Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (9 page)

The average attendance at public barbecues is probably around 300. They
are usually held in a grove where the air is still perfumed by the sweet, burned
aroma of roasted meat and the penetrating, acid odor of hardwood smoke. A thin spiral may still be curling up from the pits where whole carcasses of pigs,
now and then a goat or lamb, but almost never beef, were cooked throughout
the preceding night. Guests feed from long, shelflike wooden tables, built
from tree to tree and piled high with baker's bread, vats of pickles, tubs of
lemonade, or maybe iced beer. Sometimes there are jugs of corn likker stashed
out in the woods. It all makes up a powerful fare that would dismay many
Northerners even on a winter day. But Southerners, from field hands to debutantes, can eat frightening amounts of 'cue and stew on the hottest day of
summer without visible damage to their systems.

Instances are cited of ulcer victims who could digest barbecue better than
other solid foods. And there was the time down at Brooks, Georgia, when Old
Man Martin Turner became so feeble that he could eat nothing but Brunswick
stew. He subsisted for several years on that alone.

On the other hand, there was a tragic outcome several years ago down in
southern Georgia at the big annual barbecue given on his birthday by Frank
Oliff Miller, mayor of Pembroke, Georgia - population, 1,282-and publisher
of the Pembroke Journal ("Liked by Many, Cussed by Some, Read by All"). The
most enthusiastic guest on this particular day was old Judge W. F. Slater, a
renowned eater from over near Eldorado. His wife had died a year before, and
the judge had been batching. He hadn't had a square meal in several weeks,
being a poor cook. He fell to at Miller's barbecue with such abandon that he
took sick that night and died.

Another unfortunate, but less tragic, result of eating barbecue befell one of
the "Tree-Climbing Haggards of Danielsville" at one of the late Eugene Talmadge's speakings. Among Talmadge's entourage of bucolic camp followers
and stooges were Old Man Haggard and his eight sons. They dressed like "Ole
Gene," in suits of rusty black with wide-brimmed hats and red galluses, and
they would climb to the tops of nine tall pines in each speaking grove to shout
down encouragement and cues to Talmadge, according to a carefully rehearsed
script.

"Tell us about the schoolteachers, Gene!" a Haggard would cry from a
treetop.

"Oh, yes," Talmadge would respond. "I'm glad you brought that up,
brother." He would then carry on with remarks about pedagogues until a
Haggard in another tree would croak, "Tell us about the old folks, Gene!"his cue for remarks about pensions.

One time when Talmadge was speaking at Quitman, about three o'clock on
a hot afternoon, one of the Haggards, having eaten heavily of barbecue earlier,
fell asleep on his perch. When the time came for his cue, he fell out of the trees, causing much amusement among the onlookers. Talmadge forgot what
he'd been discussing. It should be added that the Haggards had not eaten
the barbecue at Quitman, but at a town up the road where Gene had given a
noon speech. On political occasions the barbecue is never served before the
speaking.

It is generally agreed down South that barbecue will not hurt anybody
when properly cooked, and that the secret of proper barbecuing is patience
and more patience. Good barbecue cannot be hurried; it should be allowed to
cook and drip for twelve hours over an outdoor fire of hardwood coals. Then
it is done throughout. The excess grease has dripped off into the fire after permeating the meat during the cooking. Every true barbecue chef-and every
Georgia community has at least one locally celebrated amateur-agrees that
no flame should be tolerated in the pit. Some say only half-burned-out coals,
whitening with ash, produce heat delicate enough for fine barbecue. Most
cooks also agree that pork is the ideal meat. As Uncle Harry Powers, celebrated cook around Rocky Mount, North Carolina, explains it, "Even after he
gutted, a pig is so full of blood and water and fat dat it keep him nice and
moist through all them hours it take to cook him. You take and barbecue a
yearlin' and if you ain't keerful, he turn as black as a hat. No matter what you
do, he goin' to be tough."

Some authorities say that the word "barbecue" derives from French, a
barbe de queue, meaning "from beard to tail," and refers to cooking whole carcasses. Others claim that it comes from a Haitian word, barbacoa, meaning a
wooden framework, referring to spitting the meat on poles over the pit. Still
others say it derives from "buccaning," the process by which the buccaneers of
Santo Domingo and St. Christopher cured by smoking on a wooden frame the
meat of wild cattle and hogs. They sold the food as provisions to shipmasters
of the Spanish Main three centuries ago. It is thought that Negro slaves picked
up the barbecuing art in the Caribbean; they brought it to the Southern states.
Almost all barbecuing was done by Negroes in past years, and much of it still
is. The traditional time for a Georgia barbecue is when crops are "laid by,"
when cultivation is finished and the farmer has only to wait for the harvest.
Since early days it has been customary for plantation owners to entertain their
retainers and neighbors each year at gigantic, almost pagan, festivals of meat
eating.

