Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (5 page)

This is borne out more than a century later in 1698 by the good Father
Labat, in Nouveau Voyages aux Isles de l'Amerique. In this four-volume treatise
on the customs of the islands, Pere Labat, a Dominican friar and a fair bon vivant, doesn't use the term "barbecue" but rather the word "boucan" to refer to
the method of preparation. His description of the grill, though, mirrors that
of Oviedo, and he devotes an entire chapter to his discussion of a pig boucan.
(A turtle boucan is mentioned elsewhere in the work.) It is a sort of wooden
grill upon which the entire pig must be cooked. One cuts for this purpose four
forked pieces of the width of an arm and about four feet in length, and one
plants them in the ground so that they outline a rectangle about five feet by
three feet. Across the forked pieces are placed smaller branches that form the
grill. All is tightly bound with vines. On this bed or on this grill the pig is laid
on its back, stomach opened, spread out as much as possible, and held in this
position by sticks for fear of its closing up when it comes into contact with the
heat that will be placed on it. Labat goes on to say that the cavity of the pig was
filed with lemon juice, salt, and hot chiles. When cooked, the pig was served with a dipping sauce in two strengths, mild or hot, along with the condiments
that seemed to have consisted of a calabash of the sauce from the stomach of
the pig and another of lemon juice, salt, pepper, and chile, from which the
diners could prepare their own sauce. He concludes by stating that the wild
hog is tastier than the domesticated one and, in an apostrophe that will bring
joy to the hearts of 'cue lovers, reminds readers that a boucan necessitates
drinking often. As he puts it, "the rules demand it and the sauce invites it."

The boucan that Labat describes with such gusto was perfected by the
French sailors or boucaniers-the buccaneers. Indeed it seems that when not
raping and pillaging, these brethren of the coast spent their few sober hours
preparing wild pigs in this manner, which they would then sell to other seafarers. This method of slow-cooking over smoke became particularly popular
in Jamaica at a time when the English crown had Northern and Caribbean
colonies. While the Northern form went on to become a major form of public and private entertainment, the Caribbean version has gone on to become
synonymous with Jamaica.

When the abbot of Jamaica in 1611 wrote to the king of Spain about the
products of the island, he suggested that apart from the town of Santiago de la
Vega, there was nothing much except a large herd of swine raised in the
mountains which were considered common property and which yielded a
large quantity of lard and jerked pork. Bev Carvey, in The Maroon Story, suggests that the tradition of jerk in Jamaica is a direct continuation of the boucan of the French-speaking Caribbean, with the Jamaican Maroons, or escaped Africans who had been enslaved by the Spanish, learning the technique
from the buccaneers and the Carib Indians with whom it may have originated.
The Jamaican addition to Labat's recipe is allspice, the fragrant and flavorful
berry of a tree indigenous to the island.

Certainly by the time of Maria Nugent, wife of the Jamaican governor general from 18oi to 1805, jerk was being served to the gentry, and she records in
her diaries that on March of 1802 she visited the Moro, a part of Hordley Estate, and ate a dinner that was so copious that it bore inclusion in her notes.
She noted in her diaries, "The first course was entirely of fish, excepting jerked
hog, in the center, which is the way of dressing it by the Maroons." A note signals the connection between the buccaneers and the Maroons and even states
that the Maroons were referred to as "hog hunters."

The tradition that goes from barbacoa to boucan to jerk has been documented in detail by scholars and gourmands from Labat to Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston writes a lengthy and rapturous description of a Maroon pig feed
she attended in Accompong, the Maroon capital, in her anthropological study Tell My Horse. "Towards morning we ate our fill of jerked pork. It is more delicious than our barbecue. It is hard to imagine anything better than pork the
way the Maroons jerk it." The Maroon tradition of jerked pork is alive in the
pork pits of Boston Beach in Jamaica, where it is served with a fried dough
that is known as "festival." There, visitors are occasionally able to watch as pit
men prepare the traditional pork as well as more recent additions of chicken
and fish, slathering it with a marinade prepared of fresh thyme, lime juice, allspice berries, Scotch Bonnet chiles, and other ingredients including perhaps,
as one pit man confided in me, some of the blood of the slaughtered animal.
The meat is then slow-cooked over a smoky fire of allspice logs-the one
missing ingredient in all North American jerk-with the pit men watching,
poking, probing, and verifying until it is done to their satisfaction. Then it is
served up on brown paper with panache parallel to that of their North American brethren. One taste connects all of the history from the Carib to the Buccaneers to the Maroons, Labat and Lady Nugent, Oviedo and Hurston; the
only thing left to do is savor and smile.

One of the first things any staff member learns after coming to Mount Vernon
is that the American public's idea of George Washington is primarily taken either from marble statues they have seen in museums and statehouses or from
the portraits on the one-dollar bills and quarters they carry in their pockets.
Unfortunately, the impression they have taken away from these sources, as
well as the rather dry treatments of Washington in their history texts from
school, is of a rather stiff, formal individual who was never any younger than
about forty-five, was always busy doing great and important things, and never
had any fun. Barbecue and George Washington are probably never thought of
in the same breath-but maybe they should be.

