enough bitter that makes this dish, holistically, in flavor and culture, worth taking pride in. The smoke is rich in the bark, and the pork soaks up the sauce; and what sauce it doesn’t, the bread saves for later.
Offering more than a connectedness with my country, this experience provided a connectedness with humanity under the genus of “Barbecue” in a way that lent insight to my countrymen through the species “Southern Barbecue” and subspecies of “North Carolina barbecue.” Since the first-time flame touched meat, the barbacoa tradition has been in motion. The drive that sent me to the stove as a youth is the same that sent the Spanish to the smoldering barbacoa. It’s the same drive shared amongst all humanity, allowing for the independent and concurrent development of not just beef and pork barbecue, but chicken, mutton, goat, fish, and even veg.
I turn on the tv, queuing up the next episode of Netflix’s show Chef’s Table BBQ, not quite ready to let the experience end. Tucking into the best pulled pork I’ve ever eaten, I listen to the story of Mayan chef Rosalia Chay Chuc of the Yaxunah, Yucatan, Mexico. Since time immemorial, the Maya have cooked their food with indirect heat using smoking coals in an earthen oven called a “pib.” Mexican food investigator Ricardo Muñoz visited Rosalia to try this most traditional Mexican barbecue, cochinita pibil. He recalls, “When we got there, there was a type of wild boar that was at least a thousand years old.” What? A thousand years old? I google it. The peccary is an ancient variety of pigs still prevalent in the Americas, though now extinct in Europe. Pre-Hispanic Maya kept herds of peccary for food, hundreds of years before Spanish hogs arrived; cooking them with smoke over indirect heat until the meat is tender enough to pull, served with achiote salsa over white tortillas… Say WHAT?
By Brandon Silvis
Works Referenced:
1. https://www.southernfoodways.org/oral-history/southern-bbq-trail/
2. Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha, by Don Harrison Doyle https://books.google.com/books?id=JLAUzHQBj5YC&pg=PA27&dq=hernando+de+soto,+barbecue,+chicksaw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=o-vmUdf3LdHd4AOo14GIBw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hernando%20de%20soto%2C%20barbecue%2C%20chicksaw&f=false
3. Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food by Andrew Warnes https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/osu/reader.action?docID=3038933
4. https://chickasaw.net/Our-Nation/History/Europeans-Contact.aspx
5. https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/Ossabaw
7. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Chickasaw
9. https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/campfire-stories/cattle-folk
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meusebach%E2%80%93Comanche_Treaty
11. https://www.barbecuecountry.com/blogs/news/all-you-need-to-know-about-mexican-bbq
12. “Rosalia Chay Chuc” Chef’s Table BBQ, season 1, episode 5, Netflix Studios, 2020. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81147383
