Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (10 page)

Perhaps the most interesting, colorful, and traditional of the barbecues I
attended was the seventieth annual feast near Cartersville, Georgia, of the Euharlee Farmers Club, said by the United States Department of Agriculture to
be the oldest farmers' club in continuous operation in the world. It hasn't
missed a monthly meeting since its organization in 1883 in the Euharlee community. Its constitution requires its member to conduct agricultural experiments on their separate farms and report findings back to the membershipan early form of agricultural extension work. The club has always had twelve
regular members, all leading farmers of Bartow County, and now it has three
honorary members-the president of a Cartersville bank and editors Milton
Fleetwood, of the Daily Tribune-News, and W. Ryan Frier, of the Bartow Herald. Members remain with the club until death. Then the other members
spend several months selecting a worthy successor. The Euharlee club has
been identified with some of Georgia's most progressive agricultural strides,
including formation of the university's College of Agriculture, improvement
of cotton culture, diversification of crops, and raising of livestock. But to most
people in that part of the state, it is probably best known for its annual barbecue. This is an invitation affair for about 300 guests, including the leading
farmers and businessmen, the best families and prettiest girls in that part of
Georgia.

Their last barbecue was held at Malbone, the antebellum home of member
Robert M. Stiles. His family has owned this land since his great-grandfather,
who later became U.S. charge d'affaires in Austria, was awarded the property
in 1835 by the government for negotiating the treaty whereby that area of
Georgia was bought from the Cherokee Indians. This estate and several like it
lie along the course of the Etowah River-Cherokee for "muddy water"-in a
three-mile-wide valley of fertile bottom lands and timbered areas of black
walnut, oak, poplar, cedar pine, and hickory. In the distance can be seen the
smoky outlines of the Blue Ridge.

The main house on the Stiles place has twenty-inch walls of brick made
and laid by slave labor. There are twelve-foot ceilings, oval-topped windows,
and heavy old mahogany furniture, including an old-fashioned planter's desk,
used to keep plantation accounts back before the War between the States.
There are marble-topped bureaus, immense old wardrobe chests, porcelain
doorknobs, and ornate, heavy furniture brought from Austria by the first
owner. A banquet table capable of seating about forty fills the old dining
room. The library is notable for an old Franklin stove and for the fact that
during the campaign for Atlanta a company of Sherman's cavalry used it for a
stable. They put horse troughs in the twenty-inch-wide sills of the tall windows, and used the family's bound set of Congressional Records for flagstones
to make a path to the well. The Stiles family was not present for this performance, having refugeed to Terrell County in covered wagons. They had buried
their glass and silver in a pit near the river. It was never found by the Yankees,
and it now adorns the old dining room.

Most barbecues are noon affairs, but the Euharlee party started at six P.M.
At the first pinking of dawn on the big day, barbecue chef Robert Auchmutey,
a Cartersville fireman, and his chief assistant, "Uncle John" Pendergrass, an
elderly Negro, were on hand to get things started. A barbecue pit eight feet
long, four feet wide, and two feet deep had been dug under the shed of the old
log barn. On the walls nearby hung old-fashioned farm implements-harvesting cradles, hoes, plows, ancient work-mule harness, and even an old
wooden yoke for oxen. In such an atmosphere one almost expected to see
Uncle Remus, Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and "de yudder critters" emerge through
the early-morning haze out of a blackjack thicket across the cotton patch.

Three pork carcasses and two whole lambs had been cooling through the
night in the springhouse. Uncle John and several Negro helpers brought them
to the pit and began sticking two iron rods through the shoulders and hindquarters of each animal. A "stretcher stick" of hickory was inserted horizontally to spread the sides and keep the carcass open. Supported by their rods on
either side of the pit, the carcasses were placed inside down, where they would
cook for eight hours before being turned to brown evenly and to finish dripping over the slowly cooling coals.

Meanwhile chef Auchmutey was seeing about his fire. Stacked nearby were
several cords of oak and hickory limbs, four feet long, five inches in diameter,
and still containing some sap. Auchmutey mixed some pine for kindling in
with the hardwood. He soon had a leaping fire going. It would be fed all day
so a supply of coals would always be available. Roscoe Tatum, the local Brunswick stew specialist, who had his iron pots in place by now, put logs under them from the big fire, which by this time had also produced coals. The acid
smoke began stealing up through the pale meat. It caught up the odor of
roasting and drifted down the valley, informing everybody who could smell
that a barbecue was now on the fire.

Another school of barbecue fire makers, headed by J. B. Mask, decries the
use of coals from a supplementary fire. Mask advocates a pit three feet deep,
floored with hickory logs twelve inches in diameter. The top of the pit is filled
with pine, which is burned for five hours before the barbecuing starts. By then
the pine is gone, but the hickory logs, their aromatic bark still intact, are glowing with heat that will hold all during the hours the cooking requires.

As the day wore on, men began to gather by twos and threes at the Stiles
barn. Some were Euharlee club members come to help set up tables and do
other chores. Others came just to enjoy watching the meat and stew cook. "A
man ought to be on the grounds three hours ahead of time to really enjoy eating barbecue," one spectator observed. "As he absorbs the aromas of the cooking meat and the wood smoke and watches the other preparations-the turning of the meat, the stirrings of the stew, and the laying out of bread and
pickles under the trees-his system responds. His gastric juices flow, and his
digestion is so stimulated that he can eat 'cue and stew all day, and it won't
hurt him a bit."

