The Slaw and the Slow Cooked: Culture and Barbecue in the Mid-South

233 Pages·2012·1.64 MB·English

by  James R. Veteto

Culture and Barbecue
in the Mid-South
EditEd by
JamEs R. VEtEto
and
EdwaRd m. maclin
The Slaw
and The Slow Cooked

The Slaw and
the Slow Cooked
Culture and Barbecue
in the Mid-South
Edited by James R. Veteto
and Edward M. Maclin
Foreword by
Gary Paul Nabhan
Vanderbilt University Press
nashville
© 2011 by Vanderbilt University Press
Foreword © 2011 by Gary Paul Nabhan
Published by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The slaw and the slow cooked : culture and barbecue
in the mid-south / edited by James R. Veteto and
Edward M. Maclin ; foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8265-1801-9 (cloth edition : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1802-6 (pbk. edition : alk. paper)
1. Food habits—Southern States. 2. Barbecuing—
Southern States. 3. Cooking, American—Southern
style. 4. Southern States—Social life and customs.
I. Veteto, James R. II. Maclin, Edward M.
GT2853.U5S57 2011
394.1′20975—dc22
2011003011
ConTenTS

Foreword:
From Coa to Barbacoa to Barbecue vii
Gary Paul Nabhan
Acknowledgments xi
1 Smoked Meat and the Anthropology
of Food: An Introduction 1
James R. Veteto and Edward M. Maclin
Part I.
Traditional and Contemporary Landscapes
of Mid-South Barbecue
2 A History of Barbecue
in the Mid-South Region 25
Robert F. Moss
3 Patronage and the Pits: A Portrait,
in Black and White, of Jones Bar-B-Q
Diner in Marianna, Arkansas 43
John T. Edge
4 Piney Woods Traditions at the Crossroads:
Barbecue and Regional Identity
in South Arkansas and North Louisiana 51
Justin M. Nolan
vi The Slaw and the Slow Cooked
5 Priests, Pork Shoulders, and
Chicken Halves: Barbecue for a Cause
at St. Patrick’s Irish Picnic 65
Kristen Bradley-Shurtz
6 Identity, Authenticity, Persistence,
and Loss in the West Tennessee
Whole-Hog Barbecue Tradition 83
Rien T. Fertel
Part II. Old/New Barbecue Moving Forward
7 The Changing Landscape
of Mid-South Barbecue 107
Edward M. Maclin
8 Swine by Design: Inside
a Competition Barbecue Team 117
Jonathan Deutsch
9 Barbecue as Slow Food 151
Angela Knipple and Paul Knipple
10 Southern Barbecue Sauce
and Heirloom Tomatoes 167
James R. Veteto
11 Mid-South Barbecue in the Digital Age
and Sustainable Future Directions 181
Edward M. Maclin and James R. Veteto
Contributors 199
Index 203
foreword
From Coa to Barbacoa
to Barbecue
Gary Paul Nabhan
Start with a coa, a sharpened, skinned stick that may be used for digging
and planting seeds or for skewering and smoking mammalian
meats, fish, or fowl. Coa may indeed be one of the oldest and most wide-
spread words in the Americas—including the Caribbean. It may also be
embedded in one of the oldest and most ubiquitous means of slowly
smoking meats and making them savory and storable, rather than leav-
ing them raw and perishable: the babricot of the Taino and Carib, the
barbacoa of the Hispanicized natives and immigrants, and the barbecue
of the Anglicized natives and immigrants of the New World.
When meat, fish, or fowl is crucified on coa skewers and placed
over red-hot coals, the flesh does not perish but is made immortal and
eminently memorable by both fire and smoke. The coas may be set ver-
tically as the barbecue racks in Argentina are, or woven into a horizon-
tal grate as they are in northern Mexico, or leaned at 60-degree angles
as they are at salmon bakes in the Pacific Northwest. Of course, the
quality of the meat itself matters most—whether it is from pig or pec-
cary, Criollo cattle or Churro sheep—but whatever meat is chosen will
be transmogrified by the kind of wood used to roast or grill it: hickory,
oak, pecan, alder, or mesquite. Each wood offers a certain intensity and
duration of heat which reshapes the muscle and fat cells in the meat,
but it also infuses the meat with antioxidants from the smoke passing
through it. Sweet smoke, savory smoke, dark smoke or light—they waft
up from the fire as wisps of vaporized carbon and secondary chemicals,
then linger.
But meat, fire, and smoke are not enough to make barbecue as many
vii
viii The Slaw and the Slow Cooked
recognize it—by taste, smell, and sight—today. The term barbecue has,
in many hills and hollers, become synonymous with a savory sauce,
although that was not always its meaning. The savory sauces and dry
rubs of the Taino and Carib first encountered by the Spanish may have
had several different red, green, yellow, and orange peppers among their
ingredients—aji, chilli, chilpotli, or habanero—but they likely included
