The Man Who Ate Everything (40 page)

1. If you think the word “barbecue” comes from the French
barbe a queue,
“from beard to tail,” then you are one of those silly People whom
The Oxford English Dictionary
accuses of an “absurd
conjecture.” Coming from the
OED,
these are fighting words “Barbecue” derives from the Spanish
barbacoa
or the French
babracot,
both adaptations from the Taino and Arawak languages of Haiti and Guiana. The Indian words referred to a framework of sticks set upon posts either for sleeping or for supporting meat above a fire. But though the word may have been invented by the Indians of the Caribbean, the technique was probably not: Waverly Root considers it “a method of cooking so natural under primitive circumstances that it would practically invent itself everywhere, especially in societies accustomed to living outdoors most of the time.”

2. Real barbecue has absolutely nothing to do with grilling. Did the Taino Indians grill or did they barbecue? Was the technique of real barbecue known to the North American Indians, or was it developed by Mississippi slaves? The answers are lost in the mists and drizzles of time itself. Backyard grilling (which nearly everybody outside the South calls barbecuing) is quick cooking over intense dry heat (often 500 degrees or higher) on an open brazier. Real barbecue is slow, enclosed cooking at gentle temperatures in moist hardwood smoke. A whole hog typically takes twenty-four hours in a barbecue pit or cooker, a shoulder takes twelve to fourteen hours, and ribs average five or six. Most people grill their meat to rare and juicy. Real barbecue is always well done. Any sign of blood, any trace of unrendered fat, is a serious flaw. All the tough connective tissue must be dissolved. The meat must pull cleanly from the bone and separate in long, moist shreds. Real barbecue never sizzles; it just lies there quietly, slowly and imperceptibly reaching what Boyd Atkinson described to me as a higher plane of existence. Boyd himself cooks an extremely good rib.

The cooker (also known as the pit, the smoker, the rig, or even the grill) must be covered, and the atmosphere inside must be moist. The temperature should range between 170 and 250 degrees. (Some experts advocate even lower temperatures. “But if flies begin to land on your meat,” they warn, “you know it’s not
hot enough.”) Sometimes wood is the only fuel; sometimes chunks of hardwood are burned with charcoal or even (but never in Memphis) gas. Especially when large cuts of meat are cooked, the heat is usually indirect, generated by coals and hardwood chunks burned in a separate chamber called a firebox; the heat and the smoke are then piped into the main compartment. A water pan can be used to humidify the air inside the cooker and catch the drippings, but the meat inside a well-sealed cooker will generate its own moisture.

No reputable barbecue cook parboils or presteams his meat, which reliably turns the meat gray and leaches out its sweet pork taste. Sauces can be used for marinating the raw meat, for injecting flavor deep into a hundred-pound hog, for basting, as a finishing sauce when the product is nearly done, and as a table or serving sauce. Some championship barbecue cooks use several sauces, some none at all, instead sprinkling on a layer of dry rub only at the very beginning. The miracle of barbecue is that this ancient process flavors and tenderizes the meat all by itself. The greatest barbecue cooks use sauce in ascetic moderation.

3 and 4. Real barbecue is one of the most delicious foods ever devised by humankind. It takes on various forms and shapes. In Memphis, a pork-barbecue sandwich consists of pulled shoulder (or pulled and then chopped) on a hamburger bun (or a length of what in this country is called Italian bread, a squat baguette with tapered ends, all flecked with sesame seeds), doused with a tomato-based sauce that is tangy, mildly sweet, and barely piquant—and topped with a scoop of coleslaw and the upper half of the bun. In Memphis, coleslaw is raised to a level that, while never scaling the heights to which pork soars in this city, is in my experience without peer or equal. I cannot say the same for barbecued spaghetti, another Memphian speciality.