Of course, barbecues have not been confined to Georgia. They have flourished from Virginia to Texas for 200 years. Most authorities, however, seem to
feel that Georgia is the home of barbecue. "Get ten people together," one student of the custom has written, "and where the Irish would start a fight, Geor gians will start a barbecue." A food authority of the last century declared,
"The barbecue is to Georgia what the clambake is to Rhode Island, what a
roast-beef dinner is to the English, what canvasback duck is to a Marylander,
and what a Saturday night pork-and-beans supper is to a Bostonian."

The first known Northern barbecue was held in connection with the presidential election of 1876. On the morning of October eighteenth, two oxen
were paraded through New York to Myrtle Park, Brooklyn where they were
slaughtered. By eleven o'clock that night one ox, weighing 983 pounds, was
roasting on a spit beside an outdoor coke fire. It was declared done at eight the
next morning and removed to cook, while the second ox was put on the spit.
By noon several thousand curious persons were on hand. The feast began at
one o'clock, after 800 loaves of bread had been made into barbecued-ox sandwiches. The crowd was so enthusiastic about the meat that in twenty minutes
only the skeleton was left. The second ox was served up that night. The two
animals didn't begin to feed the 50,000 persons the affair attracted.

Nowadays barbecuing, or something so called, has spread throughout the
land. These days it isn't politics so much as the popularity of backyard cookery that promotes barbecuing. Countless men in chef's caps and fancy aprons,
with their eyes reddened by smoke, regale their guests with burnt and raw
flesh. Many Georgia epicures insist that this is an insult to the honorable name
of barbecue. They assert that, statements in various magazines to the contrary,
you cannot barbecue hamburgers, roasting ears, potatoes, onions, tomatoes,
wieners, or salami, and it is a shame and disgrace to mention barbecuing in
connection with such foolishness.

These purists are even more dismayed by the thousands of "Bar-B-Q"
stands that line highways from Maine to California. There exists in Atlanta an
organization sworn to boycott any roadside stand displaying the hated "BarB-Q" sign. Members say such a sign is usually a tip-off that the "barbecue"
will be an underdone pork roast served with a sauce so hot and bitter that the
victim can't tell what he is eating. One member swears he once saw a sign
made of painted pictures of an iron bar, a honeybee, and a billiard cue. He can
scarcely control his emotions when describing this ghastly sight.

Southerners cannot agree even among themselves about proper barbecuing practices. In one Georgia county they claim that oak is the best barbecuing wood. Another county will advocate hickory. Pecan wood is favored
somewhere else. In one community the custom is to baste the meat all
through the cooking with a sauce made of vinegar, butter, and pepper. In the
next community they baste with salt water and do not sauce and salt the meat until it is ready to serve. Georgians, who like their barbecue served in thick,
juicy slices, regard as dreadful the North Carolina method of cooking the
meat very dry, then mincing it into small, thin particles.

Southerners are even more horrified by certain barbecuing practices of the
North, East, and West. Dr. J. G. Woodroof, of the Georgia Agricultural Experiment Station, near Griffin, was shocked to learn that in Michigan barbecue
consists of pressure-cooking the meat, "then letting a little smoke filter
through it at the last minute." He was even more appalled to find that in California a barbecue is cooked over coke. One Georgia epicure swears he found
a Boston cookbook recipe calling for barbecuing chicken by dredging it in
flour, then cooking it in a closed pan in an oven.

Many Georgians feel that Brunswick stew is even more abused and less understood than barbecue. In 1946, during observance of Georgia Week at the
national capital, one Washington restaurant billed on its menu something
called "Brunswick stew." Every Georgian who sampled it was outraged, especially members of Congress from Georgia, who, as a class, are more vocal and
excitable than other people. "I wish you could have seen the mess they were
serving under that sacred name," Rep. Henderson Lanham, of Rome, told the
press. "It might as well have been creamed chicken, with a few pieces of liver
and lamb and a scattering of green peas."