a distant kin of black peppers as well: allspice, pimienta gorda, or pi-
mienta de Tabasco. The original American chilmollis or moles may have
also included cacao, vanilla, wild oreganos, wild sages, or epazotes. Old
World immigrants and refugees—not just blue-blooded Spaniards but
also Moors and Jews escaping the Inquisition—introduced to these
sauces cumin, cinnamon, coriander, cane sugar, black pepper, mustard,
onion, and garlic.
The immigrants and refugees—Europeans, Africans, and Asians—
also introduced another ingredient for flavoring and saving meats from
spoilage: vinegar. The “cooking” of meat, fish, and fowl in vinegar,
as well as sour orange and sweet lime juice, in the manner of ceviches
and escabeches go back to ancient times, and these culinary techniques
were perfected by the Persians, Arabs, and Berbers. They arrived in the
Americas along with swine, sheep, cattle, and goats that were so large
they could not be consumed in a single meal—hence the need for ad-
ditional preservation techniques so that the meats could be “put up.”
The vinegar transforms the very cells of flesh, fish, and fowl very much
like smoke does.
Of course, concentrated sugars and salts, through their osmotic pro-
cesses, may do the same. And so, sorghum cane syrup, maple syrup,
fruit syrup, and prickly pear cactus syrup were added to the sauces. In
some cases, so was alcohol in the form of mescal, whiskey, or various
and sundry other “moonshines.” The more illegal the fermented or dis-
tilled juice used to marinate or baste the meat, the more memorable the
meal.
When mixed in particular proportions, these ingredients—fire,
smoke, spices, vinegars, sweets, and meats—are so iconic that entire
cultural communities link their identities to them. The rituals of pre-
paring for a barbecue in each American culture are tightly scripted, with
gesture, vocal tone, and social behavior being learned at an early age and
viscerally maintained for decades—until death do the barbecue master
and his (or her) barbecue pit part. Most of the current masters have had
From Coa to Barbacoa to Barbecue ix
no book to guide them; their training has been as rigorous as that of
Zen masters, guided by elders who both encourage and critique every
move.
Indeed, barbecue is not merely the process or the paraphernalia
of grilling, or the meaty burnt ends that result, but a choreographed
dance, from woodlot to smokehouse to mixing bowl to platter to picnic
table, bar, roadside diner, or juke joint. Prospective barbecue aficiona-
dos are selected early by their fathers, mothers, aunts, or uncles and
nurtured for many years, until their predilection for a certain balance of
smoke, sour, sweet, and meat is finely honed. They may not be able to
verbally describe how to reach that perfect balance, but they definitely
know when it has been achieved or when some gargantuan effort seems
to have missed the mark. Satisfaction with barbecue is a lot like preg-
nancy—either you are or you aren’t.
Someone recently wondered aloud to me, “Why in the world would
anthropologists and historians, linguists and ethnozoologists, theolo-
gians and evolutionary biologists be consumed by the topic of barbe-
cue?” What other American food and its preparation are so strongly
linked to the distinctive identities of so many American cultures? We
are what and where we eat, but we are also how we prepare our most be-
loved foods. And who we prepare it with. And who we eat it with. And
who we leave out beyond the smokehouse, who longingly wishes they
were in there with us, no matter how stifling hot and claustrophobically
congested it may be. No other American food is imbued with such
symbolism, such smoke, such spirit.
Not far from my rustic office on Tumamoc Hill in downtown Tuc-
son, Arizona, there is a barbecue joint and African American history
museum that are joined at the hip, sharing the same rundown build-
ing in a neighborhood filled with indigents, derelicts, and others that
mainstream society consider “lowlifes.” And yet on any day of the week,
politicians, police officers, and college professors congregate there with
construction workers, surveyors, truck drivers, and street musicians.
The owner-chef—who was born in Texarkana, not far from the Arkan-
sas line—had an incredibly successful professional career before he re-
turned to his true love, barbecue. The folks who flock to his tables may
be from Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kansas City,
or Chicago, but when they come there for lunch, dinner, or to cure a
hangover, they know they are coming for communion, to reaffirm their