As often happens, two or three barbecue cooks not employed on this job
paid courtesy calls at the Euharlee club pit during the afternoon. They entertained with some stories of famous barbecues of the past. Pat Wofford Jr., of
Atco, Georgia, was asked about the chicken he was unable to cook for
Brunswick stew the time he superintended a big barbecue near Cartersville.

"That was the world's toughest chicken," Wofford laughed. "We had killed
two hundred chickens, thinking they were all fat hens. But one turned red and
wouldn't cook. We cooked this bird three hours under fifteen pounds of steam
in a pressure cooker. Then we threw it in the pot and boiled it four hours, and
it would still bounce like a rubber ball when dropped on a table. The Negro
help named it `Ole Abe.' They tied a string to his leg and hung him on a pole
like a flag for everybody to see. I really think it was an old rooster whose crowing had been disturbing that end of the county for years. Looking back, nobody could remember seeing or hearing him since a couple of days before our
barbecue."

Another barbecue historian present in the Stiles barn mentioned that the
man who probably did most to put Georgia barbecue on the map was the late
Sheriff John West Callaway, of Wilkes County. He had the barbecue concession at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. At his stand, purposely made rural and crude, with Negroes crooning over the pits in the background,
Sheriff Callaway fed as many as 500 people at a sitting, including the president
of the United States and other visiting dignitaries. When the exposition
ended, Sheriff Callaway was much in demand to superintend barbecues all
over the nation.

His stand was the forerunner of a number of famous barbecue places, such
as the stand at Rocky Mount, North Carolina, of Cap'n Bob Melton. He is an
eighty-two-year-old, 250-pound, old-time barbecuer. His restaurant serves
nothing but barbecue, Brunswick stew, coleslaw, boiled potatoes, and corn
bread, and it is known as far away as California. Or there is Sprayberry's place,
at Newnan, Georgia, famous as an eating oasis for travelers heading southwest
from Atlanta. Posse's, in Athens, Georgia, is held in such high regard by the
barbecue-eating University of Georgia football players that they sometimes
hold their annual banquet there. In Nashville, Tennessee, Charlie Nickens,
who started out twenty years ago in a shack in the slums, has built a big restaurant and probably a fortune from his barbecue, which is cooked over greenhickory blocks.

Perhaps the most interesting aftermath of Sheriff Callaway's barbecuing
triumphs, however, is the tradition he started for sheriffs of Georgia counties.
They all seem to become barbecue cooks. Sheriff A. B. (Bud) Foster, of Fulton
County, is known as the leading barbecuer in the Atlanta area at present.

The tale-spinning around the pit in Stiles's barn came to an end about
four-thirty, when the meat was taken off the fire and a crew began "cutting
up" for serving. An hour before eating time, most of the guests began arriving. The meat was brought to the serving tables in big washtubs. Pork and
lamb were kept separate, and each guest was asked which he preferred or how
much of each. Each cardboard plate was heaped high with meat. The Brunswick stew was poured into a smaller division, leaving some room in the middle of the plate for bread and pickles. Several big tubs of ice-cold lemonade,
stirred by young Negro women in white aprons, stood handy, so that guests
might cool off their throats after parching them with hot barbecue.

The eating began after a prayer by a local minister and a few words of welcome from host Stiles. Little time was wasted on talk. In less than an hour
everybody had finished. Most of the guests sat around to digest their food, to
enjoy watching the coming of night, and to tell stories about the Civil War -
still a favorite topic of the area.

Meanwhile, the fifteen members of the club were following their custom of
dividing equally among themselves the leftover barbecue. In this case it was
only half a pig. Also according to tradition, the ten gallons of leftover Bruns wick stew were sold to guests at a dollar a quart. There were more people eager
to buy than there was stew to sell.

As the last guests were leaving, a big full moon had come up, tinting with
silver the tops of the cotton stalks that come right up to the edge of the big old
yard. Out across the valley a mist was rising from the river, and from the thickets whippoorwills had begun to call. A day like that makes it easier to understand why Georgians regard their barbecues with such reverence.

Cowgirls are taking turns climbing onto the stage and turning around to display their denim-clad derrieres to the audience and judges. It's the "Miss Blue
Jeans Contest" at the Houston Rodeo Barbecue Cook-off. When a frisky female undulates provocatively, the men wave their cowboy hats in the air and
roar in approval. The girls are all white. And so are the hundred or so males
standing in front of the stage. The guy next to me is wearing Confederate flag
Mardi Gras beads.

I make my way through the grounds checking out the contestants. In front
of one booth, there's a huge wooden sign with the team's name, "Confederated Cookers," carved across the stars and bars. Right around the corner, I
stumble upon four members of the Skinner Lane Gang, who are busy taking
barbecue off the smoker. I stand there staring at them, awestruck. They are the
first all-black barbecue cook-off team I've ever seen.

And this isn't the Skinner Lane Gang's first big rodeo. They won the overall championship trophy here in 1994. And they hope to win it again this time,
they tell me. First, I sample a healthy pile of their brisket and a few excellent
ribs. Then I start asking questions.