Both Georgia and Virginia claim to have originated Brunswick stew. Some
Georgians say it was first made from wild game and vegetables in the mid-
1730s, when followers of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism,
were converting the Indians near the present site of Brunswick, Georgia. In
1946, the Atlanta Journal reported another theory: that the stew was first made
on July 2, 1898, by a mess sergeant for a company of soldiers on guard duty at
Gascoigne Bluff, St. Simons Island, which is also near Brunswick. The sergeant was said to have had no particular recipe, using only a hodgepodge of
meats and vegetables he had at hand. It turned out to be so luscious that Negroes of St. Simons preserved his formula.

There seem, however, to be more grounds to believe that the first stew, so
called, came from Brunswick County, Virginia. It is said to have been developed around 1828 by "Uncle Jimmy" Matthews, retainer of Dr. Creed Haskins,
of Mount Donum, on the banks of the Nottoway River. Uncle Jimmy, an inveterate squirrel hunter and a celebrated cook, made squirrel stews for picnics
and public gatherings in that area all his life. When he died, Dr. Aaron Haskins
became the area's stew chef, to be succeeded with the passing years by Jack
Stith, a relative, and finally by Colonel Thomas Mason, of Redoak, Virginia. Uncle Jimmy never called his dish anything but squirrel stew, but when residents of the area moved elsewhere and made something like it, their stews
were called "Brunswick" for identification purposes.

Uncle Jimmy's stew contained no vegetables except onions. The Georgia
version calls for liberal use of chicken, hog head and other meats, tomatoes,
corn, and other vegetables. Thus, it is quite possible that the Brunswick stew
of Virginia and that of Georgia are completely different items and always have
been. In any case, the old recipe for a small mess of Uncle Jimmy Matthews's
stew follows:

Take six squirrels, put them in cold water, parboil one hour. Take up and
scrape free of all scum. Then put them in a pot of boiling water with a
pound of good bacon cut into inch cubes. Add one quart of sliced onions,
salt, red and black pepper. Cook slowly, stirring well until the meat is done
and will come to pieces (about four hours). Then add a little butter and
stale bread crumbs until the stew is no longer watery, but not too thick.

By contrast, a typical Georgia Brunswick stew recipe for feeding 3,500 people is 850 pounds of the meat of fat hens, boiled until it falls from the bones,
sixty gallons of chicken broth, 200 pounds of chopped lean beef, 200 pounds
of chopped pork, sixty gallons of tomatoes, twenty-five gallons of creamed
corn, eight gallons of vinegar, fifty pounds of butter, forty bottles of ketchup,
forty bottles of Worcestershire sauce, twenty bottles of A-i sauce, ten bottles of
chili sauce, ten boxes of paprika, twenty boxes of black pepper, ten boxes of
red pepper, juice from twenty dozen lemons, and five boxes of salt. This particular stew was cooked from eight o'clock on a Friday night until eight Saturday morning in fifty-gallon iron pots. Legend says these pots were stolen by
natives of North-Central Georgia from Sherman's army, which had used them
as soup kettles. There are still a dozen or more in Bartow County, Georgia.

At crop laying-by time last summer I went to Georgia to attend several
barbecues. One was the sixtieth-birthday shindig of mayor and editor Frank
Miller of Pembroke. His birthday celebrations over the past sixteen years have
developed into one of the best-known annual eating events of South Georgia.
A few days later in Atlanta I attended a barbecue given by Mayor William B.
Hartsfield for some friends, and a couple of days after that, one given by Fulton County commissioners to dedicate a convict camp. Next I rode with Governor Herman Talmadge to a barbecue served in an old barn near Elberton
during the dedication of a state park.

One Sunday I attended at Brooks, Georgia, a barbecue that has been given
yearly for three generations by J. B. Mask, his father and grandfather before him, on their 5,000-acre farm beside a lake. The whole community is always
invited, and the ladies bring along cakes and pies for dessert. Mask is one of
the few who have made a commercial enterprise out of a tradition. Back during the last war some Brooks people canned Brunswick stew, according to the
Mask recipe, and sent it to their stew-hungry sons and brothers in the armed
services. It was received so enthusiastically that people urged Mask to go into
the stew-canning business. He did, shortly after the war, with his brother-inlaw and his nephew, W. M. Gay Sr. and Jr. Now they gross $500,000 a year,
presumably from people who can't stand the wait from one barbecue to the
next.