George Washington was born in 1732 in the British colony of Virginia,
where a popular form of summer entertainment was attendance at a barbecue. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "barbecue" had
come into the English language by the mid-seventeenth century from the
Haitian word "barbacoa" and the Guianan Indian "babracot," which refer to a
framework of sticks set on posts. By the time of the Revolution, the principal
dish at a Virginia barbecue was roasted pig. The guests would ride or sail
down from their respective homes to a prearranged gathering place. While the
food cooked, fiddles and banjos would play and the guests would dance.'

A slightly earlier version of the eighteenth-century barbecue seems to have
been very much like what we would call a potluck supper. Plantation owner
Landon Carter mentioned in his diary in 1772 that he had just been to his third
barbecue that year and found it an expensive entertainment: "I confess I like
to meet my friends now and then, but certainly the old plan of every family
carrying its own dish was both cheaper and better." By the time Carter wrote
these words, the organization of the barbecues had changed; instead of bringing their own food, people paid money ahead of time, and those subscription
fees were used to pay for the provisions. One of Carter's principal complaints about this newfangled way of doing things was that "many on the credit of
their Su[bsc]ription brought eaters enough there, some 5 and 6 for one Subscription. So that they all eat at about the price of 15d a head, when others
[presumably he himself] paid at least 7/ for themselves alone which I think is
a very unequal disposal of money." Always somewhat touchy and thinskinned, two years later he groused that "barbecues and what not deprived
some of their senses."2

George Washington went to a number of these events in the years before
the Revolution, taking part in barbecues held, generally on a Saturday, in the
city of Alexandria as well as at the home of his brother-in-law, Colonel Fielding Lewis, in Fredericksburg and, closer to home, along the Potomac River at
Accotink and Johnson's Ferry.' He seems to have hosted at least one, and possibly two, in 1773, noting in his diary that he went "to a Barbicue of my own
giving at Accatinck." In May of the following year, his financial papers record
that he had either sold or donated forty-five weight of flour in August of 1773
"for Barbecue."'

The barbecues were very social events. For instance, Washington recorded
that at a barbecue held at the home of his sister and brother-in-law on August
4, 1770, there were "a great deal of other Company" in attendance and that he
had "stayd there till Sunset." Among the company that day were his wife,
Martha, her daughter, Patsy, then fourteen years old, and probably the family
of his younger brother Charles.' Three years later, his stepchildren's former
tutor and other unnamed members of the family seem to have accompanied
him to a barbecue at Alexandria. In the spring of 1774, Washington took his almost twenty-year-old stepson, John Parke Custis, that young man's wife and
sister-in-law, and a friend, James Tilghman Jr., with him to one barbecue.' In
that year, as in others, he brought overnight guests home with him afterward;
sometimes Washington himself was an overnight guest at the home of someone else.'

More may have been going on in the way of entertainment at these barbecues than just music, dancing, and socializing. Washington mentioned in
his diary that there was a boat race at the barbecue at Johnson's Ferry in 1774.
In all probability, a lively round of betting accompanied that race, possibly
helped along by the forty-eight bottles of claret he supplied for the occasion.'
George Washington is also known to have taken part in several types of outdoor games during his life, any one of which may have filled the time of the
gentlemen waiting for the roasted pig to finish cooking. During Christmas of
1773, for example, he came outside to find a group of young men comprising
his stepson and some visiting friends playing a game called "pitching the bar," which was probably similar to today's game of horseshoes. One of the men
there that day later recorded that Washington

requested to be shown the pegs that marked the bounds of our efforts;
then, smiling, and without putting off his coat, held out his hand for the
missile. No sooner ... did the heavy iron bar feel the grasp of his mighty
hand than it lost the power of gravitation, and whizzed through the air,
striking the ground far, very far, beyond our utmost limits. We were indeed
amazed, as we stood around, all stripped to the buff, with shirt sleeves
rolled up, and having thought ourselves very clever fellows, while the
colonel, on retiring, pleasantly observed, "When you beat my pitch, young
gentlemen, I'll try again."'

A French officer who knew Washington during the Revolution described the
American commander playing "ball for whole hours with his aides-decamp.""' Although he did not specify what type of game the men were playing,
some of the possibilities include early forms of cricket, with variations known
as trap ball or stool ball; "bandy," very similar to hockey; and a game called
"fives," which is a version of the modern game of handball."

Two other outdoor games are known to have been played at Mount Vernon
and may or may not have been played by people at barbecues. The first, lawn
bowling, can be documented through several means. After the Revolution,
George Washington transformed the western approach to his home from a
straight road through an avenue of trees to a serpentine drive through groves
of trees on the edge of a large flat lawn, which provided a spectacular view
both of the house and from the house toward the west. That lawn was known
as a "bowling green." Among the objects housed in the nearby Circle Storehouse, an outbuilding on the edge of that bowling green, were two balls made
of lignum vitae, a very heavy and hard tropical wood.''- A second game, called
"prisoner's base," was described by a visitor to Mount Vernon in 1798 who
watched a group of about thirty slaves, divided into two teams, playing it one
Sunday, their weekly day off from work. Prisoner's base was a well-known English game, popular in Virginia, which was rather like a team version of the
modern game called "tag."'