In St. Louis, potato salad replaces coleslaw and is served on the side. In Kentucky, pork becomes mutton. In some parts of the South, fluffy commercial white bread, often toasted, stands in for the bun or Italian bread. In North Carolina, the mild tanginess of
Tennessee spice rub becomes the corrosive power of vinegar, and in South Carolina the tomato-sauce base is replaced by unadulterated mustard. Drive one hundred miles into Missouri, and whole pork shoulder yields to the smaller butt portion. In some places along the Southeast coast, fresh ham replaces shoulder, and if you travel farther west than central Arkansas, pork gives way to beef and poultry. But in Memphis and its culinary sphere of influence in northern Mississippi, western Tennessee, and eastern Arkansas, pork is king.

This much I knew. The daylong seminar in the dark theater on Beale Street concentrated more on the practicalities of judging and the fine points of pork. Our excellent teachers were Mike Cannon (judging chairman of the Memphis in May World Championship) and Steve Gray (chairman of the Memphis in May Sanctioned Contest Network, a circuit of pork-barbecue cooking contests run according to Memphis rules). We started by taking a test of fifty multiple-choice questions. May whole hog be cooked in two or more pieces? What is the red layer below the surface of a piece of barbecue? What cut of meat makes an acceptable shoulder? What is the most difficult aspect of cooking a whole hog? Can natural gas or propane be used as fuel in the Memphis World Championship?

After we had all failed the test, which was our teachers’ intention, we sat in the old New Daisy for the rest of the day, listening to their lectures, watching a film from a meatpacking plant, running through the simulated judging of a real live pork shoulder. Only a small percentage of Memphis judges subject themselves to this seminar, but I don’t see how anybody can hope to be a fair, consistent judge without it. Finally we took the test again—exactly the same questions but in a different order. All but two of us passed. I got a 96.

By Friday morning my wife had arrived, which meant an obligatory visit to Graceland for the complete Platinum Tour. This included the mansion, the Elvis Presley Automobile Museum, the Sincerely Elvis Museum, and Elvis’s two airplanes. We had
arrived early to leave time for a late-morning barbecue brunch at Cozy Corner in preparation for a full barbecue lunch at Payne’s.
b
ut the Platinum Tour was so excruciatingly comprehensive that we missed brunch and were forced to postpone lunch until three in the afternoon. Two days of anger and depression lifted when I read in the Memphis papers that at the very moment my wife was dragging me around Graceland, the Shelby County Commission had filed suit to reopen the investigation into Elvis’s death. The guides at Graceland never mentioned the King’s fondness for controlled substances. Or that his favorite snack was fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. They did not mention barbecue even once.

Late Friday afternoon my wife and I drove over to Tom Lee Park in downtown Memphis, where all 241 barbecue teams had already set up for the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. The contestants stretched a half mile along the east bank of the Mississippi, and the air was thick with perfumed smoke, pork and hickory and applewood. On its assigned plot of ground, each team had erected its temporary quarters, a tent or a bungalow, a cabin or a cottage, a shed or a shack, a shanty or lean-to, a trailer or a pavilion, a kiosk or an entire prefabricated suburban house. Some structures hugged the earth; others soared three stories toward the skies. Some were rough and homely, others magnificent, with decks and balconies overlooking the great river.

Each team had brought at least one barbecue cooker. Most were painted black, but some came in red, and one in pink; most teams had two or three cookers, some converted from five-hundred-gallon propane tanks, others in the shape of outsized coffins, still others bulbous affairs with tall smokestacks. One cooker was a converted 1975 Datsun with a firebox in the engine compartment and racks of meat in the driver’s seat. The U.S. Porkmasters, sponsored by the Postal Service, had made its smoker from a small mail-delivery van. The Paddlewheel Porkers had the largest display of all, a forty-three-foot replica of a river-boat steamer complete with decks and galleys and a revolving paddlewheel. Each team had a name—the Adribbers and the Big Dawg Hawg, the Crispy Critters and the Great Boars of Fire, the Not Ready for Swine Time and the Party Pigs, the Super Swine Sizzlers and Hazardous Waist. (Swine Lake Ballet was not in attendance this year.) Of the 241 teams, I was told by an insider, 100 are serious and expert competitors who enter ten to twenty contests a year, traveling around the South with their five-thousand-dollar cookers and their twenty-thousand-dollar eight-wheel trailers. “This is our country club,” one team captain explained to me, “this is our bass boat.” (A bass boat is apparently an extremely fancy and expensive speedboat that rides high on the water, carries sonar and other costly toys, and is used in fishing contests in the Mississippi Delta.) Barbecue competitions are largely a white man’s game; no more than twenty of the Memphis teams were dominated by blacks or women. Still, the very first Memphis world championship sixteen years ago was won by a black woman named Bessie Louise Cathey.

Each of the serious teams had a long table that sagged under the weight of its twenty or thirty proudest trophies. The most breathtaking example had three tall and lustrous blue metal columns supporting a black triangular platform, on which were three pink metal pigs each standing on a golden rectangle. In the center, between the three pigs, stood a loving cup surmounted by a tall golden figure in the form of the
Victory of Samothrace,
this one not headless and chipped like the version at the Louvre, but fully formed and with a slimmer, more modern body, her wings shimmering with speckles of blue and pink, her saucy breasts straining through gauzy drapery, one arm raised to hold a torch aloft, its flame a rosy radiance.

Saturday was judgment day. The sky was blue, the air was filled with smoke and tension, and the ground was getting dusty. When it rains on a Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, Tom Lee Park turns into a hog wallow. But today the event went off with benign military precision. Many
among both the public and the contestants wore pink rubber snouts; your present correspondent did not. There was also a sprinkling of Elvis impersonators. Admission for the public was four dollars; the crowd was later estimated at eighty thousand.

Teams had driven in from seventeen states to vie for twenty-
f
ive thousand dollars in prize money, most of it divided among the winners and runners-up in the three categories of pork barbecue—Ribs, Shoulder, and Whole Hog. Some judges visit each team’s site, and some participate in a blind judging, in which each team’s product is carried in a numbered Styrofoam box to the judges’ tent, where four judges evaluate (in order of importance) the entry’s flavor, tenderness, and appearance or doneness—on a scale from 5 to 10. In the on-site judging, three judges make independent trips to each team’s location and assign points for the quality of the food, the cleanliness of the team’s area, and what is called the team’s presentation, a lengthy speech explaining the history of the team; its theories of barbecue cookery; the source of its meat, fuel, and machinery; the secrets of its sauce. Truth is not an indispensable element. As long as a speech is consistent and intelligent, a team is allowed to say, southern style, anything that may impress you. “It’s like sitting around an old pit late at night, swapping stories,” one of our teachers had explained. I have never sat around an old pit late at night, but I can imagine what he had in mind. Appearance and presentation are given minor weight. The meat comes first, and flavor is its most important attribute. Garnishes do not count, not even Memphis slaw.

The on-site judges are repeatedly warned not to get drunk before visiting all three assigned teams, but I saw no judge who was anything less than stone-cold sober. Each on-site judge is given an apron (a different color for each category of pork) and an assistant to guide him or her around the crowded park to three teams within a precise sixty minutes. Then the scoring cards are tallied by Price Waterhouse and its computers. The three highest scorers in each of the three categories become finalists. All nine finalists are visited late in the day by a group of four special judges
who decide the winner in each category and the grand champion of the entire contest.

Every cut of pork presents its own particular challenge to the barbecue chef. The rib section is the most delicate of a pig’s assets, we had been told in the judging seminar at the New Daisy Theater. It is the hardest part to cook, both because of its delicacy and because “anybody that’s ever owned a Weber thinks he can cook a real dynamic rib.” Only two rib cuts are eligible, the fatty, dense spareribs from the hog’s belly and the lighter loin ribs from the hog’s back, called baby back ribs when they come from a young hog. Ineligible are country-style ribs, which have a piece of the tenderloin still attached, almost like a pork chop. A slab of loin or baby back ribs, which have narrow bones separated by ethereal flesh, weighs less than two pounds; taken from high on the hog, they are favored in barbecue competitions. When a four- or five-pound slab of spareribs is entered, it is usually first trimmed down to a St. Louis cut—all visible fat removed along with the gristly “brisket flap” that runs obliquely across the back of the slab.